It has been argued that the last two of these Sonnets must be out of their proper chronological places in the printed editions. They must have been written, it is said, before Milton lost his sight: for how are such invitations to mirth and festivity reconcileable with Milton's circumstances in the third or fourth year of his blindness? There is no mistake in the matter, however. In Milton's own second or 1673 edition of his Minor Poems the sonnets, in the order in which we have printed them,--with the exception of No. 2, which had then to be omitted on account of its political point,--come immediately after the sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre; and there are other reasons of external evidence which assign Nos. 1, 3, and 4, distinctly to about the same date as No. 2, the opening--words of which date _it_ near the middle of 1655. But, indeed, we should miss much of the biographic interest of the last two sonnets by detaching them from the two first. In No. 1 we have a plaintive soliloquy of Milton on his blind and disabled condition, ending with that beautiful expression of his resignation to God's will in which, under the image of the varieties of service that may be required by some great monarch, he contrasts his own stationariness and inactivity with the energy and bustle of so many of his contemporaries. In No. 2, addressed to Cyriack Skinner, he treats of the same topic, only reverting with pride, as he had done several times in prose, to the literary labour that had brought on his calamity. In both the intimation is that he has disciplined himself to live on as cheerfully as possible, taking daily duties, and little pleasures too, as they come. What more natural, therefore, than that, some little while after those two affecting sonnets on his blindness had been written, there should be two others, in which not a word should be said of his blindness, but young Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner should find themselves invited, in a more express manner than usual, to a day in Milton's company? For that is the proper construction of the Sonnets. They are cards of invitation to little parties, perhaps to one and the same little party, in Milton's house in the winter of 1655-6. It is dull, cold, weather; the Parks are wet, and the country-roads all mire; and for some days Milton has been baulked of his customary walk out of doors, tended by young Lawrence or Cyriack. To make amends, there shall be a little dinner in the warm room at home--"a neat repast" says Milton temptingly, adding "with wine," that there may be no doubt in that particular--to be followed by a long talk and some choice music. So young Lawrence is informed in the metrical missive to _him_; and the same day (unless, as we may hope, the little dinner became a periodical institution in Milton's house), Cyriack is told to come too. Altogether they are model cards of invitation.[1]