that foreigners are reported, by Wood, to have visited the house in
Bread Street where he was born.

According to another account, he was seen in a small house, neatly
enough dressed in black clothes, sitting in a room hung with rusty
green; pale but not cadaverous, with chalkstones in his hands. He
said that, if it were not for the gout, his blindness would be
tolerable.

In the intervals of his pain, being made unable to use the common
exercises, he used to swing in a chair, and sometimes played upon an
organ.

He was now confessedly and visibly employed upon his poem, of which
the progress might be noted by those with whom he was familiar; for
he was obliged, when he had composed as many lines as his memory
would conveniently retain, to employ some friend in writing them,
having, at least for part of the time, no regular attendant. This
gave opportunity to observations and reports.

Mr. Philips observes, that there was a very remarkable circumstance
in the composure of "Paradise Lost," "which I have a particular
reason," says he, "to remember; for whereas I had the perusal of it
from the very beginning, for some years, as I went from time to time
to visit him, in parcels of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time
(which, being written by whatever hand came next, might possibly
want correction as to the orthography and pointing), having, as the
Summer came on, not been showed any for a considerable while, and
desiring the reason thereof, was answered, that his vein never
happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal; and that