“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649in the Barbican house. They had been dispossessed of their Forest Hill property due
to Richard Powell’s debts and tangled finances, and the requirement that, as a
delinquent royalist, he compound for the rest of his heavily mortgaged assets.^46
Milton rose to need and family responsibility, but must have felt considerable am-
bivalence about extending hospitality to the feckless father-in-law who had de-
faulted both on the interest he owed Milton from the 1627 bond and on Mary’s
dowry, and to the mother-in-law who, Mary reportedly claimed, had incited her to
desert Milton.^47
These chances of war meant that Mary had her own family with her when she
gave birth to her first child, named Anne for Mary’s mother and perhaps also for
Milton’s sister Anne. Milton’s Bible records the event: “My daughter Anne was
born July the 29 on the fast at eevning about half an houre after six 1646.”^48 Edward
Phillips describes the infant as “a brave girl,” which suggests that she did not at first
show signs of her lifelong lameness and defective speech.^49 His ambiguous com-
ment – “whether by ill Constitution, or want of Care, she grew more and more
decrepit” – may be simply a formula, or it may imply that her handicaps, if not
congenital, were caused or aggravated by some unspecified neglect – from inept
doctors? or Anne’s wet-nurse? or lack of attention to her needs?
Milton carried on with his school for a time, though his much-expanded family
brought profound changes to his quiet scholarly routine.^50 During his years of teach-
ing, Milton may have made good progress on a projected, though now lost, Latin
Thesaurus.^51 Also, he began and may have substantially completed two works of
pedagogy that were published decades later, with various revisions and additions.
As first conceived, the Accidence Commenc’t Grammar is Milton’s effort to produce a
new school grammar for the reformed commonwealth he expected to emerge from
the wars.^52 In Of Education (1644) Milton indicated that his system for teaching
Latin quickly and efficiently involved beginning with Lily’s grammar “or any bet-
ter,” referring perhaps to the text he was writing. It offers a replacement for the
grammar by William Lily and John Colet, mandated from 1540 on for use in the
schools in its usual two-part format: a Shorte Introduction in English, with a more
elaborate Brevissima Institutio in Latin.^53 Milton does not dispense with formal gram-
mar in favor of vocabulary and memorized phrases as in Comenius’s system, but
instead seeks to bring students through the grammatical preliminaries with dispatch
so they may quickly begin reading classical works. He takes about 60 percent of his
500 or so examples from Lily, and many of his innovations were anticipated in
other grammars, especially those that follow, as his does, the method of the French
Calvinist philosopher and educational reformer Petrus Ramus.^54 But he could fairly
claim that his grammar follows Ramus more closely than the others in his defini-
tions, brevity, and organization by dichotomous pairs; and that he brought several
innovations together in one text.^55 In place of Lily’s two-part volume of almost 200
pages, Milton produced one English volume of 65 pages. He defines grammar as
Ramus does, as the art of speaking or writing well; and he divides it as Ramus does,