Ellwood, THOMAS, whose name will never be forgotten from its connection with Milton's, was born at Crowell in Oxfordshire in 1639. At twenty the influence of his friends the Penningtons converted him to Quakerism, from which neither his father's blows, nor confinement within his house, nor frequent imprisonments could cure him. In 1662 he made Milton's acquaintance, and soon visited him 'every day in the afternoon, excepting on the first day of the week, and sitting by [the poet] in his dining-room, read to him in such books in the Latin tongue as he pleased to hear me read.' Milton taught him to read
Latin in the foreign manner. The readings were interrupted six weeks later by Ellwood's illness; but again, in 1665, we find him hiring a cottage at Chalfont St Giles, where Milton might escape the plague then raging in London. One day Milton
Lamb's eulogy is well known. See the Life by Raymond (2 vols. 1845), and the article by Joseph Knight in Dict. Nat. Biog. (vol. xvii. 1889).