was therefore much chagrined to find himself represented as a
grim-looking gentleman of at least fifty. The way he revenged himself
upon the hapless artist is well known. The volume, with the portrait, is
now very scarce, almost rare.

In 1647 Milton removed from the Barbican, both his father and his father-
in-law being dead, to a smaller house in Holborn, backing upon Lincoln's
Inn Fields, close to where the Inns of Court Hotel now stands, and not
far from the spot which was destined to witness the terrible tragedy
which was at once to darken and glorify the life of one of Milton's most
fervent lovers, Charles Lamb. About this time he is supposed to have
abandoned pedagogy. The habit of pamphleteering stuck to him; indeed, it
is one seldom thrown off. It is much easier to throw off the pamphlets.

In 1649 Milton became a public servant, receiving the appointment of
Latin Secretary to the Council of Foreign Affairs. He knew some member
of the Committee, who obtained his nomination. His duties were purely
clerkly. It was his business to translate English despatches into Latin,
and foreign despatches into English. He had nothing whatever to do with
the shaping of the foreign policy of the Commonwealth. He was not even
employed in translating the most important of the State papers. There is
no reason for supposing that he even knew the leading politicians of his
time. There is a print one sees about, representing Oliver Cromwell
dictating a foreign despatch to John Milton; but it is all imagination,
nor is there anything to prove that Cromwell and Milton, the body and
soul of English Republicanism, were ever in the same room together, or
exchanged words with one another. Milton's name does not occur in the
great history of Lord Clarendon. Whitelocke, who was the leading member
of the Committee which Milton served, only mentions him once. Thurloe
spoke of him as a blind man who wrote Latin letters. Richard Baxter, in
his folio history of his Life and Times, never mentions Milton at all.
{27} He was just a clerk in the service of the Commonwealth, of a
scholarly bent, peculiar habit of thought, and somewhat of an odd temper.
He was not the man to cultivate great acquaintances, or to flitter away
his time waiting the convenience of other people. When once asked to use
his influence to obtain for a friend an appointment, he replied he had no
influence, '_propter paucissimas familiaritates meas cum gratiosis_,