Milton's duties as Secretary for Foreign Tongues must have brought him, one would think, into some sort of personal relation with Cromwell and the other great parliamentary leaders. The poet leaves us in no doubt as to the high esteem in which he held these men. But no gossip of the time admits us to a glimpse of their intercourse with each other. It falls to Milton to eulogize Cromwell; it never came in Cromwell's way to put on record his estimate of Milton. With the restoration of royalty in the person of Charles II., in 1660, Milton's public activity of course ceased, and the second period of his life comes to an end. We saw his first period devoted to preparation and to early essays in poetry, with the distinct conception that poetry was yet to be the great work of his life. In his second period he expresses himself in verse but rarely and briefly, but produces controversial prose, now in English, now in Latin. In this second period he works, as teacher or as public secretary, for payment, supporting himself and family. When the third period begins, he loses all employment, goes into closest retirement, a widower with three daughters growing up from childhood, and devotes himself to the poetry that he has always contemplated as the object of his ambition. He has now been blind eight years. In view of the conspicuous part that Milton had taken in defending the right of Parliament to bring a king to the scaffold, it is surprising that of the Restoration he was not included in the number of those marked out for the punishment of death. He was for some time undoubtedly in danger. Fortunately he was overlooked, or, perhaps, was purposely neglected as being henceforce harmless. In February, 1663, he married his third wife Elizabeth Minshull, who faithfully cared for him till his death in 1674. During this last period of his life Milton composed and published his _major_ poems,--Paradise Lost, 1667, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, 1671. For Paradise Lost he received from his publisher five pounds in cash, with promise of five pounds when thirteen hundred copies should have been sold, and of two more payments, each of the same sum, when two more editions of the same size should have been disposed of. The last years of his life Milton appears to have spent in comparative comfort. His three daughters had gone out to learn trades. It seems he had given them no education. It may be they showed no desire or aptitude for instruction. Far more probably, however, he took no interest in their education. His ideal of womanhood, as may be gathered from numerous passages in his poems, is as far as possible removed from the modern conception of sexual equality as to opportunity for education and for training to self-determination. He shared in this respect the views that prevailed during his day in all classes of society, and he maintained these views as a parent no less than as the poet of Paradise.