A year or two later, while Robert Boyle was in Ireland, Mary fell ill again; this time “strangely and extremely ill” at delicious Leeze. Poor Charles Rich once more sent post-haste for Lady Ranelagh, who set out from London the very next morning. She found My Lady Molkin in an extraordinary condition, to all appearances well enough, but, “her disease lying more in stupidness than pain,” she was “no more joyed” to see her sister. It was “a mortifying encounter”; Mary was “the carcase of a friend,” her “soul gone as to any rational use she had of it”; her “kindness was dead.” Nerves were little understood in those days. The Essex doctor diagnosed Mary’s illness as “a spice of the palsy.” The Warwick family talked of “fumes of the spleen.” Dr. Wright held a more modern opinion, which he confided to Lady Ranelagh; but he agreed with the opinion of the country doctor that the disease was “very inward and hidden”; and Lady Ranelagh wrote to her brother Robert in Ireland that they were “all going blindfold towards a cure.”[214] Charles Rich and Mary’s mother-in-law had been “very obligingly careful of, and kind to, her”; and as soon as Mary was well enough Lady Ranelagh carried her off to London, where, under her sister’s care and Dr. Wright’s, she was once more restored to health. Lady Ranelagh was, in Mary’s own words, “the most useful and best friend for soul and body that ever any person, I think, had.”[215] Somebody else thought so too. In 1655 Lady Ranelagh had known Milton for ten years. For the last six years Milton had been Latin Secretary to the Council of State; and he was now living in the “pretty garden house” in Petty France, Westminster, next door to my Lord Scudamore, and not far from Lady Ranelagh’s house in the Old Mall. If only as the great Republican pamphleteer, one of the chief State officials under the Protectorate, Milton was a very eminent and important man, visited by many “persons of quality” besides Lady Ranelagh, and by all the learned foreigners of note who passed through London. Some of the old Hartlib-Durie circle of the Aldersgate and Barbican days, with Milton’s pupils, Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner, came about Milton almost daily; and among his more recent friends was the Agent for Bremen, Mr. Henry Oldenburg. Durie himself, who was Keeper of the library at St. James’s, was a near neighbour. Milton’s wife, poor Mary Powell, and their little son had been about three years dead; and the widower had been left with three little girls, the youngest but a month or two old at the mother’s death. In 1655 they were nine, seven, and three years old, and were being brought up, in strange, motherless fashion, in the house in Petty France; while Milton himself, with the help of readers and amanuenses, pursued his work for the Council through all the difficulties of his blindness. For Milton was now quite blind.[216]