“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674of portrait engravings includes Queen Henrietta Maria, Cromwell in armor, Fairfax,
Gabriel Harvey, Hobbes, Lady Castlemaine, Prince Rupert, and other notables.^31
He claimed that the etching was made from life, that is, from a drawing he made of
Milton sometime that year.^32 Milton’s wife Elizabeth Minshull was as dissatisfied
with the Faithorne engraving as she was with the other frontispiece portraits, telling
Aubrey that “the Pictures before his bookes are not at all like him” (EL 3); she may
have thought the sober, unsmiling countenance too severe for a man generally
described to be of “a very cheerfull humour” and “Extreme pleasant in his conver-
sation, & at dinner” (EL 5–6). But Milton’s daughter Deborah (Clarke), many years
later, confirmed to the engraver George Virtue that copies made from the Faithorne
engraving did resemble Milton as she remembered him.^33 Milton evidently sat for
Faithorne sometime in 1670, and his engraving is the best record we have of his
appearance in the last years of his life.
Milton’s History attracted some immediate attention from the learned. In a letter
to Anthony à Wood (November 10, 1670), Thomas Blount commented that it had
the reputation of stringing old authors together, and “not abstainyng from som
lashes at the ignorance or I know not what of those times.”^34 In late December,
John Beale had learned of the History but not seen it.^35 Two weeks later he was
immersed in it, writing to Evelyn (January 9, 1671) that he greatly approved of its
moral lessons:
Since I wrote, I have read much of Miltons History. Tis Elegant, chosen with judg-
ment out of best Authors; And wee needed all, & more than all that I have yet seen of
his sharpe checks & sowre Instructions. For wee must be a lost People, if wee be not
speedily reclaim’d.^36There is some evidence that Milton began revisions for a new edition, probably
hoping to include the censored material and the Digression, but that edition did not
materialize.^37 For reasons that are not clear, within two years rights to reissue the
work passed to as many as five booksellers.^38
As Milton was taking satisfaction from the publication of two splendid new po-
ems and the History, he may have learned of Pierre Du Moulin’s collection of
poems, Parerga (probably published in November, 1670), which made public his
authorship of Clamor and also reprinted his satiric poem from that treatise, “To the
beastly blackguard John Milton, Parricide and Advocate of Parricides,” in which he
declines a duel with the “foul and loathsome” Milton but hands him over to an
executioner to be lashed and cudgeled until his body is a mosaic of stripes.^39 In a
Latin epistle he takes pride in his virulence: “I had not spared the goads, and had
not considered any vehemence too strong, by which so criminal and horrible mad-
ness might be reviled.” He also sneers at Milton with telling effect for reviling
Alexander More in his Defensio Secunda when he should have known More was not
the author: