If Milton had been hanged with the Regicides at Charing Cross, or carted to Tyburn! And more than once during the passage of the Bill it seemed possible that it might be so. As it was, with the passing of this Act of Oblivion, and the emerging of a blind Puritan into the murky sunshine of the old London streets, Milton drops out of the story of Lady Ranelagh and the Boyle family. For a little while after the passing of the Act (his hiding-place having apparently been discovered) he seems to have been detained in custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Perhaps he was safer so. His offending tracts were duly burnt; his regicide comrades were duly hanged, drawn and quartered; and in December Milton was at large. Staunch friends he had had; Andrew Marvell was perhaps bravest and most indefatigable of them all; but it must have required more powerful influence than Marvell’s and Davenant’s to save John Milton. Had Lady Ranelagh done him one more service greater than all before? Had she enlisted the interest of her powerful brother Broghill, and of such Privy Councillors as she knew best—men like Sandwich and Manchester, and Annesley[260] and Morrice, and the old Lord Goring, poor Lettice’s father-in-law,[261] and the young Charles Howard, who had married “Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and was going to be first Earl of Carlisle? Had Lady Ranelagh’s silken strings reached the little private Junto about the King himself—Hyde, and Ormonde, and Southampton? One remembers that Mr. Boyle had been “treated with great civility and respect by the King, as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” And it is good to think that the Boyle family—perhaps Boyle himself, whose memories went back to the Milton of _Comus_ and Eton, the Milton of the _Epitaphium Damonis_ and the Villa Diodati in Geneva, may have had a hand in saving Milton, the blind Republican,—to write _Paradise Lost_. But if to any of them, it was certainly to Lady Ranelagh that Milton owed his life and freedom. There is no record of any further visits from Lady Ranelagh to Milton after that date, but it is difficult to believe her friendship for Milton ended with the Restoration. The garden-house in Petty France was to be no more his home: his blind steps turned eastward, to Holborn again, and Jewin Street, and then to Artillery Walk, near Bunhill Fields, where he was to resume and finish his great poem, and where he was to end his days. It is difficult to believe that Lady Ranelagh never again knocked at the blind man’s door; and it must be taken for granted that one day in late August or early September 1667 a presentation-copy of _Paradise Lost_ arrived at the house in Pall Mall. * * * * *