left by the conclusion of his controversy with Morus (Aug. 1655), he
resumed those two favourite hack-occupations on which he always fell
back when he had nothing else to do,--his History of England and his
compilations for a Latin Dictionary,--Phillips adds, "But the highth
of his noble fancy and invention began now to be seriously and mainly
employed in a subject worthy of such a muse: viz. a Heroic Poem,
entitled _Paradise Lost_, the noblest," &c. In this passage,
however, Phillips is throwing together, in 1694, all his
recollections of the four years of his uncle's life between Aug. 1655
and Aug. 1659; and Aubrey's earlier information (1680), originally
derived from Phillips himself, is that _Paradise Lost_ was begun
"about two years before the King came in," i.e. about May 1658. This
would fix the date somewhere in the two or three months immediately
following the death-of Milton's second wife. In such a matter exact
certainty is unattainable; and it is enough to know for certain that
the resumption of _Paradise Lost_ was an event of the latter
part of Cromwell's Second Protectorate, and that some portion of the
poem was actually written in the house in Petty France, Westminster,
while Milton was in communication with Cromwell and writing letters
for him. In the rooms of that house, or in the garden that stretched
from the house into St. James's Park across part of what is now the
ground of Wellington Barracks, the subject of the epic first took
distinct shape in Milton's mind, and here he began the great
dictation.

Eighteen years had elapsed since Milton, just settled in London after
his return from Italy, had first fastened on the subject, preferred
it by a sure instinct to all the others that occurred in competition
with it, and sketched four plans for its treatment in the form of a
sacred tragedy, one with the precise title _Paradise Lost_, and
another with the title _Adam Unparadised_ (Vol. II. pp. 106-108,
and 115-119). Through all the distractions of those eighteen years
the grand subject had not ceased to haunt him, nor the longing to
return to it and to his poetic vocation. Nay there had hung in his
memory all this while certain lines he had actually written and
destined for the opening of the intended tragedy. They were the ten
lines that now form lines 32-41 of the fourth book of our present
_Paradise Lost_. He had imagined, for the opening of his
tragedy, Satan already arrived within our Universe out