But we do get from Ellwood's reminiscence a date for the
beginning of _Paradise Regained_, which must have been at Chalfont in
the autumn of 1665.
When the plague was abated, and the city had become safely habitable,
Milton returned to Artillery Row. He had not been long back when
London was devastated by a fresh calamity, only less terrible than the
plague, because it destroyed the home, and not the life. The Great
Fire succeeded the Great Plague. 13,000 houses, two-thirds of the
city, were reduced to ashes, and the whole current of life and
business entirely suspended. Through these two overwhelming disasters,
Milton must have been supporting his solitary spirit by writing
_Paradise Regained_, _Samson Agonistes_, and giving the final touches
to _Paradise Lost_. He was now so wholly unmoved by his environment,
that we look in vain in the poems for any traces of this season of
suffering and disaster. The past and his own meditations were now all
in all to him; the horrors of the present were as nothing to a man who
had outlived his hopes. Plague and fire, what were they, after the
ruin of the noblest of causes? The stoical compression of _Paradise
Regained_ is in perfect keeping with the fact that it was in the
middle of the ruins of London that Milton placed his finished poem in
the hands of the licenser.
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