of six folio volumes; the yet more magnificent
_Geographia Blaeviana_, or Atlas of the geographer and printer
John Blaeu, was not perfect till 1662, and then consisted of eleven
volumes of very large folio. But various Atlases, or collections of
maps in anticipation of the complete Atlas, had been on sale by Blaeu
for ten or twelve years previously: e.g., from his own
trade-catalogue in 1650, "Atlas, four volumes illuminated, bound
after the best fashion, will cost 150 guldens," and "Belgia Foederata
and Belgia Regia, two vols., white [uncoloured], 70 guldens, or
illuminated 140 guldens." The gulden or Dutch florin was equal to
1_s._ 8_d._ English, so that the price of Blaeu's four
volume Atlas of 1650 was L12 10_s._ To Milton in 1656 the price
of the same, or of whatever other Atlas he had in view, was to be
twenty florins less, i.e. about L11. It was much as if one were asked
to give L38 for a book now; and no wonder that Milton hesitated.[1]

[Footnote 1: The information about the prices of Blaeu's general
Atlas in 1650 and his special Atlas of the two Belgiums in the same
year is from a curious letter in the _Correspondence of the Earls
of Ancram and Lothian_, edited for the Marquis of Lothian, in
1875, by Mr. David Laing (II. 256).]

Just four days after the date of the letter to Heimbach, i.e. on the
12th of November, 1656, there took place an event of no less
consequence to the household in Petty France than Milton's second
marriage, after four years of widowerhood. It was performed, as the
Marriage Act then in force required, not by a clergyman, but by a
justice of the peace, and is registered thus in the books of the
parish of St. Mary Aldermanbury, London, under the year 1656: "The
agreement and intention of marriage between JOHN MILTON, Esq., of the
Parish of Margaret's in Westminster, and MRS. KATHARINE WOODCOCKE, of
the Parish of Mary's in Aldermanbury, was published three several
market-days in three several weeks, viz. on Wednesday the 22nd and
Monday the 27th of October, and on Monday the 3rd of November; and,
no exceptions being made against their intention, they were,
according to the Act of Parliament, married the 12th of November by
Sir John Dethicke, Knight and Alderman, one of the Justices of Peace
for this City of London."[1] Of this KATHARINE WOODCOCK (the "Mrs."
before whose name does not mean that she had been married before) we
learn farther, from Phillips, that she was "the daughter of Capt