Yet, before visiting any of the parties with inexorable condemnation, we should consider the strong probability that much of the misery grew out of an antecedent state of things, for which none of them were responsible.

The infant minds of two of the daughters, and the two chiefly named as undutiful, had been formed by their mother.

Mistress Milton cannot have greatly cherished her husband, and what she wanted in love must have been made up in fear.

She must have abhorred his principles and his writings, and probably gave free course to her feelings whenever she could have speech with a sympathizer, without caring whether the girls were within hearing.
Milton himself, we know, was cheerful in congenial society, but he were no poet if he had not been reserved with the uncongenial.

To them the silent, abstracted, often irritable, and finally sightless father would seem awful and forbidding.