or mere expediency. "His ideal of true and perfect marriage," says Mr.
Ernest Myers, "appeared to him so sacred that he could not admit that
considerations of expediency might justify the law in maintaining sacred
any meaner kind, or at least any kind in which the vital element of
spiritual harmony was not." Here he is impregnable and above criticism,
but his handling of the more sublunary departments of the subject must
be unsatisfactory to legislators, who have usually deemed his sublime
idealism fitter for the societies of the blest than for the imperfect
communities of mankind. When his "doctrine and discipline" shall have
been sanctioned by lawgivers, we may be sure that the world is already
much better, or much worse.

As the girl-wife vanishes from Milton's household her place is taken by
the venerable figure of his father. The aged man had removed with his
son Christopher to Reading, probably before August, 1641, when the birth
of a child of his name--Christopher's offspring as it should
seem--appears in the Reading register. Christopher was to exemplify the
law of reversion to a primitive type. Though not yet a Roman Catholic
like his grandfather, he had retrograded into Royalism, without becoming
on that account estranged from his elder brother. The surrender of
Reading to the Parliamentary forces in April, 1643, involved his
"dissettlement," and the migration of his father to the house of John,
with whom he was moreover better in accord in religion and politics.
Little external change resulted, "the old gentleman," says Phillips,
"being wholly retired to his rest and devotion, with the least trouble
imaginable." About the same time the household received other additions
in the shape of pupils, admitted, Phillips is careful to assure us, by
way of favour, as M. Jourdain selected stuffs for his friends. Milton's
pamphlet was perhaps not yet published, or not generally known to be
his, or his friends were indifferent to public sentiment. Opinion was