That peril was soon realised. In the spring of 1660, the Restoration was accomplished amidst the tumultuous rejoicings of the people. It was certain that the vengeance of government would lose no time in marking its victims; for some of them in anticipation had already fled. Milton wisely withdrew from the first fury of the persecution, which now descended on his party. He secreted himself in London, and when he returned into the public eye in the winter, found himself no farther punished, than by a general disqualification for the public service, and the disgrace of a public burning inflicted on his Eikonoclastes, and his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. Apparently it was not long after this time that he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshul, a lady of good family in Cheshire. In what year he began the composition of his ‘Paradise Lost,’ is not certainly known: some have supposed in 1658. There is better ground for fixing the period of its close. During the plague of 1665 he retired to Chalfont, and at that time Elwood the quaker read the poem in a finished state. The general interruption of business in London occasioned by the plague, and prolonged by the great fire in 1666, explain why the publication was delayed for nearly two years. The contract with the publisher is dated April 26, 1667, and in the course of that year the Paradise Lost was published. Originally it was printed in ten books: in the second, and subsequent editions, the seventh and tenth books were each divided into two. Milton received only five pounds in the first instance on the publication of the book. His farther profits were regulated by the sale of the three first editions. Each was to consist of fifteen hundred copies, and on the second and third respectively reaching a sale of thirteen hundred, he was to receive a farther sum of five pounds for each; making a total of fifteen pounds. The receipt for the second sum of five pounds is dated April 26, 1669.