The last part of Milton’s life is a picture of solitary grandeur
unequaled in literary history. With the Restoration all his
labors and sacrifices for humanity were apparently wasted. From
his retirement he could hear the bells and the shouts that
welcomed back a vicious monarch, whose first act was to set his
foot upon his people’s neck. Milton was immediately marked for
persecution; he remained for months in hiding; he was reduced to
poverty, and his books were burned by the public hangman. His
daughters, upon whom he depended in his blindness, rebelled at
the task of reading to him and recording his thoughts. In the
midst of all these sorrows we understand, in Samson, the cry of
the blind champion of Israel:
Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, quelled,
To what can I be useful? Wherein serve
My nation, and the work from heaven imposed?
But to sit idle on the household hearth,
A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze,
Or pitied object.
--WILLIAM J. LONG, “English Literature.”
(1204)