[Footnote 1:  Wood’s Fasti, II. 195.]

In proceeding from the month of August 1655, when Milton published his Pro Se Defensio, to his life through the rest of Oliver’s Protectorate, it is as if we were leaving a cluster of large islands that had detained us long by their size and by the storms on their coasts, and were sailing on into a tract of calmer sea, where the islands, though numerous, are but specks in comparison.  The reason of this is that we are now out of the main entanglement of the Salmasius and Morus controversy.  Milton had taken leave of that subject, and indeed of controversy altogether for a good while.

In the original memoirs of Milton due note is taken of this calm in his life after his second castigation of Morus.  “Being now quiet from state adversaries and public contests,” says Phillips, “he had leisure again for his own studies and private designs”; and Wood’s phrase is all but identical:  “About the time that he had finished these things, he had more leisure and time at command.”  Both add that, in this new leisure, he turned again at once to those three labours which had been occupying him, at intervals, for so many years, and which were, in fact, always in reserve as his favourite hack-employments when he had nothing else to do—­his compilations for his intended Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, his History of Britain, and his Body of Biblical Theology.  The mere mention of such works as again in progress in the house in Petty France in the third or fourth year of Milton’s blindness confirms conclusively the other evidences that he had by this time overcome in a remarkable manner the worst difficulties of his condition.  One sees him in his room, daily for hours together, with his readers and amanuenses, directing them to this or that book on the shelves, listening as they read the passages wanted, interrupting and requiring another book, listening again, interrupting again, and so at length dictating his notes, and giving cautions as to the keeping of them.  His different sets of papers, with the volumes most in use, are familiar now even to his own touch in their places on the table or the floor; and, when his amanuenses are gone, he can sit on by himself, revising the day’s work mentally, and projecting the sequel.  And so from day to day, with the variation of his afternoon exercise in the garden, or the walk beyond it in some one’s company into the park or farther, or an occasional message from Thurloe on office-business, or calls from friends singly or two or three together, and always, of course, at intervals through the day, the pleased contact of the blind hands with the stops of the organ.

Among the inmates of the house in Petty France in the latter part of 1655, besides the blind widower himself, were his three little orphan girls, the eldest, Anne, but nine years of age, the second, Mary, but seven, and the youngest, Deborah, only three.  How they were tended no one knows; but one fancies them seeing little of their father, and left very much to the charge of servants.  Two women-servants, with perhaps a man or boy to wait on Milton personally, may have completed the household, unless Milton’s two nephews are to be reckoned as also belonging to it.