ceeding to point out,
with his accustomed good sense, that there is really nothing to laugh at,
since it was desirable that Milton, whose father was alive and could only
make him a small allowance, should do something, and there was no shame
in his adopting an honest and useful employment.

To be a Parliament man was no part of the ambition of one who still
aspired to be a poet; who was not yet blind to the heavenly vision; who
was still meditating what should be his theme, and who in the meantime
chastised his sister's sons, unruly lads, who did him no credit and bore
him no great love.

The Long Parliament met in November, 1640, and began its work--brought
Strafford to the scaffold, clapped Laud into the Tower, Archbishop though
he was, and secured as best they could the permanency of Parliamentary
institutions. None of these things specially concerned John Milton. But
there also uprose the eternal Church question, 'What sort of Church are
we to have?' The fierce controversy raged, and 'its fair enticing
fruit,' spread round 'with liberal hand,' proved too much for the father
of English epic.

'He scrupled not to eat
Against his better knowledge.'

In other words, he commenced pamphleteer, and between May, 1641, and the
following March he had written five pamphlets against Episcopacy, and
used an intolerable deal of bad language, which, however excusable in a
heated controversialist, ill became the author of _Comus_.

The war broke out in 1642, but Milton kept house. The 'tented field' had
no attractions for him.

In the summer of 1643 he took a sudden journey into the country, and
returned home to his boys with a wife, the daughter of an Oxfordshire
Cavalier. Poor Mary Powell was but seventeen, her poetic lord was thirty-
five. From the country-house of a rollicking squire to Aldersgate Street
was somewhat too violent a change. She had left ten brothers and sisters
behind her, the eldest twenty-one, the youngest four. As one looks upon
this picture and on that, there is no need to wonder that the poor girl
was unhappy. The poet, though keenly alive to the subtle charm of a
woman's personality, was unpractised in the arts of daily companionship.
He expected to find much more than he brought of general good-fellowship.
He had an ideal ever in his mind of both bodily and spiritual excellence,
and he was almost greedy to realize both, but he knew not how. One of
his complaints was that his wi