Ranelagh to Boyle in Vol. V. of his Works; Notes by Mr. Crossley
to his edition of _Worthington's Diary and Correspondence_ for
the Chetham Society, I. p. 164-165, and 366. Mrs. Green's Calendar
of State-Papers for 1651, p. 574.]

How long Lady Ranelagh had known Milton is uncertain; but, as her
nephew, the young Earl of Barrimore, had been one of Milton's pupils
in his house in the Barbican, and as we had express information that
he had been sent there by his aunt, the acquaintance must have begun
as early as 1646 or 1647. And now, it appears, through all the
intermediate eight years of Milton's changes of residence and
fortune, including his six in the Latin Secretaryship, the
acquaintanceship has been kept up, and has been growing more
intimate, till, in 1655, in his widowerhood and blindness in his
house in Petty France, there is no one, and certainly no lady, that
more frequently calls upon him, or whose voice, on the staircase,
announcing who the visitor is, he is more pleased to hear. They were
close neighbours, only St. James's Park between their houses; and his
having taught her nephew, the young Earl of Barrimore, was not now
the only link of that kind between themselves. She had not been
satisfied till she had contrived that her own son should, to some
extent, be Milton's pupil too. "My Lady Ranelagh, whose son for some
time he instructed" are Phillips's words on this point; and, though
we included Lady Ranelagh's son, Mr. Richard Jones, afterwards third
Viscount and first Earl of Ranelagh, in our general enumeration of
Milton's pupils, given under the year 1647, when the Barbican
establishment was complete, it was with the intimation that this
particular pupil, then but seven years old, could hardly have been
one of the Barbican boys, but must have had the benefit of lessons
from Milton in some exceptional way afterwards. The fact, on the
likeliest construction of the evidence, seems to have been that
Milton, to oblige Lady Ranelagh, had quite recently allowed the boy
to come daily, or every other day, from his mother's house in Pall
Mall to Petty France, to sit with him for an hour or two, and read
Greek and Latin. To the end of his life Milton found this easy kind
of pedagogy a pleasant amusement in his blindness, and made it indeed
one of his devices for help to himself in his readings and references
to books; and Lady Ranelagh's son may have been his first experiment
in the method. That he retained an i