The circumstances of Milton’s first marriage are as singular as any in the strange series of the loves of the poets. The scene opens with an affair of business. Milton’s father, as is well known, was a scrivener—a kind of professional money-lender, then well known in London; and having been early connected with the vicinity of Oxford, continued afterwards to have pecuniary transactions of a certain nature with country gentlemen of that neighbourhood. In the course of these he advanced 500_l._ to a certain Mr. Richard Powell, a squire of fair landed estate, residing at Forest Hill, which is about four miles from the city of Oxford. The money was lent on the 11th of June 1627; and a few months afterwards Mr. Milton the elder gave 312_l._ of it to his son the poet, who was then a youth at college, and made a formal memorandum of the same in the form then usual, which still exists. The debt was never wholly discharged; for in 1651 we find Milton declaring on oath that he had never received more than 180_l._, ‘in part satisfaction of his said just and principal debt, with damages for the same and his costs of suit.’ Mr. Keightley supposes him to have ‘taken many a ride over to Forest Hill’ after he left Cambridge and was living at Horton, which is not very far distant; but of course this is only conjecture. We only know that about 1643 ‘he took,’ as his nephew relates, ‘a journey into the country, nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was more than a journey of recreation. After a month’s stay he returns a married man, who set out a bachelor; his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a justice of the peace’ for the county of Oxford. The suddenness of the event is rather striking; but Philips was at the time one of Milton’s pupils, and it is possible that some pains may have been taken to conceal the love-affair from the ‘young gentlemen.’ Still, as Philips was Milton’s nephew, he was likely to hear such intelligence tolerably early; and as he does not seem to have done so, the _dénouement_ was probably rather prompt. At any rate, he was certainly married at that time, and took his bride home to his house in Aldersgate Street; and there was feasting and gaiety according to the usual custom of such events. A few weeks after, the lady went home to her friends, in which there was of course nothing remarkable; but it is singular that when the natural limit of her visit at home was come, she absolutely refused to return to her husband. The grounds of so strange a resolution are very difficult to ascertain. Political feeling ran very high: old Mr. Powell adhered to the side of the king, and Milton to that of the parliament; and this might be fancied to have caused an estrangement. But on the other hand, these circumstances must have been well known three months before. Nothing had happened in that quarter of a year to change very materially the position of the two parties in the State.