England, too, in the same year, had lost the loyal Marquess of Worcester and the virtuous Earl of Southampton, neither of whom could she well spare at such a period; on the other hand, the country was receiving a noble addition to her literature by the publication of "Paradise Lost;" but this, few at the time, cared to read, as the work of "that Milton who wrote for the regicides,"[1]—"that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem,"[2] or chose to understand, from the seriousness of the subject, or the grandeur of its treatment.
At the Court, where undisguised libertinism was still triumphant, the burning of the city began to be talked of as an old story, like that of the burning of Troy, and the disgrace at Chatham as something to be obliterated by the disgrace of the Lord Chancellor. Indeed there was no feeling of fear, or any sentiment of deserved dishonour, maintained at Court. On the very day on which the Great Seal was taken from Clarendon, and his ruin effected, the Countess of Castlemaine, one of the leading instruments of his fall, was admiring the rope-dancing of Jacob Hall, and laughing at the drolls and odd animals exhibited to the citizens at Bartholomew Fair!
