THEIR AUTHOES AND ORIGIN. 89
quest." Now was the favoured time when he began seriously to set about his greatest poem, the " Paradise Lost; " for which his varied learning, and his native and acquired poetical skill, were suitable preparatives, and the plan of which had long been in his mind. He resided at that time at a house in the Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. There he gave himself heartily to this work, seizing the intervals of his suffering from gout to compose his sublime epic, and availing himself of the assistance of friends, who wrote down what he had produced.
In 1663 Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshul, daughter of a gentleman in Cheshire. He had not suffered at the Restoration in 1660 as we might have feared he would. This fact Dr. Johnson thus explains " He was now poor and blind, and who would pursue with violence an illustrious enemy, depressed by fortune, and disarmed by nature."
During the Plague, in 1665, Milton took refuge at Chalfont, in Bucks, where one Elwood first saw a complete copy of " Paradise Lost," and said to the poet, " Thou hast said a great deal upon Paradise Lost ! what hast thou to say on Paradise Regained ? " This question led to the production of the " Paradise Regained," a work which, contrary to the general judgment, Milton himself preferred to the "Paradise Lost."
In the year 1667 the poet, having returned to London, obtained a licence to publish his great poem, and sold his copy right to Samuel Simmons for five pounds, with further payments according to the sale. Thus humble in the manner of its first appearance was that work of which Johnson says "it is not the greatest of heroic poems only because it was not the first." The sale was slow at first, for readers were few in those times, and the work was too learned in style for the majority of them. But Andrew Marvel and John Dryden welcomed it with generous but deserved praise ; and later, Addison s papers on it, in the "Spectator," opened the way for it to take its lofty place of pre-eminence in our literature.
The " Paradise Regained " was published in 1067, and in the
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