A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.
The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tempest of flame and smoke which devoured nearly two-thirds of London; the old poet hearing the din and roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat and the showers of cinders--a scene and an experience which might have given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pandemonium, if his great poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed--completed and bargained for; £20 were to be paid for it conditionally,[68] in four payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an added tint of blackness to the picture, we have to fancy his three daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling. Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked, and Deborah, the youngest (latterly being very helpful)--all desert him. They never return. “Undutiful daughters,” he says to Ellwood; but I think he does not soften toward them, even when gone. Poor, stern, old man! He would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in his estate; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough, married--dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster; and Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton’s daughter. But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of dignity belonging to her; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India.