The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 7. His later years
As to residences, he moved from place to place, till he settled in Artillery row on the way to Bunhill fields, where he lived for the last twelve years of his life. His dress, hours, ways of occupying his sightless day, diet, partiality for tobacco and abstinence from total abstinence as regards wine, have been recorded with the strenuous inertia of persons such as Aubrey and Phillips. Like other people, he left London in the plague year, going to his old county of Bucks, but to Chalfont St. Giles, not Horton. He had no lack of friends and visitors—Marvell; the quaker Ellwood, who flattered himself that he had suggested Paradise Regained; Dryden, of whom he seems to have spoken with his usual disdainfulness, but who always spoke nobly of him. Nor does he seem ever to have quarrelled with his brother, or with his nephews, however much their principles differed from his own. In 1669, any domestic dissensions which may have prevailed were terminated by the daughters’ going out to apprenticeship or superior service. But, in his later years, he suffered more and more from gout, and he died of it on 8 November, 1674. He was buried in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, the resting place of his father.
His widow died at Nantwich in 1727, more than half a century after Milton. Her youngest step-daughter, Deborah, died in the same year. She had married a silk-weaver, Abraham Clarke, and had many children, of whom two lived, and themselves left issue. So far as is known, the last direct descendant of Milton was Elizabeth Foster or Clarke, Deborah’s youngest daughter, who died in 1754, and whose seven children had all died young. Anne Milton, the poet’s eldest daughter, had married, but died in childbirth. Mary, the second, died unmarried within the seventeenth century. His brother, Sir Christopher, did not continue the name beyond another generation; but there are living representatives of the family on the female side, deriving from the elder Anne Milton, the poet’s sister, especially by her second marriage with a man named Agar.