He continued to serve under Richard, writing eleven letters between September, 1658, and February, 1659.

With two letters for the restored Parliament after Richard's abdication, written in May, 1659, Milton, though his formal supersession was yet to come, virtually bade adieu to the Civil Service:-- "God doth not need Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best: His state Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait." The principal domestic events in Milton's life, meanwhile, had been his marriage with Katherine, daughter of an unidentified Captain Woodcock, in November, 1656; and the successive loss of her and an infant daughter in February and March, 1658.

It is probable that Milton literally never saw his wife, whose worth and the consequent happiness of the fifteen months of their too brief union, are sufficiently attested by his sonnet on the dream in which he fancied her restored to him, with the striking conclusion, "Day brought back my night." Of his daughters at the time, much may be conjectured, but nothing is known; his nephews, whose education had cost him such anxious care, though not undutiful in their personal relations with him, were sources of uneasiness from their own misadventures, and might have been even more so as sinister omens of the ways in which the rising generation was to walk.

The fruits of their bringing up upon the egregious Lucretius and Manilius were apparently "Satyr against Hypocrites," _i.e._, Puritans; "Mysteries of Love and Eloquence;" "Sportive Wit or Muses' Merriment," which last brought the Council down upon John Phillips as a propagator of immorality.

In his nephews Milton might have seen, though we may be sure he did not see, how fatally the austerity of the Commonwealth had alienated those who would soon determine whether the Commonwealth should exist.