written long before then, and so, no doubt, were L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. Mosely, in his Address to the Reader, in the volume of Milton's poems containing all these pieces, published in 1645, tells us that these poems were known to be written, and that he solicited them to accompany Lycidas and Comus; and Milton, in presenting this volume to his friend Rouse, says plainly that they were the productions of his early youth:
"Gemelle cultu simplici gaudens liber,
Fronde licit geminâ,
Munditiaque nitens non operosâ;
Quem manus attulit Juveniles olim, Secula tamen haud nimii poetæ," &c.
This settles the question of the location of the poems; but the question of when, and how long, and how often Milton resided at Forest Hill, still remains. That he did not reside there long, immediately after his marriage, is very clear, from the statement of his nephew and biographer, Phillips. "About Whitsuntide, or a little after, he took a journey into the country: nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was more than a journey of recreation. After a month's stay, home he returns a married man, that went out a bachelor; his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a justice of peace, of Forestil, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire." This account is confirmed by Anthony Wood, who states that Milton courted, married, and brought his wife to his house in London in one month's time; and that she was very young. She continued, however, as we shall presently see, only a few weeks with her husband, and returned to Forest Hill.
Now, as Milton kept this courtship so profound a secret, it is quite probable that it might be going on much longer than any of his friends were aware of. When he set out on his journey, of which nobody knew the cause, he no doubt knew it. Somewhere, and some time before, he had most likely seen this Mary Powell—where, and how long before, who shall now say? It is possible, therefore, that, for aught any one of his friends knew, he might have been at Forest Hill, and sojourning there occasionally, attracted by this attachment; and that he now set out with an intention of bringing his courtship to an end, as he did. As it turned out, his wife was discontented with the dullness of his dwelling, being accustomed to much gayety at home, and left him. Of this we shall speak more anon, but here we are inquiring only into the probability of the extent of his residence or residences at Forest Hill. The marriage took place in the midst of the Revolutionary wars. Soon after, the house and property of Mr. Powell, Milton's father-in-law, were seized by the Parliamentary army, he being a Cavalier; and the wife, who had deserted her husband in her father's prosperity, now, in his adversity, came back, and soon brought her father and family, to seek protection under the roof so coolly abandoned before. The father-in-law and family appear to have lived with Milton till 1647, or about three years.
Mary Powell, Milton's first wife, died in 1652, or about nine years after her marriage. Now, these nine years were all years of the ascendency of the Parliamentary power, and consequently of danger and uncertainty to the Powell family. It must be to Milton's interest with Cromwell that they must look for any kind of security; and during these nine years there would be many occasions when Milton might find it agreeable to spend a certain time in the country, and at Forest Hill. It is said that Mr. Powell, Milton's father-in-law, had, indeed, another mansion in the neighborhood, and allowed Milton and his family occasional occupation of this. Thus, though Milton, from his post as Latin secretary to Cromwell, and from his continual engagements in the cause of the Commonwealth, always had, and must have, his house in London, it is quite likely that during these nine years he resided, in the summer months, not unfrequently at Forest Hill.
Warton has said that he composed some of his later productions there. It would be just the retreat for such purposes, when he required close and unbroken retirement from the excitements and personal interruptions of town. Mr. Richards, a sub-commissioner under a recent commission of the reign of George III., gave Mr. Todd this intelligence: "Milton married a daughter of Justice Powell, of Sandhurst, in the vicinity of Oxford, and lived in a house at Forest Hill, about three miles from Sandhurst, where the late laureate Warton told me Milton wrote a great part of his Paradise Lost. Warton found a number of papers of Milton's own writing in that house, and also many of Justice Powell's, which the late Mr. Crewe, father to the late Viscountess Falmouth, permitted him to take, and make what use of them he thought proper. The late Mr. Mickle translated part of Camoens' Luciad in the same house, he being, at the time I visited him, a lodger in that house. Mr. Mickle married the daughter of Mr. Tomkins, a farmer, the tenant to Mr. Crewe. The time I allude to of visiting my worthy friend Mickle was in 1772 and 1773; and my conversations had with Mr. Warton and Mr. Crewe were from 1781 to 1786."
Having now clearly settled the fact that Forest Hill, near Shotover, was a residence of Milton, and probably through a course of nine years, at various times, and the scene of some of those great literary and political works on which he was arduously engaged during those years; and that while his birth-place in Bread-street, and his parental home at Horton, were both destroyed, this has been nearly so, we will now notice a little more closely the condition of his home during those nine years of his first marriage. That marriage appears to have been a great mistake; to have destroyed to a great degree his domestic comfort, and to have occasioned the world to entertain a very unfavorable idea of Milton's disposition. The facts, drawn from his various biographers, are briefly these.
At Whitsuntide, in 1643, and in his thirty-fifth year, as we learn from his nephew Phillips, in the passage quoted, he married Mary, the daughter of Richard Powell, living at Forest Hill, near Shotover, and a justice of peace for Oxfordshire. He brought his wife to London. She was very young, and had been accustomed to a gay life. According to Aubrey, "she was brought up and bred where there was a great deal of company and merriment, as dancing, &c.; and when she came to live with her husband, she found it solitary, no company coming to her; and she often heard her nephews cry and be beaten. This life was irksome to her, and so she went to her parents." Phillips says the same; that she was averse to the philosophic life of Milton, and sighed for the mirth and jovialness to which she had been accustomed in Oxfordshire. It was a great mistake altogether. Milton was now a man of a sober age; he was yet but a schoolmaster, though he had a large and handsome house in Aldersgate-street, in a garden. This was necessary for the accommodation of his pupils, as well as for his quiet study, and prosecution of those great questions of the age in which he was engaged, writing for the Republican cause, and against its enemies. All this must have been immensely dull to a young girl, who, from all the glimpses we can get of her, was, though perhaps handsome and fascinating, but of an ordinary nature, and one who had been educated to frivolity and mere enjoyment of the fashionable gayeties of life. What was more, the very work on which Milton was zealously engaged, the defense of the Parliamentary cause, and the defeat of the kingly, and which abstracted him from her society, was perfect poison to her and her family—all high Royalists. "Her relations," says Phillips, "being generally addicted to the Cavalier party, and some of them possibly engaged in the king's service, who at this time had his headquarters at Oxford, and was in some prospect of success, they began to repent them of having matched the eldest daughter of the family to a person so contrary to them in opinion; and thought it would be a blot in their escutcheon, whenever that events should come to flourish again."
It was these circumstances, operating together, which induced his young wife to desert Milton. All that we can learn confirms the idea that her family was a regularly worldly-minded one; and the only wonder is that they should ever have agreed to the match at all. Milton was then comparatively unknown. He was but a schoolmaster, and must have been pretty well known to all that came in contact with him to hold very liberal opinions. However, scarcely was the match made, than the family began to suspect they had made a great blunder. The wife asked leave, after a week, to go home and see her parents; and the whole affair reminds us of the matrimonial history of a great poet of our own day. The wife goes home in good humor, and then sends her husband word that she does not mean to come back again. It does not appear that the wife or wife's friends ever set up the plea that Milton was mad, however they might think so. Luckily, Milton was a sober, moderate man, and not accustomed to run into debt. Had he, like Lord Byron,
