the
descriptions we possess seem to apply. Richardson heard of his sitting
habitually "in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near
Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather to enjoy the fresh air"--a
suggestive picture. What thoughts must have been travelling through his
mind, undisturbed by external things! How many of the passers knew that
they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and
Wren? For one who would reverence the author of "Paradise Lost," there
were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the
apologist of the killing of the King. In-doors he was seen by Dr.
Wright, in Richardson's time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found
him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green "sitting in
an elbow chair, black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous;
his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." Gout was the enemy
of Milton's latter days; we have seen that he had begun to suffer from
it before he wrote "Samson Agonistes." Without it, he said, he could
find blindness tolerable. Yet even in the fit he would be cheerful, and
would sing. It is grievous to write that, about 1670, the departure of
his daughters promoted the comfort of his household. They were sent out
to learn embroidery as a means of future support--a proper step in
itself, and one which would appear to have entailed considerable expense
upon Milton. But they might perfectly well have remained inmates of the
family, and the inference is that domestic discord had at length grown
unbearable to all. Friends, or at least visitors, were, on the other
hand, more numerous than of late years. The most interesting were the
"subtle, cunning, and reserved" Earl of Anglesey, who must have "coveted
Milton's society and converse" very much if, as Phillips reports, he
often came all the way to Bunhill Fields to enjoy it; and Dryden, whose
generous admiration does not seem to have been affected by Milton's
over-hasty sentence upon him as "a good rhymester, but no poet." One of
Dryden's visits is famous in literary history, when he came with the
modest request that Milton would let him turn his epic into an opera.
"Aye," responded Milton, equal to the occasion, "tag my verses if you
will"--to tag being to put a shining metal point--compared in Milton's
fancy to a rhyme--at the end of a lace or cord. Dryden took him at his
word, and in due time "Paradise Lost" had become an opera under th