injured. He proceeds to describe the course of his conduct, and the
train of his thoughts; and, because he has been suspected of
incontinence, gives an account of his own purity: "That if I be
justly charged," says he, "with this crime, it may come upon me with
tenfold shame."

The style of his piece is rough, and such perhaps was that of his
antagonist. This roughness he justifies by great examples, in a
long digression. Sometimes he tries to be humorous: "Lest I should
take him for some chaplain in hand, some squire of the body to his
prelate, one who serves not at the altar only, but at the court-
cupboard, he will bestow on us a pretty model of himself; and sets
me out half-a-dozen phthisical mottoes, wherever he had them,
hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits; in which labour the
agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of well-sized
periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies.--And
thus ends this section, or rather dissection, of himself." Such is
the controversial merriment of Milton; his gloomy seriousness is yet
more offensive. Such is his malignity, "that hell grows darker at
his frown."

His father, after Reading was taken by Essex, came to reside in his
house, and his school increased. At Whitsuntide, in his thirty-
fifth year, he married Mary, the daughter of Mr. Powel, a justice of
the peace in Oxfordshire. He brought her to town with him, and
expected all the advantages of a conjugal life. The lady, however,
seems not much to have delighted in the pleasures of spare diet and
hard study; for, as Philips relates, "having for a month led a
philosophic life, after having been used at home to a great house,
and much company and joviality, her friends, possibly by her own