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it he determined to marry again, and made his addresses to a young lady of great wit and beauty, one of the daughters of Dr. Davis. But intelligence of this coming to his wife, and the then declining state of the King's cause, and consequently of the circumstances of Justice Powell's family, caused them to set all engines on work to restore the wife again to her husband. His friends, too, for different reasons, seem to have been as desirous of bringing about a reconciliation as her's, and this method of effecting it was concerted between them. He had a relation, one Blackborough, living in the lane of St. Martin's Le Grand, whom he often visited; and one day, when he was visiting there, it was contrived that the wife should be ready in another room; and as he was thinking of something else, he was surprised to see her whom he had expected never to have seen any more, falling down upon her knees at his feet, and imploring his forgiveness with tears. At first he showed some signs of aversion, but he continued not long inexorable; his wife's intreaties, and the inter. cession of friends on both sides, soon wrought upon his generous nature, and procured a happy reconciliation, with an act of oblivion of all that was past. But he did not take his wife home immediately; it was agreed that she should remain at a friend's, till the house, that he had newly taken, was fitted for their reception; for some other gentlemen of his acquaintance, having observed the great success of his method of education, had recommended their sons

to his care; and his house in Aldersgate-street not being large enough, he had taken a larger in Barbican. Till this could be got ready, the place pitched upon for his wife's abode, was the widow Webber's house in St. Clement's Church-yard, whose second daughter had been married to the other brother many years before. The part that Milton acted in this whole affair, showed plainly that he had a spirit capable of the strongest resentment, but yet more inclinable to pity and forgiveness: and neither in this was any injury done to the other lady, whom he was courting, for she is said to have been always averse from the motion, not daring, I suppose, to venture in marriage with a man who was known to have a wife still living. He might not think himself too at liberty as before, while his wife continued obstinate; for his most plausible argument for divorce proceeds upon a supposition, that the thing be done with mutual consent.

After his wife's return, his family was increased not only with children, but also with his wife's rela'tions, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, coming to live with him in the general distress and ruin of the royal party: and he was so far from resenting their former ill treatment of him, that he generously protected them and entertained them very hospitably, till their affairs were accommodated through his interest with the prevailing faction. And then upon their removal, and the death of his own father, his house locked again like the house of the

Muses: but his studies had like to have been interrupted by a call to public business; for about this time there was a design of constituting him Adjutant General in the Army under Sir William Waller; but the new modelling of the army soon following, that design was laid aside. Not long after, his great house in Barbican being now too large for his family, he quitted it for a smaller in High Holborn, which opened backward into Lincoln's Inn-Fields, where he prosecuted his studies till the King's trial and death, when the Presbyterians declaiming tragically against the King's execution, and asserting that his person was sacred and inviolable, provoked him to write the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, proving that it is lawful to call a tyrant to account, and to depose and put him to death, and that they who of late so much blame deposing, are the men who did it themselves and he published it at the beginning of the year 1649, to satisfy and compose the minds of the people. Not long after this, he wrote his Observations on the Articles of Peace, between the Earl of Ormond and the Irish Rebels. In these and all his writings, whatever others of different parties may think, he thought himself an advocate for true liberty; for ecclesiastical liberty, in his treatises against the Bishops; for domestic liberty, in his books of divorce, and for civil liberty in his writings against the King, in defence of the Parliament and People of England.

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After this he retired again to his private studies:

and thinking that he had leisure enough for such a work, he applied himself to the writing of a History of England, which he intended to deduce from the earliest accounts down to his own times: he had finished four books of it, when neither courting nor expecting any such preferment, he was invited by the Council of State to be their Latin Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He served in the same capacity under Oliver, and Richard, and the Rump, till the Restoration; and without doubt a better Latin pen could not have been found in the kingdom. For the Republic and Cromwell scorned to pay that tribute to any foreign prince, which is usually paid to the French King, of managing their affairs in his language; they thought it an indignity and meanness, to which this or any free nation ought not to submit; and took a noble resolution neither to write any letters to any foreign states, nor to receive any answers from them, but in the Latin tongue, which was common to them all. It would have been well, if succeeding princes had followed their example; for in the opinion of very wise men, the universality of the French language will make way for the universality of the French monarchy.

But it was not only in foreign dispatches that the government made use of his pen. He had discharged the business of his office a very little time, before he was called to a work of another kind. For soon after the King's death was published a book under his mame intitled Εικων Βασιλικη, or the Royal Image :

and this book, like Cæsar's Last Will, making a deeper impression, and exciting greater commiseration in the minds of the people, than the King Limself did while alive, Milton was ordered to prepare an answer to it, which was published by authority, and intitled Enovoxλass, or the Image Breaker, the famous surname of many Greek Emperors, who in their zeal against idolatry, broke all superstitious images to pieces. This piece was translated into French, and two replies to it were published, one in 1651, and the other in 1692, upon the reprinting of Milton's book at Amsterdam. In this controversy a heavy charge hath been alledged against Milton. Some editions of the King's book have certain prayers added at the end, and among them a prayer in time of captivity, which is taken from that of Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia: and it is said, that this prayer was added by the contrivance and artifice of Milton, who, together with Bradshaw, prevailed upon the printer to insert it, that from thence he might take occasion to bring a scandal upon the King, and to blast the reputation of his book, as he hath attempted to do in the first section of his answer. This fact is related chiefly upon the authority of Henry Hills the printer, who had frequently affirmed it to Dr. Gill and Dr. Bernard his physicians, as they themselves have testified. But Hills was not himself the printer who was dealt with in this manner, and consequently he could have the story only from hearsay and though he was Cromwell's printer, yet after

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