, which had escaped
from Milton's pen in 1642 to the great grief of his friends. If
the information of a dissenting minister, one Thomas Bradbury, who
professed to derive it from Jeremiah White, one of Oliver's chaplains,
may be trusted, Milton "was allowed by the Parliament a weekly table
for the entertainment of foreign ministers and persons of learning,
such especially as came from protestant states, which allowance was
also continued by Cromwell."
Such homage, though it may be a little tiresome, may have gratified
for the moment the political writer, but it would not satisfy the poet
who was dreaming of an immortality of far other fame--
Two equal'd with me in fate,
So were I equal'd with them in renown.
And to one with Milton's acute sensibility, yearning for sympathy and
love, dependent, through his calamity, on the eyes, as on the heart,
of others, his domestic interior was of more consequence than outside
demonstrations of respect. Four years after the death of his first
wife he married again. We know nothing more of this second wife,
Catharine Woodcock, than what may be gathered from the Sonnet XIX,
in which he commemorated his "late espoused saint," in whose person
"love, sweetness, goodness shin'd.
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