act; and hence we are to suppose that, at the
time he wrote, he did keep himself as much aloof as possible from the
magnates of the Council, performing the pieces of work required of
him in his own house, rather than making them occasions for visits
and colloquies. His old and intimate friend Fleetwood, and his friend
Lord President Lawrence, with Desborough, Pickering, Strickland,
Montague, and Sydenham, all of whom had been mentioned by him with
more or less of personal regard in the _Defensio Secunda_ in
1654, were still Councillors, and formed indeed more than half the
Council; but his intercourse with some of these individually may have
been less since his blindness. Then, of the rest, Thurloe was the
real man of influence, the real _gratiosus_ who could carry or
set aside a request like Heimbach's; and, though Milton's
communications with Thurloe must necessarily have been more frequent
than with any other person of the Council, one has an indefinable
impression that Thurloe had never taken cordially to Milton or Milton
to Thurloe. At the date of Milton's note to Heimbach, too,
_gratiosi_ were becoming plentiful all round the Council.
Cromwell's sixty-three writs for the new Upper House had gone out, or
were going out, and in a week or two many more "lords" were to be
seen walking in couples in any street in Westminster. Milton, in
_his_ quiet retreat there, may have had something of all this in
his mind when he wrote to young Mr. Heimbach.

The short second session of the Parliament, with its difficult
experiment of the two Houses once more, and the angry dispute of the
Commons whether the name of "Lords" _should_ be allowed to the
Other House, had come and gone (Jan. 20--Feb. 4, 1657-8), and of
Milton or his thoughts and doings through that crisis we have no
trace whatever. Our next glimpse of him is just after the moment of
the abrupt dissolution of the Parliament, when Cromwell was
addressing himself again, single-handed, to the task of grappling
with the double danger of anarchy within and a threatened invasion
from without. The glimpse is a very sad one.

"_Feb._ 10, 1657-8, _Mrs. Katherin Milton_," and again
"_March_, 20, 1657-8, _Mrs. Katherin Milton_," are two
entries, within six weeks of each other, in the burial registers of
St, Margaret's, Westminster. They are the records of the deaths of
Milton's second wife and the little girl she had borne him only in
October last. Which entry designates the mot