Upon the return of Charles, he fled, and lay concealed, during which time his books, the Eikonoklastes and “Defense of the People of England,” were burned by the common hangman! An indictment was found against him, and a warrant for his arrest placed in the hands of the sergeant-at-arms. The act of indemnity was passed, and he received the benefit of it, and came forth from his concealment, but was arrested, and shortly after, by order of the House of Commons, discharged, upon his paying the fees to the sergeant-at-arms, who had endeavored to exact them from him, which he resisted, and appealed to the House. And thus, although a prisoner, he still displayed a determination and resolution to oppose that oppression in his own person, against which he had so stoutly battled for the whole people. He now retired from public life forever; and when an offer was afterward made to him by the king, to return to his old post of secretary, he refused it, although pressed by his wife to accept it, and to her entreaties answered thus: “Thou art in the right; you and other women would ride in your coach; for me, my aim is to live and die an honest man.” This offer has been denied by Doctor Johnson, in his life of Milton, and that, too, without sufficient foundation, for the contradiction is made without proof; and when Dr. Newton, in his admirable account of Milton, published in his splendid edition of the Poetical Works of Milton, confirms it, and asserts that these very words were from Milton’s wife only twenty years before the publication of his edition. The Doctor has in this, as in other instances, displayed a malicious desire to detract from his merits; his envy no doubt being excited by this unbending integrity of one, whose political opinions were serious enough in the Doctor’s eyes to affect even his merits as a poet. For this, as for other offenses, has he received again and again that censure which he so richly deserved; but from no one with more force than from Mr. St. John, in his able Preliminary Discourse to these volumes. We quote a passage. “Another sore point with Johnson was, that Milton should be said to have rejected, after the Restoration, the place of Latin Secretary to Charles the Second. Few men heartily believe in the existence of virtue above their own reach. He knew what he would have done under similar circumstances; he knew that had he lived during the period of the Commonwealth, a similar offer from the Regicides would have met with no ‘sturdy refusal’ from him; he knew it was in his eyes no sin to accept of a pension from one whom he considered an usurper; how, then, could he believe, what must have humiliated him in his own esteem, that the old blind republican, bending beneath the weight of years and indigence, still cherished heroic virtues in his soul, and spurned the offer of a tyrant! Oh, but he had filled the same office under Oliver Cromwell!