"What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence, my noble task,
O! which all Europe rings from side to side;
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask,
Content though blind, had I no better guide."

Noble words, and Milton might well triumph in his victory in the field
of intellectual combat. But if his pamphlet could have put Charles the
First's head on again, then, and then only, could it have been of real
political service to his party.

Milton's loss of sight was accompanied by domestic sorrow, though
perhaps not felt with special acuteness. Since the birth of his eldest
daughter in 1646, his wife had given him three more children--a
daughter, born in October, 1648; a son, born in March, 1650, who died
shortly afterwards; and another daughter, born in May, 1652. The birth
of this child may have been connected with the death of the mother in
the same or the following month. The household had apparently been
peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion
to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was
given her to understand. She must have become considerably emancipated
from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been
anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, much as one pities
her probably wasted life, her disappearance from the scene, if tragic
in her ignorance to the last of the destiny that might have been hers,
is not unaccompanied with a sense of relief. Great, nevertheless, must
have been the blind poet's embarrassment as the father of three little
daughters. Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his
temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the
evil yet to come. He was then living in Petty France, Westminster,
having been obliged, either by the necessities of his health or of the
public service, to give up his apartments in Whitehall. The house stood
till 1877, a forlorn tenement in these latter years; far different,
probably, when the neighbourhood was fashionable and the back windows
looked on St. James's Park. It is associated with other celebrated
names, having been owned by Bentham and occupied by Hazlitt.

The controversy with Salmasius had an epilogue, chiefly memorable in so
far as it occasioned Milton to indulge in autobiography, and to record
his estimate of some of the h