14
“To Try, and Teach the Erring Soul”
1669–1674
The final years of Milton’s life were busy and productive. The comforts of home
and garden gave him pleasure, as did the attentive care of his wife Elizabeth, but he
continued to resent his “undutiful” daughters. He enjoyed the visits of friends old
and new, and taught an occasional student in return for their services in reading and
writing for him. He also suffered, by all accounts cheerfully, painful attacks of the
gout which increased in frequency and duration. During these years, in part to
realize additional income, he revised and prepared for the press several unpublished
works begun during his days as a private scholar and schoolmaster in the 1640s: a
grammar, an art of logic, and a History of Britain. All of these apparently innocuous
works allowed him to testify covertly against some norms of Restoration culture.
They also allowed him to continue an educative role, endeavoring to help the
English people develop the moral virtues and love of liberty that alone could enable
them – in God’s good time – to gain and sustain freedom in church and state. He
was cleaning out his desk drawers and turning that housekeeping to good account.
He also wrote two remarkable new poems that might be seen to complete the
program he projected for himself three decades earlier in the Reason of Church-
governement (1642) and that also seek to advance the moral and political education
of his countrymen: a brief epic, Paradise Regained, as a counterpart to his “diffuse
epic”; and a biblical tragedy, Samson Agonistes. He entered the polemic arena again
with Of True Religion, which again addressed his primary concern for many years,
religious toleration for Protestants, but now under the severely constraining condi-
tions of Restoration repression and censorship. He translated a document on the
election of a new King of Poland as a covert contribution to the escalating crisis
over the Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James II. And in the year of his death
he published the second edition of Paradise Lost, slightly revised and now in a twelve-
book format. This was not a time of standing and waiting but of continued political
engagement and magnificent poetic accomplishment.