He tells him how his sight began to fail about ten years before; how in the morning he felt his eyes shrinking from the effort to read anything; how the light of a candle appeared like a spectrum of various colours; how, little by little, darkness crept over the left eye; and objects beheld by the right seemed to waver to and fro; how this was accompanied by a kind of dizziness and heaviness which weighed upon him throughout the afternoon.

"Yet the darkness which is perpetually before me seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish, and such that, when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small chink, a certain little trifle of light." Elsewhere he says that his eyes are not disfigured: "Clear To outward view of blemish or of spot." These symptoms have been pronounced to resemble those of glaucoma.
Milton himself, in "Paradise Lost," hesitates between amaurosis ("drop serene") and cataract ("suffusion").

Nothing is said of his having been recommended to use glasses or other precautionary contrivances.
Cheselden was not yet, and the oculist's art was probably not well understood.

The sufferer himself, while not repining or despairing of medical assistance, evidently has little hope from it.

"Whatever ray of hope may be for me from your famous physician, all the same, as in a case quite incurable, I prepare and compose myself accordingly.