contemporaries, have preserved the record of the rapid impression of
the momentary passage of beauty upon his susceptible mind. Once, at
twenty, he was set all on flame by the casual meeting, in one of his
walks in the suburbs of London, with a damsel whom he never saw again.
Again, sonnets III. to V. tell how he fell before the new type of
foreign beauty which crossed his path at Bologna. A similar surprise
of his fancy at the expense of his judgment seems to have happened on
the present occasion of his visit to Shotover. There is no evidence
that Mary Powell was handsome, and we may be sure that it would
have been mentioned if she had been. But she had youth, and country
freshness; her "unliveliness and natural sloth unfit for conversation"
passed as "the bashful muteness of a virgin;" and if a doubt intruded
that he was being too hasty, Milton may have thought that a girl of
seventeen could be moulded at pleasure.

He was too soon undeceived. His dream of married happiness barely
lasted out the honeymoon. He found that he had mated himself to a
clod of earth, who not only was not now, but had not the capacity
of becoming, a helpmeet for him. With Milton, as with the whole
Calvinistic and Puritan Europe, woman was a creature of an inferior
and subordinate class. Man was the final cause of God's creation, and
woman was there to minister to this nobler being. In his dogmatic
treatise, _De doctrina Christiana_, Milton formulated this sentiment
in the thesis, borrowed from the schoolmen, that the soul was
communicated "in semine patris." The cavalier section of society had
inherited the sentiment of chivalry, and contrasted with the roundhead
not more by its loyalty to the person of the prince, than by its
recognition of the superior grace and refinement of womanhood. Even in
the debased and degenerate epoch of court life which followed 1660,
the forms and language of homage still preserved the tradition of a