Note 147 — Chapter XIX
Reading edition
A Miss Davies. "The father (says Hayley) seems to have been a convert to Milton's arguments; but the lady had scruples. She possessed (according to Philips) both wit and beauty. A novelist could hardly imagine circumstances more singularly distressing to sensibility than the situation of the poet, if, as we may reasonably conjecture, he was deeply enamoured of this lady; if her father was inclined to accept him as a son-in-law, and the object of his love had no inclination to reject his suit, but what arose from a dread of his being indissolubly mated to another."—Life of Milton, p. 90.