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Some account of the life and writings of John Milton
Some account of the life and writings of John Milton Author:Henry John Todd Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION II. From Ms Marriage to the time of his being appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues. At Whitsuntide in 1643, and in his thirty-fifth year, (a... more »s I have before observed,) Milton married Mary, the daughter of Richard Powell, a gentleman who resided at Forest Hill near Shotover in Oxfordshire, and was a justice of the peace for the county. He brought his bride to London; who, after living only a few weeks with him, obtained his consent to accept the invitation of her friends to spend the remaining part of the summer with them in the country. He gave her permission to stay till Michaelmas; but she declined to return at the expiration of that period. The visit to her friends was, in fact, only a pretence for conjugal desertion. This desertion has been imputed, by Phillips, to the different principles of the two families. Her relations, he tells us, " being generally addicted to the Cavalier party, and some of them possibly ingaged in the King's service, (who by this time had his head quarters at Oxford, and was in some prospect of success,) they began to repent them of having matched the eldestdaughter of the family to a person so contrary to them in opinion; and thought it would be a blot in their escutcheon, whenever that Court should come to flourish again: however, it so incensed our author, that he thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse." The same biographer intimates, that she was averse to the philosophical life of Milton, and sighed for the mirth and jovialness to which she had been accustomed in Oxfordshire. And Aubrey relates, that she " a was brought up and bred where there was a great deal of company and merriment, as dancing,« less