Milton in the Restoration

Shakespeare died at fifty-two. At the same age Milton, as a poet, was reborn; and for fourteen years more his renewed but unreconstructed genius projected itself like a Gulf Stream through the incongruous currents of the Restoration. 1 According to Aubrey, 2 he began the writing of Paradise Lost “about two years before the king came in,” which would be shortly before Oliver Cromwell’s death in September, 1658. It is not likely, though, that much was put on paper before the final, and to Milton catastrophic, settlement of 1660. The early books are too much permeated with the sense of a dire foregone decision and with the need to justify the ways of God to men to have sprung out of the chequered hopes and fears, and the immediate political urgencies, of the closing years of the Commonwealth. Milton’s prose shows that at this time he was too intent upon the lost cause for which he was himself battling to have had much leisure for Satan’s, and a Restoration background seems clearly implied by the vivid lines about Belial in Book I: 3 In courts and palaces he also reigns, And in luxurious cities, where the noise Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers, And injury and outrage; and, when night Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.