The "foreign folk" were no new thing. Milton's fame, indeed, was European: as a prose-writer and pamphleteer, be it understood, not as a poet. Had he not refuted and put to shame the most erudite scholars of the day? Foreign _savants_ of note, therefore, who might be visiting London, were desirous to acquaint themselves with so powerful a personality: and the little house in the Artillery Walk was the rendezvous for many distinguished persons. They found their host no such recluse as town-talk might have led them to imagine, but one ready and willing to converse with them,--an English gentleman to the backbone, a scholar and artist to the finger-tips. His Continental tours and Italian sojourns had made him less insular than most of his compatriots, and his vast range of reading had imparted a certain cosmopolitanism to his exceedingly individual lines of thought. The visitors found him, moreover, employed upon a work so important, and of a theme so lofty, as might well give them pause, considering the circumstances under which it was being accomplished: and whatever their particular religious tenets might be, they could not fail to admire the magnitude of his aim in composing _Paradise Lost_,--"To justify the ways of God to men." PARADISE LOST. BK. II _Painting by S. Meteyard._ "Satan with less toil, and now with ease, ... Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold ... This pendent world in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude." (_Paradise Lost. Bk. II._) [Illustration: Satan in paradise colour plate] Dinner despatched, the master of the house, led by his devoted friends, went out into the garden. A garden was the desideratum of his existence, and he had never been without one; for in seventeenth-century London every house was fitly furnished in this respect. Here Milton was in the habit of taking that steady exercise which was a _sine quâ non_ to a sedentary and gouty man. He made a point of walking up and down out of doors, in cold weather, for three or four hours at a time,--sometimes composing his majestic lines, sometimes merely meditating. When weary with walking, he would come in and either dictate what he had conceived, or would take further exercise in a swing. In really warm weather, he received his visitors sitting outside his house door, wrapped in a coarse grey overcoat--gazing out upon the fields of the Artillery ground with those "unblemished eyes" that belied their own clear beauty--"the only point," as he said, "in which I am against my will a hypocrite." To-day, being cool and cloudy, allowed but intermittent periods in the open air. Milton, Lawrence and Skinner paced slowly to and fro, deep in enthralling intercourse, until three o'clock: when the rain and Thomas Elwood arrived simultaneously, and the other two men departed to their respective avocations.