carcely wonder that two of these children (of
the youngest we have a better report), abhorred the father who exacted
so much and imparted so little. Yet, before visiting any of the parties
with inexorable condemnation, we should consider the strong probability
that much of the misery grew out of an antecedent state of things, for
which none of them were responsible. The infant minds of two of the
daughters, and the two chiefly named as undutiful, had been formed by
their mother. Mistress Milton cannot have greatly cherished her husband,
and what she wanted in love must have been made up in fear. She must
have abhorred his principles and his writings, and probably gave free
course to her feelings whenever she could have speech with a
sympathizer, without caring whether the girls were within hearing.
Milton himself, we know, was cheerful in congenial society, but he were
no poet if he had not been reserved with the uncongenial. To them the
silent, abstracted, often irritable, and finally sightless father would
seem awful and forbidding. It is impossible to exaggerate the
susceptibility of young minds to first impressions. The probability is
that ere Mistress Milton departed this life, she had intentionally or
unintentionally avenged all the injuries she could imagine herself to
have received from her husband, and furnished him with a stronger
argument than any that had found a place in the "Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce."

It is something in favour of the Milton girls that they were at least
not calculating in their undutifulness. Had they reflected, they must
have seen that their behaviour was little to their interest. If they
brought a stepmother upon themselves, the blame was theirs. Something
must certainly be done to keep Milton's library from the rag-women; and
in February, 1663, by the advice of his excellent physician Dr. Paget,
he married Elizabeth Minshull, daughter of a yeoman of Wistaston in
Cheshire, a distant relation of Dr. Paget's own, and exactly thirty
years younger than Milton. "A genteel person, a peaceful and agreeable
woman," says Aubrey, who knew her, and refutes by anticipation
Richardson's anonymous informant, perhaps Deborah Clarke, who libelled
her as "a termagant." She was pretty, and had golden hair, which one
connects pleasantly with the late sunshine she brought into Milton's
life. She sang to his accompaniment on the organ and bass-viol, but is
not recorded to have read or written for