three daughters following,
with a servant to look after the books and other things they have taken
with them, and the whole party driven away towards Giles-Chalfont."
According to the same authority, Chalfont well deserves the name of
Sleepy Hollow, lying at the bottom of a leafy dell. Milton's cottage,
alone of his residences, still exists, though divided into two
tenements. It is a two-storey dwelling, with a garden, is built of
brick, with wooden beams, musters nine rooms--though a question arises
whether some of them ought not rather to be described as closets; the
porch in which Milton may have breathed the summer air is gone, but the
parlour retains the latticed casement at which he sat, though through it
he could not see. His infirmity rendered the confined situation less of
a drawback, and there are abundance of pleasant lanes, along which he
could be conducted in his sightless strolls:--

"As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each new thing conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound."

Milton was probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived
within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton. Ellwood could not
welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at
what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities--a Quaker
funeral. When released, about the end of August or the beginning of
September, he waited upon Milton, who, "after some discourses, called
for a manuscript of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it
home with me and read it at my leisure. When I set myself to read it, I
found it was that excellent poem which he entitled 'Paradise Lost.'"
Professor Masson justly remarks that Milton would not have trusted the
worthy Quaker adolescent with the only copy of his epic; we may be sure,
therefore, that other copies existed, and that the poem was at this
date virtually completed and ready for press. When the manuscript was
returned, Ellwood, after "modestly, but freely, imparting his judgment,"
observed, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou
to say of Paradise Found? He made no answer, but sat some time in a
muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject." The
plague was then at