A graver misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76} comparison with it. Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his daughters. That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life. How things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations, made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls. And so he was. He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew, no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse; viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish and French," none of which languages they understood. Nor did he show any desire that they should; saying grimly that one tongue was enough for a woman. History and fiction are alike full of the tragedies that result from the blindness of extraordinary minds to ordinary duties; and Milton's case is one of the saddest. The daughters cheated him and made away with {77} his books; he spoke of them gravely and repeatedly as his "unkind children"; one of them is even reported, on very good evidence, to have said, at his third marriage in 1663, that "that was no news to hear of his wedding but, if she could hear of his death, that was something." At last it was thought better that he and they should part; and they were put out, at considerable expense to their father, to learn embroidery work and other "curious and ingenious manufactures" for their living. It is pleasant to hear that the youngest, Deborah, who was visited by Addison not long before he died, and received fifty guineas from Queen Caroline, was "in a transport" of delight when shown a portrait of her father, crying out "'Tis my father, 'tis my dear father, I see him; 'tis him; 'tis the very man! here, here!" as she pointed to some of the features. So one likes to be told, on her authority, that he was delightful company and "the life of the conversation, full of unaffected cheerfulness and civility" when he had his little parties of friends. And to us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she could still repeat many lines from Homer, Euripides and Ovid, though she said she did not understand Greek or Latin. The wife of a Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt {78} some pride in these survivals of her childish drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her unintelligible, that she was the daughter of Mr. Milton, the great scholar and poet.