n
oases in the desert of controversy and public business abroad and of
blindness and loneliness at home. He did not live long in Whitehall,
{71} moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. James's Park, near what
is now Queen Anne's Gate. There his first wife died in 1653, or 1654,
and her short-lived successor too; there he lived during the remaining
years of the Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and State papers,
even beginning _Paradise Lost_, with young friends to read to him,
write for him, lead their blind great man about in the Park or
elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 arrived and it was no longer
safe for the defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets.

Why Milton was not hanged at the Restoration is still something of a
mystery. His name must have been more hatefully known to the returning
exiles than that of any one except the dead Cromwell whose death did
not save his body from a grim ceremony at Tyburn. He had not only
defended Charles I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone almost
of exultation, but he had pursued the whole Stuart family with
vituperation and contempt. Even in the very last weeks, when the bells
were already almost ringing for Charles II, he had dared to raise his
voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship";
declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to
trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O
Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse
inhabitants are deaf to,"--a passage, if interpreted by its original
context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I. A man so famous, so
utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to
himself the gallows. That his challenge would receive its natural
answer was the openly expressed opinion of his enemies. No doubt it
was also the fear of his friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from
May till August 1660. By the 24th of August the danger was over. The
Act of Indemnity, which was a pardon to all political offenders not by
name excepted in it, became law on that day; and Milton's was not one
of the excepted names. How was that managed? There are various
stories; perhaps each has some truth in it; many influences may have
combined. One is that he had saved Davenant in his danger some years
before and now the Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan. But
Davenant was not in Parliament, and the real work mus