[Sidenote: HOME LIFE]

To find himself, or to find the service to which he could devote
his great learning, seems to have been Milton's object after his
return to London (1639). While he waited he began to educate his
nephews, and enlarged this work until he had a small private
school, in which he tested some of the theories that appeared later
in his _Tractate on Education_. Also he married, in haste it
seems, and with deplorable consequences. His wife, Mary Powell, the
daughter of a Cavalier, was a pleasure-loving young woman, and
after a brief experience of Puritan discipline she wearied of it
and went home. She has been amply criticized for her desertion, but
Milton's house must have been rather chilly for any ordinary human
being to find comfort in. To him woman seemed to have been made for
obedience, and man for rebellion; his toplofty doctrine of
masculine superiority found expression in a line regarding Adam and
Eve, "He for God only, she for God in him,"--an old delusion, which
had been seriously disturbed by the first woman.

[Illustration: JOHN MILTON]

[Sidenote: PERIOD OF CONTROVERSY]

For a period of near twenty years Milton wrote but little poetry,
his time being occupied with controversies that were then waged
even more fiercely in the press than in the field. It was after the
execution of King Charles (1649), when England was stunned and all
Europe aghast at the Puritans' daring, that he published his
_Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, the argument of which was,
that magistrates and people are equally subject to the law, and