enthusiasm that kept him to a task so little compatible with the repose
he must have needed even for such intellectual exercise as the
"Areopagitica," much more for the high designs he had not ceased to
meditate in verse? Enthusiasm, one would certainly say, only that it is
impossible to tell to what extent his father's income, chiefly derived
from money out at interest, may have been impaired by the confusion of
the times. Whether he had done rightly or wrongly in taking the duties
of a preceptor upon himself, his nephew's account attests the
self-sacrificing zeal with which he discharged them: we groan as we read
of hours which should have been devoted to lonely musing or noble
composition passed in "increasing as it were by proxy" his knowledge of
"Frontinus his Stratagems, with the two egregious poets Lucretius and
Manilius." He might also have been better employed than in dictating "A
tractate he thought fit to collect from the ablest of divines who have
written on that subject of atheism, Amesius, Wollebius," &c. Here should
be comfort for those who fear with Pattison that Milton's addiction to
politics deprived us of unnumbered "Comuses." The excerpter of Amesius
and Wollebius, as we have so often insisted, needed great stimulus for
great achievements. Such stimulus would probably have come
superabundantly if he could at this time have had his way, for the most
moral of men was bent on assuming a direct antagonism to conventional
morality. He had maintained that marriage ought to be dissolved for mere
incompatibility; his case must have seemed much stronger now that
incompatibility had produced desertion. He was not the man to shrink
from acting on his opinion when the fit season seemed to him to have
arrived; and in the summer of 1645 he was openly paying his addresses to
"a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, one of Dr. Davis's daughters."
Considering the consequences to the female partner to the contract, it
is clear that Miss Davis could not be expected to entertain Milton's
proposals unless her affection for him was very strong indeed. It is