hs of
Oliver's Protectorate. He continued to serve under Richard, writing
eleven letters between September, 1658, and February, 1659. With two
letters for the restored Parliament after Richard's abdication, written
in May, 1659, Milton, though his formal supersession was yet to come,
virtually bade adieu to the Civil Service:--

"God doth not need
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best: His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

The principal domestic events in Milton's life, meanwhile, had been his
marriage with Katherine, daughter of an unidentified Captain Woodcock,
in November, 1656; and the successive loss of her and an infant daughter
in February and March, 1658. It is probable that Milton literally never
saw his wife, whose worth and the consequent happiness of the fifteen
months of their too brief union, are sufficiently attested by his sonnet
on the dream in which he fancied her restored to him, with the striking
conclusion, "Day brought back my night." Of his daughters at the time,
much may be conjectured, but nothing is known; his nephews, whose
education had cost him such anxious care, though not undutiful in their
personal relations with him, were sources of uneasiness from their own
misadventures, and might have been even more so as sinister omens of the
ways in which the rising generation was to walk. The fruits of their
bringing up upon the egregious Lucretius and Manilius were apparently
"Satyr against Hypocrites," _i.e._, Puritans; "Mysteries of Love and
Eloquence;" "Sportive Wit or Muses' Merriment," which last brought the
Council down upon John Phillips as a propagator of immorality. In his
nephews Milton might have seen, though we may be sure he did not see,
how fatally the austerity of the Commonwealth had alienated those who
would soon determine whether the Commonwealth should exist. Unconscious
of the "engine at the door," he could spend happy social hours with
attached friends--Andrew Marvell, his assistant in the secretaryship and
poetical satellite; his old pupil Cyriack Skinner; Lady Ranelagh;
Oldenburg, the Bremen envoy, destined to fame as Secretary of the Royal
Society and the correspondent of Spinoza; and a choice band of
"enthusiastic young men who accounted it a privilege to read to him, or