1655 and Aug.

1659; and Aubrey's earlier information (1680), originally derived from Phillips himself, is that _Paradise Lost_ was begun "about two years before the King came in," i.e.about May 1658.

This would fix the date somewhere in the two or three months immediately following the death-of Milton's second wife.

In such a matter exact certainty is unattainable; and it is enough to know for certain that the resumption of _Paradise Lost_ was an event of the latter part of Cromwell's Second Protectorate, and that some portion of the poem was actually written in the house in Petty France, Westminster, while Milton was in communication with Cromwell and writing letters for him.

In the rooms of that house, or in the garden that stretched from the house into St.James's Park across part of what is now the ground of Wellington Barracks, the subject of the epic first took distinct shape in Milton's mind, and here he began the great dictation.
Eighteen years had elapsed since Milton, just settled in London after his return from Italy, had first fastened on the subject, preferred it by a sure instinct to all the others that occurred in competition with it, and sketched four plans for its treatment in the form of a sacred tragedy, one with the precise title _Paradise Lost_, and another with the title _Adam Unparadised_ (Vol.II.pp.