enchman,
and at the bar of the whole Christian world. Charles II. had resolved
to state his father's case to all Europe. This was natural, for very
few people on the continent knew what cause had brought his father to
the block, or why he himself was a vagrant exile from his throne. For
his advocate he selected Claudius Salmasius, and that was most
injudicious. Salmasius betrayed in his work entire ignorance of
everything, whether historical or constitutional, which belonged to
the case.

Having such an antagonist, inferior to him in all possible
qualifications, whether of nature, of art, of situation, it may be
supposed that Milton's triumph was absolute. He was now thoroughly
indemnified for the poor success of his "Eikonoclastes." In that
instance he had the mortification of knowing that all England read and
wept over the king's book, while his own reply was scarcely heard of.
But here the tables were turned; the very friends of Salmasius
complained that while his defence was rarely inquired after, the
answer to it, "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano," was the subject of
conversation from one end of Europe to the other. It was burned
publicly at Paris and Toulouse; and, by way of special annoyance to
Salmasius, who lived in Holland, was translated into Dutch.

In 1651 Milton's first wife died, after she had given him three
daughters. In that year he had already lost the use of one eye, and
was warned by the physicians that if he persisted in his task of
replying to Salmasius he would probably lose the other. The warning
was soon accomplished, according to the common account, in 1654; but
upon collating his letter to Phalaris the Athenian, with his own
pathetic statement in the "Defensio Secunda," we are disposed to date
it from 1652. In 1655 he resigned his office of secretary, in which he
had latterly been obliged to use an assistant.

Some time before this period he had married his second wife, Catherine
Woodcock, to whom it is supposed that he was very tenderly attached.
In 1657 she died in child-birth, together with her child, an event
which he has recorded in a very beautiful sonnet. This loss, added to
his blindness, must have made his home, for some years, desolate and
comfortless. Distress, indeed, was now gathering rapidly upon him. The
death of Cromwell, in the following year, and the imbecile character
of his eldest son, held out an invitation to the aspiring intriguers
of the day, which they were not slow