to improve. It soon became too
evident to Milton's discernment that all things were hurrying forward
to restoration of the ejected family. Sensible of the risk, therefore,
and without much hope, but obeying the summons of his conscience, he
wrote a short tract on the ready and easy way to establish a free
commonwealth, concluding with these noble words: "Thus much I should
perhaps have said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to
trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, Oh
earth! earth! earth! to tell the very soil itself what her perverse
inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoken should happen
[which Thou suffer not, who didst create free, nor Thou next who didst
redeem us from being servants of men] to be the last words of our
expiring liberty."

What he feared was soon realized. In the spring of 1660 the
Restoration was accomplished amid the tumultuous rejoicings of the
people. It was certain that the vengeance of government would lose no
time in marking its victims; and some of them in anticipation had
already fled. Milton wisely withdrew from the first fury of the
persecution which now descended on his party. He secreted himself in
London, and when he returned to the public eye in the winter, found
himself no farther punished than by a general disqualification for the
public service, and the disgrace of a public burning inflicted on his
"Eikonoclastes," and his "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano."

Apparently it was not long after this time that he married his third
wife, Elizabeth Minshul, a lady of good family in Cheshire. In what
year he began the composition of his "Paradise Lost" is not certainly
known; some have supposed in 1658. There is better ground for fixing
the period of its close. During the plague of 1665 he retired to
Chalfont, and at that time Elwood, the Quaker, read the poem in a
finished state. The general interruption of business in London,
occasioned by the plague, and prolonged by the great fire in 1666,
explain why the publication was delayed for nearly two years. The
contract with the publisher is dated April 26, 1667, and in the course
of that year the "Paradise Lost" was published. Originally it was
printed in ten books; in the second and subsequent editions, the
seventh and tenth books were each divided into two. Milton received
only L5 in the first instance on the publication of the book. His
farther profits were regulated by the sale of the f