was perhaps the reason why he found no difficulty in promising a
portion of 1000 l. with his daughter. Milton, with a poet's want
of caution, or indifference to money, and with a lofty masculine
disregard of the temper and character of the girl he asked to share
his life, came home with his bride in triumph, and held feasting in
celebration of his hasty and ill-considered choice. It was a beginning
of sorrows to him. Hitherto, up to his thirty-fifth year, independent
master of leisure and the delights of literature, his years had passed
without a check or a shadow. From this day forward domestic misery,
the importunities of business, the clamour of controversy, crowned by
the crushing calamity of blindness, were to be his portion for more
than thirty years. Singular among poets in the serene fortune of the
first half of life, in the second half his piteous fate was to rank in
wretchedness with that of his masters, Dante or Tasso.

The biographer, acquainted with the event, has no difficulty in
predicting it, and in saying at this point in his story, that Milton
might have known better than, with his puritanical connections, to
have taken to wife a daughter of a cavalier house, to have brought her
from a roystering home, frequented by the dissolute officers of the
Oxford garrison, to the spare diet and philosophical retirement of a
recluse student, and to have looked for sympathy and response for his
speculations from an uneducated and frivolous girl. Love has blinded,
and will continue to blind, the wisest men to calculations as easy and
as certain as these. And Milton, in whose soul Puritan austerity was
as yet only contending with the more genial currents of humanity, had
a far greater than average susceptibility to the charm of woman. Even
at the later date of _Paradise Lost_, voluptuous thoughts, as Mr.
Hallam has observed, are not uncongenial to him. And at an earlier
age his poems, candidly pure from the lascivious inuendoes of his