The birth of this child may have been connected with the death of the mother in the same or the following month.

The household had apparently been peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was given her to understand.

She must have become considerably emancipated from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, much as one pities her probably wasted life, her disappearance from the scene, if tragic in her ignorance to the last of the destiny that might have been hers, is not unaccompanied with a sense of relief.

Great, nevertheless, must have been the blind poet's embarrassment as the father of three little daughters.

Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the evil yet to come.