that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to admit Cædmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song. _Last Days._ The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed. Now, it was Holborn again; then Jewin Street; then Bunhill Row; and--one while--for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage[67] may still be seen in which he lived, and the garden in which he walked--but never saw. There, too, is the latticed window looking on the garden, at which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky, upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge. A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.