her and which, the child
we should not know from the entries themselves; but a sentence in
Phillips's memoir of his uncle settles the point. "By his second
wife; Katharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock of Hackney," says
Phillips, "he had only one daughter, of which the mother, the first
year after her marriage, died in childbed, and the child also within
a month after." The first entry, therefore, is for the mother, and
the second for the child. The mother died exactly at the time of the
dissolution of the Parliament, and not in child-birth itself, but
nearly four months after child-birth; and the little orphan,
outliving the mother a short while, died at the age of five months.
And so Milton was again left a widower, with his three daughters by
the first marriage, the eldest in her twelfth year. His private life,
for eighteen years now, had certainly not been a happy one; but this
death of his second wife seems to have been remembered by him ever
afterwards with deep and peculiar sorrow. She had been to him during
the short fifteen months of their union, all that he had thought
saintlike and womanly, very sympathetic with himself, and maintaining
such peace and order in his household as had not been there till she
entered it. And now once more it was a dark void, in which he must
grope on, and in which things must happen as they would.

Small comfort at this time can Milton have had from either of his
nephews. Not that they had openly separated themselves from him, or
even ceased to be deferential to him and proud of the relationship,
but that they had more and more gone into those courses of literary
Bohemianism those habits of mere facetious hack-work and balderdash,
which he must have noted of late as an increasing and very ominous
form of protest among the clever young Londoners against Puritanism
and its belongings. The _Satyr against Hypocrites_ by his
younger nephew in 1655 had been, in reality, an Anti-Puritan and
Anti-Miltonic production; and, since the censure of that younger
nephew by the Council in 1656 for his share in _The Sportive Wit or
Muses' Merriment_, he had naturally stumbled farther and farther
in the same direction. By the year 1658, I should say, John Phillips
had entirely given up his uncle's political principles, and was known
among his tavern-comrades as an Anti-Oliverian. We have no express
publications in his name of this date, but he seems to have been
scribbling anonymously. Of the l