Milton's memory has been charged with three several offences in the Iconoclastes, or Image Breaker. In the first place, with having too rudely blamed the king for making use of a prayer which he borrowed from a ro mance, namely, Sir Phillip Sydney's Arcadia ; in the next place, with having interpolated the Eikon Basilike with that prayer, in order that he might establish a ground of censure ; and, in the third place, with hav ing uncharitably insulted Charles's memory, on account of his intimacy with the plays of Shakespeare. The first accusation is true, the two others are absurd. He did, with unnecessary harshness, animadvert on Charles's having borrowed a prayer from a romance, but he did not interpolate the Eikon ; for in the first edition of the Eikon, printed by Royston a royalist, the prayer in question is to be found. His animadversion on the king's fondness for Shakespeare is perfectly un blameable : the gust of all that he says is merely to convey the remark, that pious and clement sentiments have often been put into the mouths of tyrants, and by no poet more than by Shakespeare, with whom Charles I. was so well acquainted.
On being appointed to the office of Latin secretary, Milton removed first to a lodging at Charing Cross, and afterwards to apartments in Scotland Yard. In this last residence his wife had her third chi1J, a son, who died in his infancy, on the I6•h of March, 1650. In 1652, he changed his abode to Petty France, where he occupied, till the Restoration, a handsome house open ing into St. James's Park.
He had no sooner finished his Iconoclastcs, than he entered into his controversy with Salinasius. This learned Frenchman, (Saumaise, or Salinasius.) an ho norary professor of Leyden, was employed by Charles II. to write the Defensio Regia, or an appeal to the world in behalf of the cause of royalty, prelacy, and the house of Stuart. Milton was employed to answer it, and he perlornied his task in 1651. by his celebrated Defensio pro Po/into Anglican°. He was ma sent when the council of England enjoined him the task. Milton, when he undertook it, was weak of body and dim of sight, and his physicians predicted that it would cost him the loss of his eyes ; but he persevtred, and finish ed a work, the eloquence and intellectual power of which is only slightly disfigured by some sportive sallies of wit, and some harsh personalities. The work was ap plauded by all Europe. Foreigners of the highest ta lent and erudition, and the amhassdclors of crowned heads, waited upon him, or wrote to him to express their congratulations. The council of state made him a pecuniary reward of a thousand pounds.
On the 2d of May, 1652, his family was increased by the birth of another daughter, Deborah, of whom his wife died in child-bed. Meanwhile his sight was im paired by incessant study, so as to leave him probably as early as this same year nearly blind, at least one of his adversaries about that time charitably upbraids him with the calamity as a punishment from heaven, and denominates him as a " monstrum horrendum cui lumen ademptum." His fortitude under the event is admirably expressed in his sonnet to Cyriac Skinner.
The precise date of his second marriage, is not much better ascertained than that of his confirmed blindness, though probably both events took place about 1654. His second matrimonial choice was Catherine, the daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney. She was the object of his fondest affection ; but died within a year after their marriage, like her predecessor, in child-birth, and the daughter whom she bore to him soon followed her to the tomb. His sonnet to her
memory must be in every one's remembrance. Du ring this period his powers were again employed in controversy.—De Moulin's "Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven," published in 1652, poured forth the most violent abuse against the English as a nation, and Mil ton as an individual. De Moulin, the son of an ob scure French satirist at Sedan, was the real author of this work ; but Alexander More, a man of Scotch pa rentage, and a preacher of considerable celebrity, settled in France, and Principal of the Protestant College of Castres, wrote a dedication of the Clamor Regii San guinis to Charles II. and committed it to the Press ; on him, therefore, Milton retaliated with a vengeance which sufficiently exposed the impeachable part of N ore's character. With his Second Defence of the People of England, Milton closed for the present his controversial labours; and probably endeavoured among his studies to retire front the mortification and disap pointment which he felt from the exhibition of despotic principles and conduct in the Protector. There is reason to believe that he felt this mortification. Like Blake and Sir Matthew Hale, he might plead the em ployment of his country as lawful even under a tyrant, and he might think a temporary usurpation, on the whole, preferable to the return of the unprincipled royal exiles. But it would have been agreeable to have had a more distinct declaration of his motives from his own pen. He was engaged in 1653 in con tinuing the History of England, and a Latin dictionary, and had begun to frame his immortal epic poem. The historical work, which is only a great fragment, appear ed in 1670, mutilated by the licenser of some of its finest passages. The materials of his Latin Thesaurus were left imperfectly digested, but are said to have been use fully employed by the compilers of the Cambridge Dictionary, to whom they were probably given by his nephew Phillips. In the same year he published a MS. of Sir Walter Raleigh's, consisting of aphorisms on the art of government, and composed in a strain of peculiar elegance the manifesto issued by the Protector in justi fication of his war with Spain. In the following year Cromwell finished his splendid but criminal career, and his son Richard descended with magnanimous innocence to the safe level of a private station. When the fluctua tions of government threatened general anarchy, Milton was induced to give his advice on civil and ecclesiastical topics, in some short publications ; one of which was, a ready and easy way to establish a free commonwealth ; the excellencies thereof compared with the inconveni ences and dangers of ie-admitting monarchy. This ap pealed bit a short time before the restoration, so zealous and sanguine was he to the very last with respect to his political system. It was in vain, however, to contend with pamplets against the national inclination. The king returned in triumph; and Milton, discharged from office, left his house in Petty France, and was secreted under the roof of a friend in St Bartholomew's close, near to West Smithfield, till the act of oblivion, in the exceptions to which he was not included, ascertained his safety and reinstated hint in society.