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 EDITED BY JOHN MOELEY 
 
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 MILTON 
 
 BY 
 
 MARK PATTISON, B.D. 
 
 EECTOB OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFOKD 
 
 govtbtm : 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1880 
 
 The Right of Tronslatiun and Reproductioti is Reserved.
 
 SEVENTH THOUSAND.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 FIRST PERIOD. 1608—1639. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Family— School— College 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Residence at Horton — L'allegko — II Penseroso— Ar- 
 cades— Comus — Lycidas 12 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Journey to Italy 32 
 
 SECOND PERIOD. 1640-1660. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Educational Theory — Teaching 43 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Marriage and Pamphlet on Divorce .... 50 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Pamphlets 64 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 Biographical. 1640-1649 85
 
 vi CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TriE Latin Secretaryship 93 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Milton and Salmasius — Blindness 105 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Milton and Morus — The Second Defence — TnE Defence 
 
 for himself 112 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Latin Secretaryship comes to an end — Milton's Friends 119 
 
 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0 — 1G74. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 BiooRAPnicAL— Literary Occupation — Religious Opinions 140 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 Paradise Lost— Paradise Regained— Samson Agonistes . 165
 
 MILTON
 
 MILTON. 
 
 FIRST PERIOD. 1608—1639. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FAMILY — SCHOOL — COLLEGE. 
 
 In the seventeenth century it was not the custom to pub- 
 lish two volumes upon every man or woman whose name 
 had appeared on a title-page. Nor, where lives of authors 
 were written, were they written with the redundancy of 
 particulars which is now allowed. Especially are the lives 
 of the poets and dramatists obscure and meagrely recorded. 
 Of Milton, however, we know more personal details than 
 of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, the 
 poet's nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and 
 lived in habits of intercourse with him to the last, wrote 
 a life, brief, inexact, superficial, but valuable from the 
 nearness of the writer to the subject of his memoir. A 
 cotemporary of Milton, John Aubrey (b. 1625), "a very 
 honest man, and accurate in his accounts of matters of 
 fact," as Toland says of him, made it his business to learn 
 all he could about Milton's habits. Aubrey was himself 
 
 B
 
 2 FIRST PERIOD. 1608—1639. [ciWP. 
 
 acquainted with Milton, and diligently catechised the 
 poet's widow, his brother, and his nephew, scrupulously 
 writing down each detail as it came to him, in the minutes 
 of lives which he supplied to Antony Wood to be worked 
 up in his Athence and Fasti. Aubrey was only an anti- 
 quarian collector, and was mainly dependent on what 
 could be learned from the family. None of Milton's 
 family, and least of all Edward Phillips, were of a capacity 
 to apprehend moral or mental qualities, and they could 
 only tell Aubrey of his goings out and his comings in, of 
 the clothes he wore, the dates of events, the names of his 
 acquaintance. In compensation for the want of observa- 
 tion on the part of his own kith and kin, Milton himself, 
 with a superb and ingenuous egotism, has revealed the 
 secret of his thoughts and feelings in numerous autobio- 
 graphical passages of his prose writings. From what he 
 directly communicates, and from what he unconsciously 
 betrays, we obtain an internal life of the mind, more 
 ample than that external life of the bodily machine, 
 which we owe to Aubrey and Phillips. 
 
 In our own generation all that printed books or writ- 
 ten documents have preserved about Milton has been 
 laboriously brought together by Professor David Masson, 
 in whose Life of Milton Ave have the most exhaustive bio- 
 graphy that ever was compiled of any Englishman. It is 
 a noble and final monument erected to the poet's memory, 
 two centuries after his death. My excuse for attempting 
 to write of Milton after Mr. Masson is that his life is in six 
 volumes octavo, with a total of some four to five thousand 
 ] ;es. The present outline is written for a different class 
 of readers, those, namely, who cannot afford to know 
 nunc of Milton than can he told in some two hundred 
 and fifty pages.
 
 i.] BIRTH. 3 
 
 A family of Miltons, deriving the name in all probability 
 from the parish of Great Milton near Thame, is found in 
 various branches spread over Oxfordshire and the adjoin- 
 ing counties in the reign of Elisabeth. The poet's grand- 
 father was a substantial yeoman, living at Stanton St. John, 
 about five miles from Oxford, within the forest of Shot- 
 over, of which he was also an under-ranger. The ranger's 
 son John was at school in Oxford, possibly as a chorister, 
 conformed to the Established Church, and was in conse- 
 quence cast off by his father, who adhered to the old faith. 
 The disinherited son went up to London, and by the 
 assistance of a friend was set up in business as a scrivener. 
 A scrivener discharged some of the functions which, at 
 the present day, are undertaken for us in a solicitor's 
 office. John Milton the father, being a man of probity 
 and force of character, was soon on the way to acquire 
 "a plentiful fortune." But he continued to live over his 
 shop, which was in Bread Street, Cheapside, and which 
 bore the sign of the Spread Eagle, the family crest. 
 
 It was at the Spread Eagle that his eldest son, John 
 Milton, was born, 9th December, 1608, being thus 
 exactly cotemporary with Lord Clarendon, who also 
 died in the same year as the poet. Milton must be 
 added to the long roll of our poets who have been 
 natives of the city which now never sees sunlight or 
 blue sky, along with Chaucer, Spenser, Herrick, Cowley, 
 Shirley, Ben Jonson, Pope, Gray, Keats. Besides attend- 
 ing as a clay-scb olar at St. Paul's School, which was 
 close at hand, his father engaged for him a private tutor 
 at home. The household of the Spread Eagle not only 
 enjoyed civic prosperity, but some share of that liberal 
 cultivation, which, if not imbibed in the home, neither 
 school nor college ever confers. The scrivener was not 
 
 B 2
 
 4 FIRST PERIOD. 160S— 1639. [chai\ 
 
 only an amateur in music, but a composer, whose tunes, 
 songs, and airs found their way into the best collections 
 of music. Both schoolmaster and tutor were men of 
 mark. The high master of St. Paul's at that time 
 was Alexander Gill, an M.A. of Corpus Christi College, 
 Oxford, who was " esteemed to have such an excellent 
 way of training up youth, that none in his time went 
 beyond it." The private tutor was Thomas Young, who 
 was, or had been, curate to Mr. Gataker, of Eotherhithe, 
 itself a certificate of merit, even if we had not the pupil's 
 emphatic testimony of gratitude. Milton's fourth elegy 
 is addressed to Young, when, in 1627, he was settled at 
 Hamburg, crediting him with having first infused into his 
 pupil a taste for classic literature and poetry. Biographers 
 have derived Milton's Presbyterianism in 1641 from the 
 lessons twenty years before of this Thomas Young, a 
 Scotchman, and one of the authors of the Smectymnuus. 
 This, however, is a misreading of Milton's mind— a mind 
 which was an organic whole — "whose seed was in itself," 
 self-determined ; not one whose opinions can be accounted 
 for by contagion or casual impact. 
 
 Of Milton's boyish exercises two have beon preserved. 
 They are English paraphrases of two of the Davidic 
 Psalms, and were done at the age of fifteen. That they 
 were thought by himself worth printing in the same 
 volume with Comus, is the most noteworthy thing about 
 them. No words are so commonplace but that they can 
 be made to yield inference by a biographer. And even 
 in these school exercises we think we can discern that 
 the future poet was already a diligent reader of Sylvester's 
 Du Bartas (1605), the patriarch of Protestant poetry, 
 and of Fairfax's Tasso (1600). There are other indi- 
 cations that, from very early years, poetry had assumed
 
 r.] BOYITOOD AND YOUTH. 5 
 
 a place in Milton's mind, not merely as a juvenile pastime, 
 but as an occupation of serious import. 
 
 Young Gill, son of the high master, a school-fellow of 
 Milton, went up to Trinity, Oxford, where he got into 
 trouble by being informed against by Chillingworth, who 
 reported incautious political speeches of Gill to his 
 godfather, Laud. With Gill Milton corresponded; they 
 exchanged their verses, Greek, Latin, and English, with 
 a confession on Milton's part that he prefers English and 
 Latin composition to Greek ; that to write Greek verses 
 in this age is to sing to the deaf. Gill, Milton finds " a 
 severe critic of poetry, however disposed to be lenient to 
 his friend's attempts." 
 
 If Milton's genius did not announce itself in his para- 
 phrases of Psalms, it did in his impetuosity in learning, 
 " which I seized with such eagerness that from the 
 twelfth year of my age, I scarce ever went to bed before 
 midnight." Such is his own account. And it is worth 
 notice that we have here an incidental test of the trust- 
 worthiness of Aubrey's reminiscences. Aubrey's words 
 are, "When he was very young he studied very hard, 
 and sate up verj r late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock 
 at night ; and his father ordered the maid to sit up for 
 him." 
 
 He was ready for college at sixteen, not earlier than 
 the usual age at that period. As his schoolmasters, both 
 the Gills, were Oxford men (Young was of St. Andrew's), 
 it might have been expected that the young scholar would 
 nave been placed at Oxford. However, it was determined 
 that he should go to Cambridge, where he was admitted a 
 pensioner of Christ's, 12th February, 1625, and com- 
 menced residence in the Easter term ensuing. Perhaps 
 his father feared the growing High Church, or, as it was
 
 G FIRST PERIOD. 1C08— 1G39. [chap. 
 
 then called, Arniinianism, of Lis own university. It so 
 happened, however, that the tutor to whom the young 
 Milton was consigned was specially noted for Arminian 
 proclivities. This was William Chappell, then Fellow of 
 Christ's, who so recommended himself to Laud by his party 
 zeal, that he was advanced to he Provost of Dublin and 
 Bishop of Cork. 
 
 Milton was one of those pupils who are more likely 
 to react against a tutor than to take a ply from him. 
 A preaching divine — Chappell composed a treatise on 
 the art of preaching — a narrow ecclesiastic of the type 
 loved by Laud, was exactly the man who would drive 
 Milton into opposition. But the tutor of the seventeenth 
 century was not able, like the easy-going tutor of the 
 eighteenth, to leave the young rebel to pursue the reading 
 of his choice in his own chamber. Chappell endeavoured 
 to drive his pupil along the scholastic highway of exercises. 
 Milton, returning to Cambridge after his summer vacation, 
 eager for the acquisition of wisdom, complains that he 
 " was dragged from his studies, and compelled to employ 
 himself in composing some frivolous declamation ! " In- 
 docile, as he confesses himself (indocilisque astas prava 
 magistra fuit), ho kicked against either the discipline or 
 the exercises exacted by college rules. He was punished. 
 Aubrey had heard that he was flogged, a thing not im- 
 possible in itself, as the Admonition Book of Emanuel 
 gives an instance of corporal chastisement as late as 1667. 
 Aubrey's statement, however, is a dubitative interlineation 
 in his MS., and Milton's age, seventeen, as well as the 
 silence of his later detractors, who raked up everything 
 which could be told to his disadvantage, concur to make 
 us hesitate to accept a fact on so slender evidence. Any- 
 how, Milton was sent away from college for a time, in the
 
 r.J AT CAMBRIDGE. 7 
 
 year 1G27, in consequence of something unpleasant which 
 had occurred. That it was something of which he was 
 not ashamed is clear, from his alluding to it himself in 
 the lines written at the time, — 
 
 Nee duri libet usque minas perferre magistri 
 CEeteraque ingenio non subeunda meo. 
 
 And that the tutor was not considered to have been 
 wholly free from blame is evident from the fact that the 
 master transferred Milton from Chappcll to another tutor, 
 a very unusual proceeding. Whatever the nature of the 
 punishment, it was not what is known as rustication ; 
 for Mdton did not lose a term, taking his two degrees of 
 B.A. and M.A. in regular course, at the earliest date 
 from his matriculation permitted by the statutes. The 
 one outbreak of juvenile petulance and indiscipline over, 
 Milton's force of character and unusual attainments ac- 
 quired him the esteem of his seniors. The nickname of 
 " the lady of Christ's" given him in derision by his fellow- 
 students, is an attestation of virtuous conduct. Ten 
 years later, in 1642, Milton takes an opportunity to 
 "acknowledge publicly, with all grateful mind, that more 
 than ordinary respect which I found, above many of my 
 equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, 
 the Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years ; 
 who, at my parting after I had taken two degrees, as the 
 manner is, signified many ways how much better it would 
 content them that I would stay ; as by many letters full 
 of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and 
 long after, I was assured of their singular good affection 
 towards me." 
 
 The words " how much better it would content them 
 that I would stay " have been thought to hint at the
 
 8 FIRST PERIOD. 160S— 1639. [chap. 
 
 ■i' of a fellowship at Christ's. It is highly improbable 
 that such an offer was ever made. There had been two 
 vacancies in the roll of fellows since Milton had become 
 eligible by taking his B.A. degree, and he had been 
 passed over in favour of juniors. It is possible that 
 Milton was not statutably eligible, for, by the statutes of 
 Christ's, there could not be, at one time, more than two 
 fellows who were natives of the same county. Edward 
 King, who was Milton's junior, was put in, not by college 
 election, but by royal mandate. And in universities 
 generally, it is not literature or general acquirements 
 which recommend a candidate for endowed posts, but 
 technical skill in the prescribed exercises, and a pedagogic 
 intention. 
 
 Further than this, had a fellowship in his college been 
 attainable, it would not have had much attraction for 
 Milton. A fellowship implied two things, residence in 
 college, with teaching, and orders in the church. With 
 neither of these two conditions was Milton prepared to 
 comply. In 1632, when he proceeded to his M.A. degree, 
 Milton was twenty-four, he had been seven years in 
 college, and had therefore sufficient experience what 
 college life was like. He who was so impatient of the 
 "turba legentum prava" in the Bodleian library, could 
 not have patiently consorted with the vulgar-minded and 
 illiterate ecclesiastics, who peopled the colleges of that 
 day. Even Merle,, though the author of Claris Apo- 
 ,.ihjiiira was steeped in the soulless clericalism of his 
 age, could not support his brother-fellows without fre- 
 quent retirements to Balsham, " being not willing to be 
 joined with such company." To be dependent upon 
 Bainbrigge's (the Master of Christ's) good pleasure for a 
 supply of pupils; to have to live in daily' intercourse
 
 i.] AT CAMBRIDGE. 9 
 
 with tlie Powers and the Chappells, such as we know 
 them from Mede's letters, was an existence to which 
 oidy the want of daily bread could have driven Milton. 
 Happily his father's circumstances were not such as to 
 make a fellowship pecuniarily an object to the son. If he 
 longed for " the studious cloister's pale," he had been, now 
 for seven years, near enough to college life to have dis- 
 pelled the dream that it was a life of lettered leisure and 
 philosophic retirement. It was just about Milton's time 
 that the college tutor finally supplanted the university 
 professor, a system which implied the substitution of 
 excercises performed by the pupil for instruction given 
 by the teacher. Whatever advantages this system 
 brought with it, it brought inevitably the degradation of 
 the teacher, who was thus dispensed from knowledge, 
 having only to attend to form. The time of the college 
 tutor was engrossed by the details of scholastic super- 
 intendence, and the frivolous worry of academical busi 
 ness. Admissions, matriculations, disputations, declama 
 tions, the formalities of degrees, public reception of royal 
 and noble visitors, filled every hour of his day, and left 
 no time, even if he had had the taste, for private study. 
 To teaching, as we shall see, Milton was far from averse. 
 But then it must be teaching as he understood it, a teach- 
 ing which should expand the intellect and raise the cha- 
 racter, not dexterity in playing with the verbal formulae 
 of the disputations of the schools. 
 
 Such an occupation could have no attractions for one 
 who was even now meditating II Penseroso (composed 
 1633). At twenty he had already confided to his school- 
 fellow, the younger Gill, the secret of his discontent 
 with the Cambridge tone. " Here among us," he writes 
 from college, " are barely one or two who do not flutter
 
 10 FIRST PERIOD. 160S— 1639. [chap. 
 
 off, all unfledged, into theology, having gotten of philology 
 or of philosophy scarce so much as a smattering. And 
 for theology they are content with just what is enough 
 to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon." He re- 
 tained the same feeling towards his Alma Mater in 1641, 
 when he wrote (Eeason of Church Government), " Cam- 
 bridge, which as in the time of her better health, and 
 mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, 
 so now much less . . . ." 
 
 On a review of all these indications of feeling, I should 
 conclude that Milton never had serious thoughts of a 
 college fellowship, and that his antipathy arose from a 
 sense of his own incompatibility of temper with academic 
 life, and was not, like Phineas Fletcher's, the result of 
 disappointed hopes, and a sense of injury for having 
 been refused a fellowship at King's. One consideration 
 which remains to be mentioned would alone be de- 
 cisive in favour of this view. A fellowship required 
 orders. Milton had been intended for the church, and 
 had been sent to college with that view. By the 
 time he left Cambridge, at twenty-four, it had become 
 clear, both to himself and his family, that he could 
 never submit his understanding to the trammels of church 
 formularies. His later mind, about 1641, is expressed 
 by himself in his own forcible style, — "The church, to 
 whose service by the intention of my parents and friends 
 I was destined of a child, and in mine own resolutions, 
 till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving 
 wli;it tyranny had invaded in the church, that he who 
 would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oatli 
 withal. ... I thought it better to prefer a blameless 
 silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and 
 begun with servitude and forswearing." When he took
 
 i.] AT CAMBRIDGE. 11 
 
 leave of the university, in 1G32, he had perhaps not 
 developed this distinct antipathy to the establishment. 
 For in a letter, preserved in Trinity College, and written 
 in the winter of 1631-32, he does not put forward any 
 conscientious objections to the clerical profession, but 
 only apologises to the friend to whom the letter is 
 addressed, for delay in making choice of some profession. 
 The delay itself sprung from an unconscious distaste. In 
 a mind of the consistent texture of Milton's, motives are 
 secretly influential before they emerge in consciousness. 
 Wo shall not be wrong in asserting that when he left 
 Cambridge in 1G32, it was already impossible, in the 
 nature of things, that he should have taken orders in the 
 Church of England, or a fellowship of which orders were 
 a condition.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 RESIDENCE AT UORTON — L'ALLEGRO — IL PENSEROSO — AR- 
 CADES — COMUS — LYCIDAS. 
 
 Milton had been sent to college to qualify for a profession. 
 The church, the first intended, he had gradually dis- 
 covered to be incompatible. Of the law, either his 
 father's branch, or some other, he seems to have enter- 
 tained a thought, but to have speedily dismissed it. So 
 at the age of twenty-four he returned to his father's house, 
 bringing nothing with him but his education and a silent 
 purpose. The elder Milton had now retired from busi- 
 ness, with sufficient means but not with wealth. Though 
 John was the eldest son, there were two other children, 
 a brother, Christopher, and a sister, Anne. To have no 
 profession, even a nominal one, to be above trade and 
 below the status of scprire or yeoman, and to come home 
 with the avowed object of leading an idle life, was 
 conduct which required justification. Milton felt it to be 
 so. In a letter addressed, in 1G32, to some senior friend 
 at Cambridge, name unknown, he thanks him for being 
 " a good watchman to admonish that the hours of the night 
 pass on, for so I call my life as yet obscure and unser- 
 viceable to mankind, and that the day with me is at hand,
 
 en. ir.] RESIDENCE AT HORTON. 13 
 
 wherein Christ commands all to labour." Milton has no 
 misgivings. He knows that what he is doing with him- 
 self is the best he can do. His aim is far above bread- 
 winning, and therefore his probation must be long. He 
 destines for himself no indolent tarrying in the garden of 
 Armida. His is a "mind made and set wholly on the 
 accomplishment of greatest things." He knows that the 
 looker-on will hardly accept his apology for " being late," 
 that it is in order to being " more fit." Yet it is the only 
 apology he can offer. And he is dissatisfied with his own 
 progress. " I am something suspicious of myself, and do 
 take notice of a certain belatedness in me." 
 
 Of this frame of mind the record is the second sonnet, 
 lines which are an inseparable part of Milton's biography — 
 
 How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 
 
 Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! 
 My hasting days fly on with full career, 
 
 But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. 
 
 Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 
 That I to manhood am arrived so near, 
 And inward ripeness doth much less appear, 
 
 That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. 
 
 Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, 
 
 It shall be still in strictest measure even 
 To that same lot, however mean or high, 
 
 Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. 
 All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
 As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye. 
 
 With aspirations thus vast, though unformed, with 
 " amplitude of mind to greatest deeds," Milton retired to 
 his father's house in the country. Five more years of 
 self-education, added to the seven years of academical 
 residence, w r ere not too much for the meditation of pro- 
 jects such as Milton was already conceiving. Years many
 
 li FIRST TEHIOD. 1C0S-1G39. [chap. 
 
 more than twelve, filled with great events and distracting 
 interests, were to pass over before the body and shape of 
 Paradise Lost was given to these imaginings. 
 
 The country retirement in which the elder Milton had 
 fixed himself was the little village of Horton, situated in 
 that southernmost angle of the county of Buckingham, 
 winch insinuates itself between Berks and Middlesex. 
 Though London was outy about seventeen miles distant, 
 it was the London of Charles I., with its population of 
 .some 300,000 only; before coaches and macadamised 
 roads; while the Colne, which flows through the village, 
 wis still a river, and not the kennel of a paper-mill. 
 There was no lack of water and wood, meadow and pas- 
 ture, closes and open field, with the regal towers of 
 Windsor "bosorn'd high in tufted trees," to crown the 
 landscape. Unbroken leisure, solitude, tranquillity of 
 mind, surrounded by the thickets and woods, which Pliny 
 thought indispensable to poetical meditation (Epist. 9. 10), 
 no poet's career was ever commenced under mure favour- 
 able auspices. The youth of Milton stands in strong 
 contrast with the misery, turmoil, chance medley, struggle 
 with poverty, or abandonment to dissipation, which 
 blighted the early years of so many of our men of letters. 
 
 Milton's life is a drama in three acts. The first dis- 
 covers him in the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, 
 of which L'Allegro, II Penseroso, and l/ycidas are the 
 expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul 
 and heated atmosphere of party passion and religious 
 hate, generating the lurid tires which glare in the bat- 
 tailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great 
 poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and iS"/i>.^nn 
 Agonistes, an; the utterance of his final period of solitary 
 and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friend-
 
 ii.] RESIDENCE AT HORTON. 15 
 
 less, he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judg- 
 ment to come, alone before a fallen world. 
 
 In this delicious retirement of Horton, in alternate 
 communing with nature and with books, for five years of 
 persevering study he laid in a stock, not of learning, but 
 of what is far above learning, of wide and accurate know- 
 ledge. Of the man whose profession is learning, it is 
 characteristic that knowledge is its own end, and research 
 its own reward. To MUton all knowledge, all life, virtue 
 itself, was already only a means to a further end. He will 
 know only " that which is of use to know," and by useful, 
 he meant that which conduced to form him for his vocation 
 of poet. 
 
 From a very early period Milton had taken poetry to 
 be his vocation, in the most solemn and earnest mood. 
 The idea of this devotion was the shaping idea of his life. 
 It was, indeed, a bent of nature, with roots drawing 
 from deeper strata of character than any act of reasoned 
 will, which kept him out of the professions, and now fixed 
 him, a seeming idler, but really hard at work, in his 
 father's house at Horton. The intimation which he had 
 given of his purpose in the sonnet above quoted had be- 
 come, in 1611, "an inward prompting which grows daily 
 upon me, that by labour and intent study, which I take to 
 be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propen- 
 sity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written 
 to after times, as they should not willingly let it die." 
 
 "What the ultimate form of his poetic utterance shall be, 
 he is in no hurry to decide. He will be " long choosing," 
 and quite content to be " beginning late." All his care 
 at present is to qualify himself for the lofty function to 
 which he aspires. No lawyer, physician, statesman, ever 
 laboured to fit himself for his profession harder than
 
 16 FIRST PERIOD. 1G08— 1639. [chap. 
 
 Milton strove to qualify himself for Lis vocation of poet. 
 Verse-making is, to the wits, a game of ingenuity ; to 
 Milton, it is a prophetic office, towards which, the will 
 of heaven leads him. The creation he contemplates will 
 not flow from him as the stanzas of the Gerusalemme did 
 from Tasso at twenty-one. Before he can make a poem, 
 Milton will make himself. "I was confirmed in this 
 opinion, that he who would not he frustrated of his hope 
 to write well hereafter in laudable things oucrht himself to 
 he a true poem .... not presuming to sing high praises 
 of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself 
 the experience and practice of all that which is praise- 
 worthy." 
 
 Of the spontaneity, the abandon, which are supposed 
 to he characteristic of the poetical nature, there is nothing 
 here ; all is moral purpose, precision, self-dedication. So 
 he acquires all knowledge, not for knowledge' sake, from 
 the instinct of learning, the necessity for completeness, 
 hut because he is to be a poet. Nor will he only have 
 knowledge, he will have wisdom ; moral development shall 
 go hand in hand with intellectual. A poet's soul should 
 " contain of good, wise, just, the perfect shape." He will 
 cherish continually a pure mind in a pure body. " I 
 argued to myself that, if unchastity in a woman, whom 
 St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and 
 dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the 
 image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not 
 so thought, be much more deflouring and dishonourable." 
 There is yet a third constituent of the poetical nature ; to 
 knowledge and to virtue must be added religion. For it 
 is from God that the poet's thoughts come. "This is 
 not to be obtained but by devout prayer to that Eternal 
 Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,
 
 II.] RESIDENCE AT HORTON. 17 
 
 and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of 
 his altar, to touch and purify the life of whom he 
 pleases. To this must be added industrious and select 
 reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly 
 and generous acts and affairs ; till which in some measure 
 be compast, I refuse not to sustain this expectation." 
 Before the piety of this vow, Dr. Johnson's morosity 
 yields for a moment, and he is forced to exclaim, " From 
 a promise like this, at once fervid, pious, and rational, 
 might be expected the Paradise Lost." 
 
 Of these years of self-cultivation, of conscious moral 
 architecture, such as Plato enacted for his ideal State, but 
 none but Milton ever had the courage to practise, the 
 biographer would gladly give a minute account. But the 
 means of doing so are wanting. The poet kept no diary 
 of his reading, such as some great students, e. g. Isaac 
 Casaubon, have left. JSTor could such a record, had it 
 been attempted, have shown us the secret process by 
 which the scholar's dead learning was transmuted in 
 Milton's mind into living imagery. " Many studious and 
 contemplative years, altogether spent in the search of re- 
 ligious and civil knowledge " is his own description of the 
 period. " You make many inquiries as to what I am 
 about;" he writes to Diodati — "what am I thinking of? 
 Why, with God's help, of immortality ! Forgive the 
 word, I only whisper it in your ear ! Yes, I am pluming 
 my wings for a flight." This was in 1637, at the end of 
 five years of the Horton probation. The poems, whicb, 
 rightly read, are strewn with autobiographical hints, are 
 not silent as to the intention of this period. In Paradise 
 Regained (i. 196), Milton reveals himself. And in 
 Comns, written at Horton, the lines 375 and following 
 are charged with the same sentiment, — 
 

 
 18 FIRST PERIOD. 1C0S-1G39. [chap. 
 
 And wisdom's self 
 Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, 
 "Where, with her best nurse, contemplation, 
 She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings, 
 That in the various bustle of resort 
 Were all-to ruffled and sometimes impair'd. 
 
 That at Horton Milton "read all the Greek and Latin 
 writers " is one of Johnson's careless versions of Milton's 
 own words, " enjoyed a complete holiday in turning over 
 Latin and Greek authors." Milton read, not as a pro- 
 fessional philologian, but as a poet and scholar, and always 
 in the light of his secret purpose. It was not in his way 
 to sit down to read over all the Greek and Latin writers, 
 as Casaubon or Salmasius might do. Milton read with 
 selection, and " meditated," says Aubrey, what he read. 
 His practice conformed to the principle he has himself 
 laid down in the often-quoted lines {Paradise Regained, 
 
 iv. 322)— 
 
 Who reads 
 
 Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
 
 A spirit and judgment equal or superior, 
 
 Uncertain and unsettled still remains, 
 
 Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself. 
 
 Some of Milton's Greek books have been traced ; his 
 Aratus, Lycophron, Euripides (the Stephanus of 1602), 
 and his Pindar (the Benedictus of 1G20), are still extant, 
 with marginal memoranda, which should seem to evince 
 careful and discerning reading. One critic even thought 
 it worth while to accuse Joshua Barnes of silently appro- 
 priating conjectural emendations from Milton's Euripides. 
 But Milton's own poems are the best evidence of his 
 familiarity with all that is most choice in the remains of 
 classic poetry. Though the commentators are accused of 
 often seeing an imitation where there is none, no com-
 
 II.] RESIDENCE AT HORTON. 19 
 
 mentary can point out the ever-present infusion of clas- 
 sical flavour, which bespeaks intimate converse far more 
 than direct adaptation. Milton's classical allusions, says 
 Hartley Coleridge, are amalgamated and consubstantiated 
 with his native thought. 
 
 A commonplace book of Milton's, after having lurked 
 unsuspected for 200 years in the archives of Netherby, 
 has been disinterred in our own day (1874). It appears 
 to belong partly to the end of the Horton period. It is 
 not by any means an account of all that he is reading, 
 but only an arrangement, under certain heads, or places 
 of memoranda for future use. These notes are extracted 
 from about eighty different authors, Greek, Latin, French, 
 Italian, and English. Of Greek authors no less than 
 sixteen are quoted. The notes are mostly notes of his- 
 torical facts, seldom of thoughts, never of mere verbal 
 expression. There is no trace in it of any intention to 
 store up either the imagery or the language of poetry. It 
 may be that such notes were made and entered in another 
 volume ; for the book thus accidentally preserved to us 
 seems to refer to other similar volumes of collections. 
 But it is more likely that no such poetical memoranda 
 were ever made, and that Milton trusted entirely to 
 memory for the wealth of classical allusion with which 
 his verse is surcharged. He did not extract from the 
 poets and the great writers whom he was daily turning 
 over, but only from the inferior authors and secondary 
 historians, which he read only once. Most of the material 
 collected in the commonplace book is used in his prose 
 pamphlets. But when so employed the facts are worked 
 into the texture of his argument, rather than cited as 
 extraneous witnesses. 
 
 In reading history it was his aim to get at a conspectus of 
 
 c 2
 
 20 FIRST PERIOD. 1G0S-1639. [chap. 
 
 the general current of affairs rather than to study minutely 
 a special period. He tells Diodati in September, 1637, 
 that he has studied Greek history continuously, from the 
 beginning to the fall of Constantinople. When he tells 
 the same friend that he has been long involved in the 
 obscurity of the early middle ages of Italian History down 
 to the time of the Emperor Eudolph, we learn from the 
 commonplace book that he had only been reading the one 
 volume of Sigonius's Hlstoria Regni Italici. From the 
 thirteenth century downwards he proposes to himself to 
 study each Italian state in some separate history. Even 
 before his journey to Italy he read Italian with as much 
 ease as French. He tells us that it was by his father's ad- 
 vice that he had acquired these modern languages. But we 
 can see that they Avere essential parts of his own scheme 
 of self education, which included, in another direction 
 Hebrew, both Biblical and Eabbinical, and even Syriac. 
 
 The intensity of his nature showed itself in his method 
 of study. He read, not desultorily, a bit here and 
 another there, but "when I take up with a thing, I 
 never pause or break it off, nor am drawn away from it 
 by any other interest, till I have arrived at the goal I 
 proposed to myself." He made breaks occasionally in 
 this routine of study by visits to London, to see friends 
 to buy books, to take lessons in mathematics, to go to the 
 theatre, or to concerts. A love of music was inherited 
 from his father. 
 
 I have called this period, 1632-39, one of preparation, 
 and not of production. But though the first volume of 
 poems printed by Milton did not appear till 1615, the 
 most considerable part of its contents was written during 
 the period included in the present chapter. 
 
 The fame of the author of Paradise Led has over-
 
 II.] COMUS. 21 
 
 shadowed that of the author of L' Allegro, 11 Penseroso, 
 and Lycidas. Yet had Paradise Lost never been 
 written, these three poems, with Comus, would have 
 sufficed to place their author in a class apart, and above 
 all those who had used the English language for poetical 
 purposes before him. It is incumbent on Milton's bio- 
 grapher to relate the circumstances of the composition of 
 Comus, as it is an incident in the life of the poet. 
 
 Milton's musical tastes had brought him the acquain- 
 tance of Henry Lawes, at that time the most celebrated 
 composer in England. "When the Earl of Bridgewater 
 would give an entertainment at Ludlow Castle to celebrate 
 his entry upon his office as President of Wales and the 
 Marches, it was to Lawes that application was made to 
 furnish the music. Lawes, as naturally, applied to his 
 young poetical acquaintance Milton, to write the words. 
 The entertainment was to be of that sort which was 
 fashionable at court, and was called a Mask. In that 
 brilliant period of court life which was inaugurated by 
 Elisabeth and put an end to by the Civil War, a Mask 
 was a frequent and favourite amusement. It was an 
 exhibition in which pageantry and music predominated, 
 but in which dialogue was introduced as accompaniment 
 or explanation. 
 
 The dramatic Mask of the sixteenth century has been 
 traced by the antiquaries as far back as the time of 
 Edward III. But in its perfected shape it was a genuine 
 offspring of the English renaissance, a cross between the 
 vernacular mummery, or mystery-play, and the Greek 
 drama. ISTo great court festival was considered complete 
 without such a public show. Many of our great dramatic 
 writers, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Middleton, 
 Dekker, Shirley, Carew, were constrained by the fashion
 
 22 FIRST PERIOD. 1G0S— 1G39. [chap. 
 
 of the time to apply their invention to gratify this taste 
 for decorative representation. No less an artist than 
 Inigo Jones must occasionally stoop to construct the 
 machinery. 
 
 The taste for grotesque pageant in the open air must 
 have gradually died out hefore the general advance of 
 refinement. The Mask hy a process of evolution would 
 have "become the Opera. But it often happens that when 
 a taste or fashion is at the point of death, it undergoes 
 a forced and temporary revival. So it was with the 
 Mask. In 1633, the Puritan hatred to the theatre had 
 blazed out in Prynne's Ilislriomastix, and as a natural 
 consequence, the loyal and cavalier portion of society 
 threw itself into dramatic amusements of every kind. 
 It was an unreal revival of the Mask, stimulated by 
 political passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the 
 fantastic and semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former 
 age had delighted. "What the imagination of the specta- 
 tors was no longer equal to, was to be supplied by costli- 
 ness of dress and scenery. These last representations of 
 the expiring Mask were the occasions of an extravagant 
 outlay. The Inns of Court and Whitehall vied with 
 each other in the splendour and solemnity with which 
 they brought out,— the Lawyers, Shirley's Triumph of 
 Peace, — the Court, Carew's Caelum BHtannicum. 
 
 It was a strange caprice of fortune that made the future 
 poet of the Puritan epic the last composer of a cavalier 
 mask. The slight plot, or story, of Comus was probably 
 suggested to Milton by his recollection of George Peele's 
 Old Wives' Tale, which he may have seen on the 
 stage. The personage of Comus was borrowed from a 
 Latin extravaganza by a Dutch professor, whose Comus 
 was reprinted at Oxford in 1(53-1, the very year in which
 
 ii.] COMUS. 23 
 
 Milton wrote his Mask. The so-called tradition col- 
 lected by Oldys, of the young Egertons, who acted in 
 Comus, having lost themselves in Haywood Forest on 
 their way to Ludlow, obviously grew out of Milton's 
 poem. However casual the suggestion, or unpromising 
 the occasion, Milton worked out of it a strain of poetry 
 such as had never been heard in England before. If any 
 reader wishes to realise the immense step upon what had 
 gone before him, which was now made by a young man 
 of twenty-seven, he should turn over some of the most 
 celebrated of the masks of the Jacobean period. 
 
 We have no information how Comus was received 
 when represented at Ludlow, but it found a public of 
 readers. For Lawes, who had the MS. in his hands, was 
 so importuned for copies that, in 1637, he caused an 
 edition to be printed off. Not surreptitiously ; for though 
 Lawes does not say, in the dedication to Lord Brackley, 
 that he had the author's leave to print, we are sure that 
 he had it, only from the motto. On the title page of this 
 edition (1637), is the line, — 
 
 Eheu ! quid volui misero mihi ! floribus austrura 
 Perditus — 
 
 The words are Virgil's, but the appropriation of them, 
 and their application in this "second intention" is too 
 exquisite to have been made by any but Milton. 
 
 To the poems of the Horton period belong also the 
 two pieces U Allegro and II Penseroso, and Lycidas. He 
 Avas probably in the early stage of acquiring the language, 
 when he superscribed the two first poems with their 
 Italian titles. For there is no such word as "Penseroso," 
 the adjective formed from "Pensiero " being "pensieroso." 
 Even had the word been written correctly, its significa-
 
 24 FIRST PERIOD. 160S— 1639. [cnAP. 
 
 tion is not that which Milton intended, viz. thoughtful, 
 or contemplative, but anxious, full of cares, cart- 
 ing. The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be 
 best perceived by comparing L? Allegro and II Pense- 
 roso of uncertain date, but written after 1632, with 
 the Ode on the Nativity, written 1629. The Ode, not- 
 withstanding its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in 
 frigid conceits, from which the two later pieces are 
 free. The Ode is frosty, as written in winter, within the 
 four walls of a college chamber. The two idylls breathe 
 the free air of spring and summer, and of the fields round 
 Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic ; the choicest 
 expression our language has yet found of the fresh charm 
 of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, 
 but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing 
 at early dawn, or at sunset, into the fields from his 
 chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and 
 smells are here blended in that ineifable combination, 
 which once or twice perhaps in our lives has saluted our 
 young senses before their perceptions were blunted by 
 alcohol, by lust, or ambition, or diluted by the social 
 distractions of great cities. 
 
 The fidelity to nature of the imagery of these poems 
 has been impugned by the critics. 
 
 Then to come, in spito of sorrow, 
 And at my window bid good morrow. 
 
 The skylark never approaches human habitations in this 
 way, as the redbreast does. Mr. Masson replies that the 
 subject of the verb "to come" is, not the skylark, but 
 L'AUegro, the joyous student. I cannot construe the 
 lines as Mr. Masson does, even though the consequence 
 were to convict Milton, a city-bred youth, of not knowing 
 a skylark from a sparrow when he saw it. A close 
 observer of things around us would not speak of the
 
 ii.] L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO. 25 
 
 eglantine as twisted, of the cowslip as wan, of the 
 violet as glowing, or of the reed as balmy. Lycidas' 
 laureate hearse is to be strewn at once with primrose and 
 woodbine, daffodil and jasmine. When Ave read "the 
 rathe primrose that forsaken dies," we see that the poet 
 is recollecting Shakespeare (Winter's Tale, 4. 4), not 
 looking at the primrose. The pine is not " rooted deep 
 as high" (P. P. 4416), but sends its roots along the 
 surface. The elm, one of the thinnest foliaged trees of 
 the forest, is inappropriately named starproof (Arc. 89). 
 Lightning does not singe the tops of trees (P. L. i. 613), 
 but either shivers them, or cuts a groove down the stem 
 to the ground. These and other such like inaccuracies 
 must be set down partly to conventional language used 
 witho\it meaning, the vice of Latin versification enforced 
 as a task, but they are partly due to real defect of natural 
 knowledge. 
 
 Other objections of the critics on the same score, 
 which may be met with, are easily dismissed. The 
 objector, who can discover no reason why the oak should 
 be styled " monumental," meets with his match in the 
 defender who suggests, that it may be rightly so called 
 because monuments in churches are made of oak. I 
 should tremble to have to offer an explanation to critics 
 of Milton so acute as these two. But of less ingenious 
 readers I would ask, if any single word can be found 
 ecpial to " monumental " in its power of suggesting to 
 the imagination the historic oak of park or chase, up to 
 the knees in fern, which has outlasted ten generations of 
 men ; has been the mute witness of the scenes of love, 
 treachery, or violence enacted in the baronial hall which 
 it shadows and protects ; and has been so associated with 
 man, that it is now rather a column and memorial obelisk 
 than a tree of the forest 1
 
 26 FIRST PERIOD. 1608— 1639. [chap. 
 
 These are the humours of criticism. But, apart from 
 these, a naturalist is at once aware that Milton had 
 neither the eye nor the ear of a naturalist. At no time, 
 even before his loss of sight, was he an exact observer 
 of natural objects. It may be that he knew a skylark 
 from a redbreast, and did not confound the dog-rose with 
 the honeysuckle. But I am sure that he had never 
 acquired that interest in nature's things and ways, which 
 Leads to close and loving watching of them. He had not 
 that sense of outdoor nature, empirical and not scientific, 
 which endows the Angler of his cotemporary Walton, 
 with its enduring charm, and which is to be acquired 
 only by living in the open country in childhood. Milton 
 is not a man of the fields, but of books. His life is in 
 his study, and when he steps abroad into the air he 
 carries his study thoughts with him. He does look at 
 nature, but he sees her through books. Natural im- 
 pressions are received from without, but always in those 
 forms of beautiful speech, in which the poets of all ages 
 have clothed them. His epithets are not, like the epithets 
 of the school of Dryden and Pope, culled from the Gfradus 
 ad Parnassum ; they are expressive of some reality, but it 
 is of a real emotion in the spectator's soul, not of any 
 quality detected by keen insight in the objects themselves. 
 This emotion Milton's art stamps with an epithet, which 
 shall convey the added charm of classical reminiscence. 
 When, e.g., he speaks of "the wand'ring moon," the 
 original significance of the epithet comes home to the 
 scholarly reader with the enhanced effect of its association 
 with the " errantem lunam " of Virgil. Xor because it 
 is adopted from Virgil has the epithet here the second- 
 hand effect of a copy. If Milton sees nature through 
 books, he still sees it.
 
 ii.] L' ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO. 27 
 
 To behold the wand'ring moon, 
 Riding near her highest noon, 
 Like one that had been led astray, 
 Through the heaven's wide pathless way, 
 And oft, as if her head she bow'd, 
 Stooping through a fleecy cloud. 
 
 No allegation that " wand'ring moon " is borrowed from 
 Horace can hide from us that Milton, though he remem- 
 bered Horace, had watched the phenomenon with a feel- 
 ing so,intense that he projected his own soul's throb into 
 the object before him, and named it with what Thomson 
 calls " recollected love." 
 
 Milton's attitude towards nature is not that of a scien- 
 tific naturalist, nor even that of a close observer. It is 
 that of a poet who feels its total influence too powerfully 
 to dissect it. If, as I have said, Milton reads books first 
 and nature afterwards, it is not to test nature by his 
 books, but to learn from both. He is learning not books, 
 but from books. All he reads, sees, hears, is to him but 
 nutriment for the soul. He is making himself. Man is 
 to him the highest object ; nature is subordinate to man, 
 not only in its more vulgar uses, but as an excitant of 
 fine emotion. He is not concerned to register the facts 
 and phenomena of nature, but to convey the impressions 
 they make on a sensitive soul. The external forms of 
 things are to be presented to us as transformed through 
 the heart and mind of the poet. The moon is endowed 
 with life and will, " stooping," " riding," "wand'ring," 
 "bowing her head," not as a frigid personification, and 
 because the ancient poets so personified her, but by com- 
 munication to her of the intense agitation which the 
 nocturnal spectacle rouses in the poet's own breast. 
 
 I have sometimes read that these two idylls are "mas-
 
 28 FIRST PERIOD. 1G0S— 1G39. [chap. 
 
 terpieces of description." Other critics will ask if in 
 the scenery of V Allegro and II Penseroso Milton has 
 described the country about Horton, in Bucks, or that 
 about Forest Hill, in Oxfordshire ; and will object that the 
 Chiltern Hills are not high enough for clouds to rest 
 upon their top, much less upon their breast. But he has 
 left out the pollard willows, says another censor, and the 
 lines of pollard willow are the prominent feature in the 
 valley of the Colne, even more so than the " hedgerow 
 elms." Does the line " "Walk the studious cloister's pale," 
 mean St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey 1 When these 
 things can continue to be asked, it is hardly superfluous 
 to continue to repeat, that truth of fact and poetical truth 
 are two different things. Milton's attitude towards nature 
 is not that of a " descriptive poet/' if indeed the phrase 
 be not a self-contradiction. 
 
 In Milton, nature is not put forward as the poet's 
 theme. His theme is man, in the two contrasted moods of 
 joyous emotion, or grave reflection. The shifting scenery 
 ministers to the varying mood. Thomson, in the Sea- 
 sons (1726), sets himself to render natural phenomena 
 as they truly are. He has left us a vivid presentation 
 in gorgeous language of the naturalistic calendar of the 
 changing year. Milton, in these two idylls, has recorded a 
 d v of twenty-four hours. But he has not registered the 
 nomcna ; he places us at the standpoint of the man 
 before whom they deploy. And the man, joyous or 
 melancholy, is not a bare spectator of them ; he is the 
 student, compounded of sensibility and intelligence, of 
 whom we are not told that he saw so and so, or that he 
 felt so, but with whom we are made copartners of his 
 thoughts and feeling. Description melts into emotion, 
 and contemplation bodies itself in imagery. Ail the
 
 ii.] LYCIDAS. 29 
 
 charm of rural life is there, hut it is not tendered to us 
 in the form of a landscape ; the scenery is subordinated 
 to the human figure in the centre. 
 
 These two short idylls are marked by a gladsome spon- 
 taneity which never came to Milton again. The delicate 
 fancy and feeling which play about V Allegro and II 
 Penseroso never reappear, and form a strong contrast to 
 the austere imaginings of his later poetical period. These 
 two poems have the freedom and frolic, the natural grace 
 of movement, the improvisation, of the hest Elizabethan 
 examples, while both thoughts and words are under a 
 strict economy unknown to the diffuse exuberance of the 
 Spenserians. 
 
 In Lycidas (1637) we have reached the high- water 
 mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own production. 
 A period of a century and a half was to elapse before 
 poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's Ode on Im- 
 mortality (1807), to be rising again towards the level 
 of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas. 
 And in the development of the Miltonic genius this 
 wonderful dirge marks the culminating point. As the 
 twin idylls of 1632 show a great advance upon the Ode 
 on the Nativity (1629), the growth of the poetic mind 
 during the five years which follow 1632 is registered in 
 Lycidas. Like the L 'Allegro and II Penseroso, Lycidas 
 is laid out on the lines of the accepted pastoral fiction ; 
 like them it offers exquisite touches of idealised rural 
 life. But Lycidas opens up a deeper vein of feeling, a 
 patriot passion so vehement and dangerous, that, like 
 that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled 
 to veil itself from power, or from sympathy, in utterance 
 made purposely enigmatical. The passage which hegins 
 " Last came and last did go," raises in us a thrill of
 
 30 FIRST PERIOD. 160S— 1639. [chap. 
 
 awe-struck expectation which I can only compare with 
 that excited by the Cassandra of /Eschylus's Agamem- 
 non. For the reader to feel this, he. must have present in 
 memory the circumstances of England in 1637. He 
 must place himself as far as possible in the situation of a 
 cotemporary. The study of Milton's poetry compels the 
 study of his time; and Professor Masson's six volumes 
 are not too much to enable us to understand, that there 
 wore real causes for the intense passion which glows 
 underneath the poet's words — a passion which unex- 
 plained would be thought to be intrusive. 
 
 The historical exposition must be gathered from the 
 English history of the period, which may be read in 
 Professor Masson's excellent summary. All I desire to 
 point out here is, that in Lycidas, Milton's original pic- 
 turesque vein is for the first time crossed with one of 
 quite another sort, stern, determined, obscurely indicative 
 of suppressed passion, and the resolution to do or die. 
 The fanaticism of the covenanter and the sad grace of 
 Petrarch seem to meet in Milton's monody. Yet these 
 n]iposites, instead of neutralising each other, are blended 
 into one harmonious whole by the presiding, but invisible, 
 genius of the poet. The conflict between the old cavalier 
 world — the years of gaiety and festivity of a splendid ami 
 pleasure-loving court, and the new puritan world into 
 v.-hich love and pleasure were not to enter — this conflict 
 which was commencing in the social life of England, is 
 also begun in Milton's own breast, and is reflected in 
 I/ycida 
 
 For we wero nurs'd upon tho self- same hill. 
 
 Hero is the sweet mournfulness of the Spenserian time, 
 upon whose joys Death is tho only intruder. Pass on-
 
 ii.] LTCIDAS. 31 
 
 ward a little, and you are in presence of the tremendous 
 
 Two-handed engine at the door, 
 
 the terror of which is enhanced by its obscurity. "We 
 are very sine that the avenger is there, though we know 
 not who he is. In these thirty lines we have the pre- 
 luding mutterings of the storm which was to sweep away 
 mask and revel and song, to inhibit the drama, and 
 suppress poetry. In the earlier poems Milton's muse has 
 sung in the tones of the age that is passing away ; the 
 poet is, except in his austere chastity, a cavalier. Though 
 even in U Allegro Dr. Johnson truly detects "some 
 melancholy in his mirth," In Lycidas,iov a moment, the 
 tones of both ages, the past and the coming, are combined, 
 and then Milton leaves behind him for ever the golden 
 age, and one half of his poetic genius. He never ful- 
 filled the promise with which Lycidas concludes, " To- 
 morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 JOURNEY TO ITALY. 
 
 Before 1632 Milton had begun to learn Italian. His 
 mind, just then open on all sides to impressions from 
 hooks, was peculiarly attracted by Italian poetry. The 
 language grew to be loved for its own sake. Saturated 
 as he was with Dante and Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto, 
 the desire arose to let the ear drink in the music of 
 Tuscan speech. 
 
 The " unhappy gift of beauty," which has attracted the 
 spoder of all ages to the Italian peninsula, has ever exerted, 
 and still exerts, a magnetic force on every cultivated mind. 
 Manifold are the sources of this fascination now. The 
 scholar and the artist, the antiquarian and the historian, 
 the architect and the lover of natural scenery, alike find 
 here the amplest gratification of their tastes. This is so 
 still ; but in the sixteenth century the Italian cities were 
 the only homes of an ancient and decaying civilization. 
 Not insensihle to other impressions, it was specially the 
 desire of social converse with the living poets and men of 
 taste— a feeble generation, but one still nourishing tho 
 traditions of the great poetic age— which drew Mdton 
 across the Alps. 
 
 In April, 1037, Milton's mother had died; but his
 
 cii. in] JOURNEY TO ITALY. 33 
 
 younger brother, Christopher, had come to live, with his 
 wife, in the paternal home at Horton. Milton, the father, 
 was not unwilling that his son should have his foreign tour, 
 as a part of that elaborate education by which he was 
 qualifying himself for his doubtful vocation. The cost 
 was not to stand in the way, considerable as it must have 
 been. Howell's estimate, in his Instructions for Forreine 
 Travel, 1642, was 300?. a year for the tourist himself, 
 and 50Z. for his man, a sum equal to about 1000/. at 
 present. 
 
 Among the letters of introduction with which Milton 
 provided himself, one was from the aged Sir Henry 
 Wotton, Provost of Eton, in Milton's immediate neigh- 
 bourhood. Sir Henry, who had lived a long time in 
 Italy, impressed upon his young friend the importance of 
 discretion on the point of religion, and told him the story 
 which he always told to travellers who asked his advice. 
 "At Siena I was tabled in the house of one Alberto 
 
 Scipioni, an old Eoman courtier in dangerous times 
 
 At my departure for Koine I had won confidence 
 enough to beg his advice how I might carry myself 
 securely there, without offence of others, or of mine own 
 conscience. ' Signor Arrigo mio,' says he, ' pensieri stretti 
 ed il viso sciolto (thoughts close, countenance open) will 
 go safely over the whole world.'" Though the intensity 
 of the Catholic reaction had somewhat relaxed in Italy, 
 the deportment of a Protestant in the countries which were 
 terrorised by the Inquisition was a matter which demanded 
 much circumspection. Sir H. Wotton spoke from his 
 own experience of far more rigorous times than those of 
 the Barberini Pope. But he may have noticed, even in 
 his brief acquaintance with Milton, a fearless presumption 
 of speech which was just what was most likely to bring 
 
 D
 
 31 FIRST PERIOD. 1608-1G39. [chap. 
 
 him into trouble. The event proved that the hint was 
 not misplaced. For at Rome itself, in the very lion's 
 den, nothing could content the young zealot but to stand 
 up for his Protestant creed. Mdton would not do as 
 Peter Heylin did, who, when asked as to his religion, 
 replied that he was a Catholic, which, in a Laudian, was 
 but a natural equivoque. Milton Avas resolute in his 
 religion at Rome, so much so that many were deterred 
 from showing him the civilities they were prepared to 
 offer. His rule, he says, was " not of my own accord to 
 introduce in those places conversation about religion, but, 
 if interrogated respecting the faith, then, whatsoever I 
 should suffer, to dissemble nothing. "What I was, if any 
 one asked, I concealed from no one ; if any one in the 
 very city of the Pope attacked the orthodox religion, I 
 defended it most freely." Beyond the statement that the 
 English Jesuits Avere indignant, we hear of no evil con- 
 sequences of this imprudence. Perhaps the Jesuits saw 
 that Milton was of the stuff that would welcome mar- 
 tyrdom, and were sick of the affair of Galileo, which had 
 terribly damaged the pretensions of their church. 
 
 "Milton arrived in Paris April or May, 1638. He 
 received civilities from the English ambassador, Lord 
 Scudamore, who at his request gave him an introduction 
 to Grotius. Grotius, says Phillips, " took Milton's visit 
 kindly, and gave him entertainment suitable to his worth, 
 and the high commendations he had heard of him." We 
 have no other record of his stay of mai^ days in Paris, 
 though A. Wood supposes that " the manners and graces 
 of that place were not agreeable to his mind." It was 
 August before he reached Florence, by way of Nice and 
 Genoa, and in Florence he spent the two months which 
 Ave now consider the most impossible there, the months
 
 hi.] JOUENEY TO ITALY. 35 
 
 of August and September. Nor did he find, as he would 
 find now, the city deserted by the natives. "We hear 
 nothing of Milton's impressions of the place, but of the 
 men whom he met there he retained always a lively 
 and affectionate remembrance. The learned and polite 
 Florentines had not fled to the hills from the stifling heat 
 and blinding glare of the Lung' Arno, but seem to have 
 carried on their literary meetings in defiance of climate. 
 This was the age of academies — an institution, Milton 
 says, " of most praiseworthy effect, both for the cultivation 
 of polite letters and the keeping up of friendships." 
 Florence had five or six such societies, the Florentine, the 
 Delia Crusca, the Svogliati, the Apotisti, &c. It is easy, 
 and usual in our day, to speak contemptuously of the 
 literary tone of these academies, fostering, as they did, 
 an amiable and garrulous intercourse of reciprocal compli- 
 ment, and to contrast them unfavourably with our 
 societies for severe research. They were at least evidence 
 of culture, and served to keep alive the traditions of the 
 more masculine Medicean age. And that the members 
 of these associations were not unaware of their own degene- 
 racy and of its cause, we learn from Milton himself. For 
 as soon as they found that they were safe with the young 
 Briton, they disclosed their own bitter hatred of the 
 church's yoke which they had to bear. "I have sate 
 among their learned men," Milton wrote in 1644, "and 
 been counted happy to be born in such a place of philo- 
 sophic freedom as they supposed England was, while 
 themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition 
 into which learning amongst them was brought, that this 
 was it which had dampt the glory of Italian wits 
 that nothing had been written there now these many 
 years but flattery and fustian." Milton was introduced 
 
 d 2
 
 80 FIEST PERIOD. 1608—1639. [OHAr. 
 
 at the meetings of their academies; his presence is re- 
 corded on two occasions, of -which the latest is the lGth 
 September at the Svogliati. He paid his scot by reciting 
 from memory some of his youthful Latin verses, hexa- 
 meters, "molto erudite," says the minute-book of the 
 sitting, and others, which " I shifted, in the scarcity of 
 books and conveniences, to patch up." He obtained much 
 credit by these exercises, which, indeed, deserved it by 
 comparison. He ventured upon the perilous experiment 
 of offering some compositions in Italian, which the fas- 
 tidious Tuscan ear at least professed to include in those 
 " encomiums which the Italian is not forward to bestoAV 
 on men of this side the Alps." 
 
 The author of Lycidas cannot but have been quite 
 aware of the small poetical merit of such an ode as that 
 which was addressed to him by Francini. In this ode 
 Milton is the swan of Thames — " Thames, which, owing 
 to thee, rivals Boeotian Permessus ;" and so forth. But 
 there is a genuine feeling, an ungrudging warmth of 
 sympathetic recognition underlying the trite and tumid 
 panegyric. And Milton may have yielded to the not 
 unnatural impulse of showing his countrymen, that though 
 not a prophet in boorish and fanatical England, he had 
 found recognition in the home of letters and arts. Upon 
 us is forced, by this their different reception of Milton, 
 the contrast between the two countries, Italy and England, 
 in the middle of the seventeenth century. The rude 
 north, whose civilisation was all to come, concentrating all 
 its intelligence in a violent effort to work off the eccle- 
 siastical poison from its system, is brought into sharp con- 
 trast with the sweet south, whose civilisation is behind it, 
 and whose intellect, after a severe struggle, has succumbed 
 to the material force and organisation of the church.
 
 in.] JOURNEY TO ITALY. 37 
 
 As soon as the season allowed of it, Milton set forward 
 to Rome, taking what was then the usual way by Siena. 
 At Borne he spent two months, occupying himself partly 
 with seeing the antiquities, and partly with cultivating 
 the acquaintance of natives, and some of the many 
 foreigners resident in the eternal city. But though ho 
 received much civility, we do not find that he met with 
 the peculiar sympathy which endeared to him his Tuscan 
 friends. His chief ally was the German, Lucas Holstenius, 
 a native of Hamhurg, who had ahjured Protestantism to 
 "become librarian of the Vatican. Holstenius had resided 
 three years in Oxford, and considered himself bound to 
 repay to the English scholar some of the attentions he 
 had received himself. Through Holstenius Milton was 
 presented to the nephew, Francesco Barberini, who was 
 just then everything in Borne. It was at a concert at the 
 Barberini palace that Milton heard Leonora Baroni sing. 
 His three Latin epigrams addressed to this lady, the first 
 singer of Italy, or of the world at that time, testify to the 
 enthusiasm she excited in the musical soul of Milton. 
 
 Nor are these three epigrams the only homage which 
 Milton paid to Italian beauty. The susceptible poet, who in 
 the suidess north would fain have "sported with the tangles 
 of Neaera's hair," could not behold Neaera herself and the 
 flashing splendour of her eye, unmoved. Milton proclaims 
 (Defensio Secunda) that in all his foreign tour he had 
 lived clear from all that is disgraceful. But the pudicity 
 of his behaviour and language covers a soul tremulous 
 with emotion, whose passion was intensified by the disci- 
 pline of a chaste intention. Five Italian pieces among 
 his poems are to the address of another lady, whoso 
 "majestic movements and love- darting dark brow "had 
 subdued him. The charm lay in the novelty of this style
 
 38 FIRST PERIOD. 160S— 1G39. [chap. 
 
 of beauty to one who came from the land of the " vermeil- 
 tinctur'd cheek " (Comus) and the "golden nets of hair" 
 (EL i. 60). No clue has been discovered to the name 
 of this divinity, or to the occasion on which Milton saw 
 her. 
 
 Of Milton's impression of Kome there is no record. 
 There are no traces of special observation in his poetry. 
 The description of the city in Paradise Regained (iv. 32) 
 has nothing characteristic, and could have been written 
 by one who had never seen it, and by many as well as 
 by Milton. We get one glimpse of him by aid of the 
 register of the English College, as dining there at a 
 " sumptuous entertainment " on 30th October, when he 
 met Nicholas Carey, brother of Lord Falkland. In spite 
 of Sir Henry Wotton's caution, his resoluteness, as A. 
 Wood calls it, in his religion, besides making the English 
 Jesuits indignant, caused others, not Jesuits, to withhold 
 civilities. Milton only tells us himself that the anti- 
 quities detained him in Kome about two months. 
 
 At the end of November he went on to Naples. On the 
 road he fell in with an Eremite friar, who gave him an 
 introduction to the one man in Naples whom it was im- 
 portant he should know, Giovanni Battista Manso, 
 Marquis of Villa. The marquis, now seventy- eight, had 
 been for two generations the Maecenas of letters in 
 Southern Italy. He had sheltered Tasso in the former 
 generation, and Marini in the latter. It was the singular 
 privilege of his old age that ho should now entertain a 
 third poet, greater than either. In spite of his years, he 
 was able to act as cicerone to the young Englishman over 
 the scenes which he himself, in his Life of Tasso, has 
 described with the enthusiasm of a poet. But even the 
 high-souled Manso quailed before the terrors of the In-
 
 in.] JOURNEY TO ITALY. 39 
 
 quisition, and apologised to Milton for not having shown 
 him greater attention, because he would not be more 
 circumspect in the matter of religion. Milton's Italian 
 journey brings out the two conflicting strains of feeling 
 which were uttered together in Lycidas, the poet's im- 
 pressibility by nature, the freeman's indignation at clerical 
 domination. 
 
 The time was now at hand when the latter passion, the 
 noble rage of freedom, was to suppress the more delicate 
 flower of jDoetic imagination. Milton's original scheme 
 had included Sicily and Greece. The serious aspect of 
 affairs at home compelled him to renounce his project. 
 " I considered it dishonourable to be enjoying myself at 
 my ease in foreign lands, while my countrymen were 
 striking a blow for freedom." He retraced his steps 
 leisurely enough, however, making a halt of two months 
 in Rome, and again one of two months in Florence. 
 We find him mentioned in the minutes of the academy 
 of the Svogliati as having been present at three of 
 their weekly meetings, on the 17th, 24th, and 31st 
 March. But the most noteworthy incident of his second 
 Florentine residence is his interview with Galileo. He 
 had been unable to see the veteran martyr of science on 
 his first visit. For though Galileo was at that time 
 living within the walls, he was kept a close prisoner 
 by the Inquisition, and not allowed either to set foot 
 outside his own door, or to receive visits from non- 
 Catholics. In the spring of 1639, however, he was 
 allowed to go back to his villa at Gioiello, near Arcetri, 
 and Milton obtained admission to him, old, frail, and 
 blind, but in full possession of his mental faculty. There 
 is observable in Milton, as Mr. Masson suggests, a pro- 
 phetic fascination of the fancy on the subject of blind-
 
 40 FIRST PERIOD. 1608—1639. [chap. 
 
 ness. And the deep impression left by this sight of " the 
 Tuscan artist " is evidenced by the feeling with which 
 Galileo's name and achievement are imbedded in Paradise 
 Lost. 
 
 From Florence, Milton crossed the Apennines by Bo- 
 logna and Ferrara to Venice. From this port he shipped 
 for England the books he had collected during his tour, 
 books curious and rare as they seemed to Phillips, and 
 among them a chest or two of choice music books. 
 The month of April was spent at Venice, and bidding 
 farewell to the beloved land he would never visit again, 
 Milton passed the Alps to Geneva. 
 
 No Englishman's foreign pilgrimage was complete with- 
 out touching at this marvellous capital of the reformed 
 faith, which with almost no resources had successfully 
 braved the whole might of the Catholic reaction. The 
 only record of Milton's stay at Geneva is the album of 
 a Neapolitan refugee, to which Milton contributed his 
 autograph, under date 10th June, 1G39, with the follow- 
 ing quotation : — 
 
 If virtuo feeble were, 
 
 Ileaven itself would stoop to her. 
 
 (From Comits). 
 Coolum uon animum inuto, dum trans mare curro. 
 
 (From Horace.) 
 
 But it is probable that he was a guest in the house of 
 one of the leading pastors, Giovanni Diodati, whose 
 nephew Charles, a physician commencing practice in 
 London, was Milton's bosom friend. Hero Milton first 
 heard of the death, in the previous August, of that friend. 
 It was a heavy blow to him, for one of the chief plea- 
 sures of being at home again woidd have been to pour
 
 II.] JOURNEY TO ITALY. 41 
 
 into a sympathetic Italian ear the story of his adventures. 
 The sadness of the homeward journey from Geneva is 
 recorded for us in the Epitapliium Damonis. This 
 piece is an elegy to the memory of Charles Diodati. It 
 unfortunately differs from the elegy on King in heing 
 written in Latin, and is thus inaccessihle to uneducated 
 readers. As to such readers the topic of Milton's Latin 
 poetry is necessarily an ungrateful subject, I will dismiss 
 it here with one remark. Milton's Latin verses are dis- 
 tinguished from most Neodatin verse by heing a vehicle 
 of real emotion. His technical skill is said to have been 
 surpassed by others ; but that in which he stands alone 
 is, that in these exercises of imitative art he is able to 
 remain himself, and to give utterance to genuine passion. 
 Artificial Arcadianism is as much the frame-work of the 
 elegy on Diodati as it is of Lycidas. "We have Daphnis 
 and Lion, Tityrus and Amyntas for characters, Sicilian 
 valleys for scenery, while Pan, Pales, and the Fauns 
 represent the supernatural. The shepherds defend their 
 flocks from wolves and lions. But this factitious buco- 
 licism is pervaded by a pathos, which, like volcanic heat, 
 has fused into a new compound the dilapidated debris 
 of the Theocritean world. And in the Latin elegy there 
 is more tenderness than in the English. Charles Diodati 
 was much nearer to Milton than had been Edward King. 
 The sorrow in Lycidas is not so much personal as it is 
 the regret of the society of Christ's. King had only been 
 known to Milton as one of the students of the same 
 college ; Diodati was the associate of his choice in riper 
 manhood. 
 
 The Epitapliium Damonis is further memorable as 
 Milton's last attempt in serious Latin verse. He dis- 
 covered in this experiment that Latin was not an adequate
 
 42 FIRST PERIOD. 1608-1G39. [ch. nr. 
 
 vehicle of the feeling lie desired to give vent to. In the 
 concluding lines he takes a formal farewell of the Latian 
 muse, and announces his purpose of adopting henceforth 
 the " harsh and grating Brittonic idiom " (Brittonicum 
 etridens).
 
 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EDUCATIONAL THEORY — TEACHING. 
 
 Milton was back in England in August, 1639. He had 
 been absent a year and three months, during which space 
 of time the aspect of public affairs, which had been per- 
 plexed and gloomy when he left, had been growing still 
 more ominous of a coming storm. The issues of the con- 
 troversy were so pervasive, that it was almost impossible 
 for any educated man who understood them not to range 
 himself on a side. Yet Milton, though he had broken off 
 his projected tour in consequence, did not rush into the 
 fray on his return. He resumed his retired and studious 
 life, " with no small delight, cheerfully leaving," as he 
 says, " the event of public affairs first to God, and then to 
 those to whom the people had committed that task." 
 
 He did not return to Horton, but took lodgings in 
 London, in the house of Russel a tailor, in St. Bride's 
 churchyard, at the city end of Pleet-street, on the site of 
 what is now Earringdon-street. There is no attempt on 
 the part of Milton to take up a profession, not even for the 
 sake of appearances. The elder Milton was content to 
 provide the son, of whom he was proud, with the means 
 of prosecuting his eccentric scheme of life, to continue,
 
 ii SECOXD PERIOD. 16 10— 1660. [chap. 
 
 namely, lo prepare himself for some great work, nature 
 unknown. 
 
 For a young man of simple habits and studious life a 
 little suffices. The chief want is books, and of these, for 
 Milton's style of reading, select rather than copious, a 
 large collection is superfluous. There were in 1640 no 
 public libraries in London, and a scholar had to find his 
 own store of books or to borrow from his friends. Milton 
 never can have possessed a large library. At Horton he 
 may have used Kederminster's bequest to Langley Church. 
 Still, with his Italian acquisitions, added to the books that 
 he already possessed, he soon found a lodging too narrow 
 for his accommodation, and removed to a house of his 
 own, " a pretty garden-house, in Aldersgate, at the end of 
 an entry." Aldersgate was outside the city walls, on the 
 verge of the open country of Islington, and was a genteel 
 though not a fashionable quarter. There were few streets 
 in London, says Phillips, more free from noise. 
 
 He had taken in hand the education of his two 
 nephews, John and Edward Phillips, sons of his only 
 sister Anne. Anne was a few years older than her bro- 
 ther John. Her first husband, Edward Phillips, had died 
 in 1631, and the widow had given her two sons a step- 
 father in one Thomas Agar, who was in the Clerk of the 
 Crown's office. Milton, on settling in London in 1639, 
 had at once taken his younger nephew John to livo with 
 him. When, in 1610, he removed to Aldersgate, the 
 elder, Edward, also came under his roof. 
 
 If it was affection for his sister which first moved 
 Milton to undertake the tuition of her sons, he soon deve- 
 loped a taste for the occupation. In 16-13 he began to 
 receive into his house other pupils, but only, says 
 Phillips (who is solicitous that his uncle should not be
 
 iv.] EDUCATIONAL THEORY. 45 
 
 thought to have kept a school), " the sons of some gentle- 
 men that were his intimate friends." He threw into his 
 lessons the same energy which he carried into everything 
 else. In his eagerness to find a place for everything that 
 could be learnt, there could have been few hours in the 
 day which were not invaded by teaching. He had ex- 
 changed the contemplative leisure of Horton for a busy 
 life, in which no hour but had its calls. Even on Sundays 
 there were lessons in the Greek Testament and dictations 
 of a system of Divinity in Latin. His pamphlets of this 
 period betray, in their want of measure and equilibrium, 
 even in their heated style and passion-flushed language, 
 the life at high pressure which their author was leading. 
 
 We have no account of Milton's method of teaching 
 from any competent pupil. Edward Phillips was an 
 amiable and upright man, who earned his living respec- 
 tably by tuition and the compilation of books. He held 
 his uncle's memory in great veneration. But when he 
 comes to describe the education he received at his uncle's 
 hands, the only characteristic on which he dwells is that of 
 quantity. Phillips's account is, however, supplemented 
 for us by Milton's written theory. His Tractate of Edu- 
 cation to Master Samuel Hartlib is probably known even 
 to those who have never looked at anything else of Milton's 
 in prose. 
 
 Of all the practical arts, that of education seems the 
 most cumbrous in its method, and to be productive of the 
 smallest results with the most lavish expenditure of 
 means. Hence the subject of education is one which is 
 always luring on the innovator and the theorist. Every 
 one, as he grows up, becomes aware of time lost, and effort 
 misapplied, in his own case. It is not unnatural to desire 
 to save our children from a like waste of power. And in a
 
 40 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [ciur. 
 
 time such as was that of Milton's youth, when all tra- 
 ditions were being questioned, and all institutions were to 
 be remodelled, it was certain that the school would be 
 among the earliest objects to attract an experimental 
 reformer. Among the advanced minds of the time there 
 had grown up a deep dissatisfaction with the received 
 methods of our schools, and more especially of our 
 universities. The great instaurator of all knowledge, 
 Bacon, in preaching the necessity of altering the whole 
 method of knowing, included as matter of course the 
 method of teaching to know. 
 
 The man who carried over the Baconian aspiration into 
 education was Comenius (d. 1670). A projector and en- 
 thusiast, Comenius desired, like Bacon, an entirely new 
 intellectual era. With Bacon's intellectual ambition, but 
 without Bacon's capacity, Comenius proposed to revo- 
 lutionise all knowledge, and to make complete wisdom 
 accessible to all, in a brief space of time, and with a 
 minimum of labour. Language only as an instrument, 
 not as an end in itself ; many living languages, instead of 
 the one dead language of the old school ; a knowledge of 
 things, instead of words ; the free use of our eyes and ears 
 upon the nature that surrounds us ; intelligent appre- 
 hension, instead of loading the memory — all these doc- 
 trines, afterwards inherited by the party of rational 
 reform, were first promulgated in Europe by the numerous 
 pamphlets— some ninety have been reckoned up — of this 
 Teuto-Slav, Comenius. 
 
 Comenius had as the champion of his views in England 
 .Samuel Ilartlib, a Dantziger by origin, settled in London 
 since 1G28. Ilartlib had even less of real science than 
 Comenius, but he was equally possessed by the Baconian 
 ideal of a new heaven and a new earth of knowledge.
 
 iv.] EDUCATIONAL THEORY. 47 
 
 .Not himself a discoverer in any branch, lie was unceasingly 
 occupied in communicating the discoveries and inventions 
 of others. He had an ear for every novelty of whatever 
 kind, interesting himself in social, religious, philanthropic 
 schemes, as well as in experiments in the arts. A sanguine 
 universality of benevolence pervaded that generation of 
 ardent souls, akin only in their common anticipation of an 
 unknown Utopia. A secret was within the reach of 
 human ingenuity which would make all mankind happy. 
 But there were two directions more especially in which 
 Hartlib's zeal without knowledge abounded. These were 
 a grand scheme for the union of Protestant Christendom, 
 and his propagand of Comenius's school-reform. 
 
 For the first of these projects it was not likely that 
 Hartlib would gain a proselyte in Milton, who had at 
 one-and-twenty judged Anglican orders a servitude, and 
 was already chafing against the restraints of Presbytery. 
 But on his other hobby, that of school-reform, Milton was 
 not only sympathetic, but when Hartlib came to talk 
 with him, he found that most or all of Comenius's ideas 
 had already independently presented themselves to the 
 reflection or experience of the Englishman. At Hartlib's 
 request Milton consented to put down his thoughts on 
 paper, and even to print them in a quarto pamphlet of 
 eight pages, entitled, Of Education: to Master Samuel 
 Hartlib. 
 
 This tract, often reproduced and regarded, along with 
 one of Locke's, as a substantial contribution to the sub- 
 ject, must often have grievously disappointed those who 
 have eagerly consulted it for practical hints or guidance of 
 any kind. Its interest is wholly biographical. It cannot 
 be regarded as a valuable contribution to educational 
 theory, but it is strongly marked with the Miltonic indi-
 
 43 SECOND PEEIOD. 1640-1660. [ciiap. 
 
 viduality. We find in it the same lofty conception of the 
 aim "which Milton carried into everything he attempted ; 
 the same disdain of the "beaten routine, and proud reliance 
 upon his own resources. He had given vent elsewhere to 
 his discontent with the system of Camhridge, " which, as 
 in the time of her better health, and mine own younger 
 judgment, I never greatly admired, so now (1G42) much 
 less." In the letter to Hartlib he denounces with equal 
 fierceness the schools and " the many mistakes which have 
 made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuc- 
 cessful." The alumni of the universities carry away with 
 them a hatred and contempt for learning, and sink into 
 "ignorantly zealous" clergymen, or mercenary lawyers, 
 while the men of fortune betake themselves to feasts 
 and jollity. These last, Milton thinks, are the best of 
 the three classes. 
 
 All these moral shipwrecks are the consequence, 
 according to Milton, of bad education. It is in our 
 power to avert them by a reform of schools. But the 
 measures of reform, when produced, are ludicrously incom- 
 mensurable with the evils to be remedied. I do not 
 trouble the reader with the proposals ; they are a form of 
 the well-known mistake of regarding education as merely 
 the communication of useful knowledge. The doctrine as 
 propounded in the Tractate is complicated by the further 
 difficulty, that the knowledge is to be gathered out of 
 Greek and Latin books. This doctrine is advocated by 
 Milton with the ardour of his own lofty enthusiasm. In 
 virtue of the grandeur of zeal which inspires them, these 
 pages, which are in substance nothing more than the now 
 familiar omniscient examiner's programme, retain a place 
 as one of our classics. The fine definition of education 
 here given has never been improved upon : " I call a
 
 iv.] EDUCATIONAL THEOEY. 49 
 
 complete and generous education that which fits a man 
 to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the 
 offices, hoth private and public, of peace and war." This 
 is the true Milton. When he offers, in another page, as 
 an equivalent definition of the true end of learning, " to 
 repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know 
 God aright," we have the theological Milton, and what 
 he took on from the current language of his age. 
 
 Milton saw strongly, as many have done before and 
 since, one weak point in the practice of schools, namely, 
 the small result of much time. He fell into the natural 
 error of the inexperienced teacher, that of supposing that 
 the remedy was the ingestion of much and diversified 
 intelligible matter. It requires much observation of 
 young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of 
 unassimilated information stupefies the faculties instead of 
 training them. Is it fanciful to think that in Edward 
 Phillips, who was always employing his superficial pen 
 upon topics with which he snatched a fugitive acquain- 
 tance, we have a concrete example of the natural result 
 of the Mdtonic system of instruction 1 
 
 E
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 MARRIAGE, AND PAMPHLETS ON DIVORCE. 
 
 We have seen that Milton turned back from his unaccom- 
 plished tour because he " deemed it disgraceful to be 
 idling away his time abroad for his own gratification, 
 while his countrymen were contending for their liberty." 
 From these words biographers have inferred that he 
 hurried home with the view of taking service in the Par- 
 liamentarian army. This interpretation of his words 
 seems to receive confirmation from what Phillips thinks 
 he had heard, — " I am much mistaken if there were not 
 about this time a design in agitation of making him 
 Adjutant-General in Sir William Waller's army." 
 Phillips very likely thought that a recruit could enlist as 
 an Adjutant-General, but it does not appear from Milton's 
 own words that he himself ever contemplated service in 
 the field. The words " contending for liberty " (de liber- 
 tate dimicarent) could not, as said of the winter 1G38-39, 
 mean anything more than the strife of party. And when 
 war did break out, it must have been obvious to Milton 
 that he could serve the cause better as a scholar than as a 
 soldier. 
 
 That he never took service in the army is certain. If
 
 ch. v.] MARRIAGE. 51 
 
 there was a time when he should have heen found in the 
 ranks, it was on the 12th November, 1642, when every 
 able-bodied citizen turned out to oppose the march of the 
 king, who had advanced to Brentford. But we have the 
 evidence of the sonnet — 
 
 Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms, 
 
 that Milton, on this occasion, stayed at home. He had, 
 as he announced in February, 1642, "taken labour and 
 intent study " to be his portion in this life. He did not 
 contemplate enlisting his pen in the service of the Par- 
 liament, but the exaltation of his country's glory by the 
 composition of some monument of the English language, 
 as Dante or Tasso had done for Italian. But a project 
 ambitious as this lay too far off to be put in execution as 
 soon as. thought of. The ultimate purpose had to give 
 place to the immediate. One of these interludes, orkrinatiny 
 in Milton's personal relations, was his series of tracts on 
 divorce. 
 
 In the early part of the summer of 1643, Milton took 
 a sudden journey into the country, " nobody about him 
 certainly knowing the reason, or that it was any more 
 than a journey of recreation." He was absent about a 
 month, and when he returned he brought back a wife 
 with him. Nor was the bride alone. She was attended 
 " by some few of her nearest relations," and there was 
 feasting and celebration of the nuptials, in the house in 
 Aldersgate-street. 
 
 The bride's name was Mary, eldest daughter of Richard 
 Powell, Esq., of Forest Hill, J.P. for the county of Oxford. 
 Forest Hill is a village and parish about five miles from 
 Oxford on the Thame road, where Mr. Powell had a houso 
 
 e 2
 
 52 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [chap. 
 
 and a small estate of some 3007. a year, value of that day. 
 Forest Hill was within the ancient royal forest of Shot- 
 over, of . which Mr. Powell was lessee. The reader will 
 remember that the poet's father was horn at Stanton St. 
 John, the adjoining parish to Fewest Hill, and that Eichard 
 Milton, the grandfather, had been under-ranger of the 
 royal forest. There had been many transactions between 
 the Milton and the Powell families as far back as 1627. 
 In paying a visit to that neighbourhood, Milton was both 
 returning to the district which had been the home of all 
 the Miltons, and renewing an old acquaintance with the 
 Powell family. Mr. Powell, though in receipt of a fair 
 income for a country gentleman — 3001. a year of that day 
 may be roughly valued at 1000Z. of our day — and his wife 
 had brought him 30007., could not live within his means. 
 His children were numerous, and, belonging as he did to 
 the cavalier party, his house was conducted with the 
 careless hospitality of a royalist gentleman. Twenty years 
 before ho had begun borrowing, and among other persons 
 had had recourse to the prosperous and saving scrivener of 
 Bread-street. He was already mortgaged to the Miltons, 
 father and sons, more deeply than his estate had any 
 prospect of paying, which was perhaps the reason why he 
 found no difficulty in promising a portion of 1000/. with 
 his daughter. Milton, with a poet's want of caution, or 
 indifference to money, and with a lofty masculine dis- 
 regard of the temper and character of the girl he asked 
 to share his life, came home with his bride in triumph, 
 and held feasting in celebration of his hasty and ill con- 
 sidered choice. It was a beginning of sorrows to him. 
 Hitherto, up to his thirty-fifth, year, independent master 
 of leisure and the delights of literature, his years had 
 passed without a check or a shadow. From this day
 
 v.] MARRIAGE. 53 
 
 forward domestic misery, the importunities of business, 
 the clamour of controversy, crowned by the crushing 
 calamity of blindness, were to be his portion for more than 
 thirty years. Singular among poets in the serene fortune 
 of the first half of life, in the second half his piteous fate 
 was to rank in wretchedness with that of his masters, 
 Dante or Tasso. 
 
 The biographer, acquainted with the event, has no 
 difficulty in predicting it, and in saying at this point in 
 his story, that Milton might have known better than, 
 with his puritanical connections, to have taken to wife a 
 daughter of a cavalier house, to have brought her from a 
 roystering home, frequented by the dissolute officers of 
 the Oxford garrison, to the spare diet and philosophical 
 retirement of a recluse student, and to have looked for 
 sympathy and response for his speculations from an un- 
 educated and frivolous girl. Love has blinded, and will 
 continue to blind, the wisest men to calculations as easy 
 and as certain as these. And Milton, in whose soul 
 Puritan austerity was as yet only contending with the 
 more genial currents of humanity, had a far greater than 
 average susceptibility to the charm of woman. Even 
 at the later date of Paradise Lost, voluptuous thoughts, 
 as Mr. Hallam has observed, are not uncongenial to him. 
 And at an earlier age his poems, candidly pure from 
 the lascivious inuendoes of his contemporaries, have pre- 
 served the record of the rapid impression of the momen- 
 tary passage of beauty upon his susceptible mind. Once, 
 at twenty, he was set all on flame by the casual meeting, 
 in one of his walks in the suburbs of London, with a 
 damsel whom he never saw again. Again, sonnets in. 
 to v. tell how he fell before the new type of foreign 
 beauty which crossed his path at Bologna. A similar
 
 54 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 surprise of his fancy at the expense of his judgment seems 
 to have happened on the present occasion of his visit to 
 Shotover. There is no evidence that Mary Powell was 
 handsome, and we may be sure that it would have heen 
 mentioned if she had been. But she had youth, and 
 country freshness ; her " unlivcliness and natural sloth 
 unfit for conversation" passed as "the bashful muteness 
 of a virgin f and if a doubt intruded that he was being 
 too hasty, Milton may have thought that a girl of seven- 
 teen could be moulded at pleasure. 
 
 He was too soon undeceived. His dream of married 
 happiness barely lasted out the honeymoon. He found 
 that he had mated himself to a clod of earth, who not 
 only was not now, but had not the capacity of becoming, 
 a helpmeet for him. With Milton, as with the whole 
 Calvinistic and Puritan Europe, woman was a creature of 
 an inferior and subordinate class. Man was the final 
 cause of God's creation, and woman was there to minister 
 to this nobler being. In his dogmatic treatise, De 
 doctrina Christiana, Milton formulated this sentiment 
 in the thesis, borrowed from the schoolmen, that the 
 soul was communicated " in semine patris." The cavalier 
 section of society had inherited the sentiment of chivalry, 
 and contrasted with the roundhead not more by its loyalty 
 to the person of the prince, than by its recognition of the 
 superior grace and refinement of womanhood. Even in 
 the debased and degenerate epoch of court life which 
 followed 1660, the forms and language of homage still 
 preserved the tradition of a nobler scheme of manners. 
 The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being parcel of 
 Catholicism, and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of 
 the subjection and seclusion of woman. Milton, in whose 
 mind the rigidity of Puritan doctrine was now contending
 
 v.] MARRIAGE. 55 
 
 with the freer spirit of culture and romance, shows on 
 the present occasion a like conflict of doctrine with 
 sentiment. While he adopts the oriental hypothesis of 
 woman for the sake of man, he modifies it by laying 
 more stress upon mutual affection, the charities of home, 
 and the intercommunion of intellectual and moral life, 
 than upon that ministration of woman to the appetite 
 and comforts of man, which makes up the whole of her 
 functions in the Puritan apprehension. The failure in 
 his own case to obtain this genial companionship of soul, 
 which he calls "the gentlest end of marriage," is what 
 gave the keenest edge to his disappointment in his matri- 
 monial venture. 
 
 Eut however keenly he felt and regretted the precipi- 
 tancy which had yoked him for life to " a mute and 
 spiritless mate," the breach did not come from his side. 
 The girl herself conceived an equal repugnance to the 
 husband she had thoughtlessly accepted, probably on the 
 strength of his good looks, which was all of Milton that 
 she was capable of appreciating. A young bride, taken 
 suddenly from the freedom of a jovial and an undisci- 
 plined home, rendered more lax by civd confusion and easy 
 intercourse with the officers of the royalist garrison, and 
 committed to the sole society of a stranger, and that 
 stranger possessing the rights of a husband, and expecting 
 much from all who lived with him, may not unnaturally 
 have been seized with panic terror, and wished herself 
 home again. The young Mrs. Milton not only wished it, 
 but incited her family to write and beg that she might be 
 allowed to go home to stay the remainder of the summer. 
 The request to quit her husband at the end of the first 
 month was so unreasonable, that the parents would 
 hardly have made it if they had not suspected some pro-
 
 56 SECOND PERIOD. lGiO-1660. [chap. 
 
 found cause of estrangement. ISor could Milton have 
 consented, as he did, to so extreme a remedy, unless he 
 had felt that the case required no less, and that her 
 mother's advice and influence were the most availahle 
 means of awakening his wife to a sense of her duty. 
 Milton's consent was therefore given. He may have 
 thought it desirahle she should go, and thus Mrs. Powell 
 would not have been going very much beyond the truth 
 when she pretended some years afterwards that her son- 
 indaw had turned away his wife for a long space. 
 
 Mary Milton went to Forest Hill in July, but on the 
 understanding that she was to come back at Michaelmas. 
 "When the appointed time came, she did not appear. Mil- 
 ton wrote for her to come. JS"o answer. Several other 
 letters met the same fate. At last he despatched a foot 
 messenger to Forest Hill desiring her return. The 
 messenger came back only to report that he had been 
 " dismissed with some sort of contempt." It was evident 
 that Mary Milton's family had espoused her cause as 
 against her husband. "Whatever may have been the 
 secret motive of their conduct, they explained the quarrel 
 politically, and began to repent, so Phillips thought, of 
 having matched the eldest daughter of their house with a 
 violent Presbyterian. 
 
 If Milton had " hasted too eagerly to light the nuptial 
 torch," he had been equally ardent in his calculations of 
 the domestic happiness upon which he was to enter. His 
 poet's imagination had invested a dull and common girl 
 with rare attributes moral and intellectual, and had pic- 
 tured for him the state of matrimony as an earthly paradise, 
 in which he was to be secure of a response of affection 
 showing itself in a communion of intelligent interests. 
 In proportion to the brilliancy of his ideal anticipation
 
 v.] PAMPHLETS ON DIVORCE. 57 
 
 was the fury of despair which came upon him when he 
 found out his mistake. A common man, in a common 
 age, would have vented his vexation upon the individual. 
 Milton, living at a time when controversy turned away 
 from details, and sought to dig down to the roots of every 
 question, instead of urging the hardships of his own case, 
 set to to consider the institution of marriage in itself. He 
 published a pamphlet with the title, The Doctrine and 
 Discipline of Divorce, at first anonymously, hut putting 
 his name to a second edition, much enlarged. He further 
 reinforced this argument in chief with three supplementary 
 pamphlets, partly in answer to opponents and objectors ; 
 for there was no lack of opposition, indeed of outcry loud 
 and fierce. 
 
 A biographer closely scans the pages of these pam- 
 phlets, not for the sake of their direct argument, but to 
 see if he can extract from them any indirect hints of their 
 author's personal relations. There is found in them no 
 mention of Milton's individual case. Had we no other 
 information, we should not be authorised to infer from 
 them that the question of the marriage tie was more than 
 an abstract question with the author. 
 
 But though all mention of his own case is studiously 
 avoided by Milton, his pamphlet, when read by the light 
 of Phillips's brief narrative, does seem to give some assis- 
 tance in apprehending the circumstances of this obscure 
 passage of the poet's life. The mystery has always been 
 felt by the biographers, but has assumed a darker hue 
 since the discovery by Mr. Masson of a copy of the first 
 edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, with 
 the written date of August 1. According to Phillips's 
 narrative, the pamphlet was engendered by Milton's 
 indignation at his wife's contemptuous treatment of him,
 
 58 SECOND PERIOD. 1C40 -1C60. [chap. 
 
 in refusing to keep the engagement to return at Michael- 
 mas, and would therefore he composed in Octoher and 
 November, time enough to allow for the sale of the edition, 
 and the preparation of the enlarged edition, which came 
 out in February, 1644. But if the date " August 1 " for 
 the first edition he correct, we have to suppose that Milton 
 was occupying himself with the composition of a vehe- 
 ment and impassioned argument in favour of divorce for 
 incompatibility of temper, during the honeymoon ! Such 
 behaviour on Milton's part, he being thirty-five, towards a 
 girl of seventeen, to whom he was bound to show all 
 loving tenderness, is so horrible, that a suggestion has been 
 made that there was a more adequate cause for his dis- 
 pleasure, a suggestion which Milton's biographer is bound 
 to notice, even if he does not adopt it. The suggestion, 
 which I believe was first made by a writer in the 
 Athenaeum, is that Milton's young wife refused him the 
 consummation of the marriage. The supposition is 
 founded upon a certain passage in Milton's pamphlet. 
 
 If the early date of the pamphlet be the true date ; if 
 the Doctrine and Discipline was in the hands of the 
 public on August 1 ; if Milton was brooding over this 
 seething agony of passion all through July, with the young 
 bride, to whom he had been barely wedded a month, in 
 the house where he was writing, then the only apology for 
 this outrage upon the charities, not to say decencies, of 
 home is that which is suggested by the passage referred 
 to. Then the pamphlet, however imprudent, becomes par- 
 donable. It is a passionate cry from the depths of a great 
 despair ; another evidence of the noble purity of a nature 
 which refused to console itself as other men would have 
 consoled themselves ; a nature which, instead of an 
 egotistical whine for its own deliverance, sets itself to
 
 v.] PAMPHLETS ON DIVORCE. 59 
 
 plead the common cause of man and of society. He gives 
 no intimation of any individual interest, but his argument 
 throughout glows with a white heat of concealed emotion, 
 such as could only be stirred by the sting of some per- 
 sonal and present misery. 
 
 Notwithstanding the amount of free opinion abroad in 
 England, or at least in London, at this date, Milton's 
 divorce pamphlets created a sensation of that sort which 
 Gibbon is fond of calling a scandal. A scandal, in this 
 sense, must always arise in your own party ; you cannot 
 scandalise the enemy. And so it was now. The Episco- 
 palians were rejoiced that Milton should ruin his credit 
 with his own side by advocating a paradox. The Presby- 
 terians hastened to disown a man who enabled their 
 opponents to brand their religious scheme as the parent 
 of moral heresies. For though church government and 
 the English constitution in all its parts had begun to be 
 open questions, speculation had not as yet attacked either 
 of the two bases of society, property or the family. Loud 
 was the outcry of the Philistines. There was no doubt 
 that the rigid bonds of Presbyterian orthodoxy would not 
 in any case have long held Milton. They were snapped 
 at once by the publication of his opinions on divorce, and 
 Milton is henceforward to be ranked among the most 
 independent of the new party which shortly after this 
 date began to be heard of under the name of Inde- 
 pendents. 
 
 But the men who formed the nucleus of this new mode 
 of thinking were as yet, in 1643, not consolidated into a 
 sect, still less was their importance as the coming political 
 party dreamt of. At present they were units, only drawn 
 to each other by the sympathy of opinion. The contempt 
 tuous epithets, Anabaptist, Antinomian, &c, could be
 
 60 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 levelled against them with fatal effect by every Philistine, 
 and were freely used on this occasion against Milton. He 
 says of himself that he now lived in a world of dis- 
 csteem. Nor was there wanting, to complete his dis- 
 comfiture, the practical parody of the doctrine of divorce. 
 A Mistress Attaway, lacewoman in Bell-alley, and she- 
 preacher in Coleman-street, had been reading Master 
 Milton's book, and remembered that she had an unsanc- 
 tified husband, who did not speak the language of Canaan. 
 She further reflected that Mr. Attaway was not only 
 unsauctified, but was also absent with the army, while 
 William Jenney was on the spot, and, like herself, also 
 a preacher. Could a " scandalised " Presbyterian help 
 pointing the finger of triumphant scorn at such examples, 
 the natural fruits of that mischievous book, The Doctrine 
 and Discipline ? 
 
 Beyond the stage of scandal and disesteem the matter 
 did not proceed. In dedicating The Doctrine and Dis- 
 cipline to the Parliament, Milton had specially called on 
 that assembly to legislate for the relief of men who were 
 encumbered with unsuitable spouses. Wo notice was 
 taken of this appeal, as there was far other work on hand, 
 and no particular pressure from without in the .direction 
 of Milton's suit. Divorce for incompatibility of temper 
 remained his private crotchet, or obtained converts only 
 among his fellow-sufferers, who, however numerous, did 
 not form a body important enough to enforce by clamour 
 their demand for relief. 
 
 Milton was not very well pleased to find that the Par- 
 liament had no ear for the bitter cry of distress wrung 
 from their ardent admirer and staunch adherent. Accord- 
 ingly, in 1645, in dedicating the last of the divorce pam- 
 phlets, which he entitled Tetrachordon, to the Parliament,
 
 v.] PAMPHLETS ON DIVORCE. 61 
 
 he concluded with a threat, " If the law make not a timely 
 provision, let the law, as reason is, hear the censure of the 
 conseqiiences." 
 
 This threat he was prepared to put in execution, and 
 did, in 1645, as Phillips tells us, contemplate a union, 
 which could not have heen a marriage, with another 
 woman. He was ahle at this time to find some part of 
 that solace of conversation which his wife failed to give 
 him, among his female acquaintance. Especially we find 
 him at home in the house of one of the Parliamentary 
 women, the Lady Margaret Ley, a lady " of great wit and 
 ingenuity," the " honoured Margaret " of Sonnet x. But 
 the Lady Margaret was a married woman, "being the wife 
 of a Captain Hohson, a " very accomplished gentleman," 
 of the Isle of Wight. The young lady who was the 
 object of his attentions, and who, if she were the " vir- 
 tuous young lady" of Sonnet ix., was "in the prime of 
 earliest youth," was a daughter of a Dr. Davis, of whom 
 nothing else is now known. She is described by Phillips, 
 who may have seen her, as a very handsome and witty 
 gentlewoman. Though Milton was ready to brave public 
 opinion, Miss Davis was not. And so the suit hung, 
 when all schemes of the kind were put an end to by the 
 unexpected submission of Mary Powell. 
 
 Since October, 1643, when Milton's messenger had been 
 dismissed from Forest Hill, the face of the civil struggle 
 was changed. The Presbyterian army had been replaced by 
 that of the Independents, and the immediate consequence 
 had been the decline of the royal cause, consummated by 
 its total ruin on the day of ISTaseby, in June, 1645. 
 Oxford was closely invested, Forest Hill occupied by the 
 besiegers, and the Powell family compelled to take refuge 
 within the lines of the city. Financial bankruptcy, too,
 
 H2 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 Lad overtaken the Powells. These influences, rather 
 than any rumours which may have reached them of 
 Milton's designs in regard to Miss Davis, wrought a 
 change in the views of the Powell family. By the 
 triumph of the Independents Mr. Milton was hecome a 
 man of consideration, and might he useful as a protector. 
 They concluded that the hest thing they could do was to 
 seek a reconciliation. There were not wanting friends of 
 Milton's also, some perhaps divining his secret discontent, 
 who thought that such reconciliation would he hetter for 
 him too, than perilling his happiness upon the experiment 
 of an illegal connexion. A conspiracy of the friends of 
 hoth parties contrived to introduce Mary Powell into a 
 house where Milton often visited in St. Martin'sde-Grand. 
 She was secreted in an adjoining room, on an occasion 
 when Milton was known to he coming, and he was sur- 
 prised by seeing her suddenly brought in, throw herself 
 on her knees, and ask to be forgiven. The poor young 
 thing, now two years older and wiser, but still only 
 nineteen, pleaded, truly or falsely, that her mother "had 
 been all along the chief promoter of her frowardness." 
 Milton, with a " noble leonine clemency " which became 
 him, cared not for excuses for the past. It was enough 
 that she was come back, and was willing to live with him 
 as his wife. He received her at once, and not only her, 
 but on the surrender of Oxford, in June, 1646, and the 
 sequestration of Forest Hill, took in the whole family of 
 Powells, including the mother-in-law, whose influence with 
 her daughter might even again trouble his peace. 
 
 It is impossible not to see that Milton had this impres- 
 sive scene, enacted in St. Martin'sde-Grand in 1645, 
 before his mind, when he wrote, twenty years afterwards, 
 the lines in Paradise Lost, x. 937 : —
 
 v.] RECONCILIATION WITH HIS WIFE. 63 
 
 . . . Eve, with tears that ceas'd not flowing 
 And tresses all disorder'd, at his feet 
 Fell humble, and embracing them, besought 
 His peace . 
 
 . . . Her lowly plight 
 Immovable, till peace obtain' d from fault 
 Acknowledg'd and deplor'd, in Adam wrought 
 Commiseration ; soon his heart relented 
 Tow'rds her, his life so late and sole delight, 
 Now at his feet submissive in distress ! 
 Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking, 
 
 •p *F T* V "P 
 
 At once disarm' d, his anger all he lost. 
 
 The garden-house in Aldersgate-street had before been 
 found too small for the pupils who were being now 
 pressed upon Milton. It was to a larger house in Bar- 
 bican, a side street leading out of Aldersgate, that he 
 brought the Powells and Mary Milton. Milton probably- 
 abated his exactions on the point of companionship, and 
 learned to be content with her acquiescence in the duties 
 of a wife. In July, 1646, she became a mother, and bore 
 in all four children. Of these, three, all daughters, lived 
 to grow up. Mary Milton herself died in giving birth to 
 the fourth child in the summer of 1652. She was only 
 twenty-six, and had been married to Milton nine years.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PAMPHLETS. 
 
 We have now seen Milton engaged in teaching and 
 writing on education, involved in domestic unhappiness, 
 and speculating on the obligations of marriage. But 
 neither of these topics formed the principal occupation of 
 his mind during these years. He had renounced a cherished 
 scheme of travel because his countrymen were engaged at 
 home in contending for their liberties, and it could not 
 but be that the gradually intensified stages of that struggle 
 engrossed his interest, and claimed his participation. 
 
 So imperative did he regard this claim that he allowed 
 it to override the purposed dedication of his life to poetry. 
 Not indeed for ever and aye, but for a time. As he had 
 renounced Greece, the ^Egean Isles, Thebes, and the East 
 for the fight for freedom, so now to the same cause he 
 postponed tho composition of his epic of Arthurian 
 romance, or whatever his mind "in the spacious circuits of 
 her musing proposed to herself of highest hope and hardest 
 attempting." No doubt at first, in thus deferring the 
 work of his life, lie thought the delay would be for a 
 brief space. Ho did not foresee that having once taken 
 an oar, he would be chained to it for more than twenty
 
 ch. vi.] PAMPHLETS. 65 
 
 years, and that lie would finally owe his release to the 
 ruin of the cause he had served. But for the Restoration 
 and the overthrow of the Puritans, we should never have 
 had the great Puritan epic. 
 
 The period then of his political activity is to he re- 
 garded as an episode in the life of the poet Milton. It 
 is indeed an episode which fills twenty years, and those 
 the most vigorous years of manhood, from his thirty- 
 second to his fifty-second year. He himself was con- 
 scious of the sacrifice he was making, and apologises to 
 the puhlic for thus defrauding them of the "better work 
 which he stood pledged to execute. As he puts it, there 
 was no choice for him. He could not help himself, at 
 this critical juncture, " when the Church of God was at 
 the foot of her insulting enemies ;" he would never have 
 ceased to reproach himself, if he had refused to employ 
 the fruits of his studies in her hehalf. He saw also that a 
 generation inflamed by the passions of conflict, and look- 
 ing in hreathless suspense for the issue of battles, was not 
 in a mood to attend to poetry. ISTor, indeed, was he 
 ready to write, "not having yet (this is in 1642) com- 
 pleted to my mind the full circle of my private studies." 
 
 But though he is drawn into the strife against his will, 
 and in defiance of his genius, when he is in it, he throws 
 into it the whole vehemence of his nature. The pam- 
 phlet period, I have said, is an episode in the life of the 
 poet. But it is a genuine part of Milton's life. However 
 his ambition may have been set upon an epic crown, his 
 zeal for what he calls the church was an equal passion, 
 nay had, in his judgment, a paramount claim upon him. 
 He is a zealot among the zealots ; his cause is the cause 
 of God ; and the sword of the Independents is the 
 sword of the Lord and of Gideon. He does not refute 
 
 F
 
 66 SECOND PEEIOD. 1610-1660. [chap. 
 
 opponents, but curses enemies. Yet his rage, even when 
 most delirious, is always a Miltonic rage ; it is grand, 
 sublime, terrible ! Mingled with the scurrilities of the 
 theological brawl are passages of the noblest English ever 
 written. Hartley Coleridge explains the dulness of the 
 wit-combats in Shakspeare and Jonson, on the ground 
 that repartee is the accomplishment of lighter thinkers 
 and a less earnest age. So of Milton's pamphlets it must 
 be said that he was not fencing for pastime, but fighting 
 for all he held most worthy. He had to think only of 
 making his blows tell. When a battle is raging, and my 
 friends are sorely pressed, am I not to help because good 
 manners forbid the shedding of blood 1 
 
 No good man can, with impunity, addict himself to 
 party. And the best men will suffer most, because their 
 conviction of the goodness of their cause is deeper. But 
 when one with the sensibility of a poet throws himself 
 into the excitements of a struggle, he is certain to lose 
 his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination 
 which qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life, 
 unfits him for participation in that real life, through the 
 manoeuvres and compromises of which reason is the only 
 guide, and where imagination is as much misplaced as it 
 would be in a game of chess. " The ennobling difference 
 between one man and another is that one feels more than 
 another." Milton's capacity of emotion, when once he 
 became champion of a cause, could not be contained 
 within the bounds of ordinary speech. It breaks into 
 ferocious reprobation, into terrific blasts of vituperation, 
 beneath which the very language creaks, as the timbers 
 of a ship in a storm. Corruptio optimi pessima. The 
 archangel is recognisable by the energy of his malice. 
 "Were all those accomplishments, those many studious
 
 vi.] PAMPHLETS. G7 
 
 years hiving wisdom, the knowledge of all the tongues, 
 the command of all the thoughts of all the ages, and that 
 wealth of English expression — were all these acquirements 
 only of use, that their possessor might vie in defamation 
 with an Edwards or a Du Moulin ] 
 
 Eor it should be noted that these pamphlets, now only 
 serving as a record of the prostitution of genius to political 
 party, were, at the time at which they appeared, of no use 
 to the cause in which they were written. Writers, with 
 a professional tendency to magnify their office, have always 
 been given to exaggerate the effect of printed words. 
 There are examples of thought having been influenced by 
 books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetorical. 
 Milton's pamphlets are not works of speculation, or philo- 
 sophy, or learning, or solid reasoning on facts. They 
 • are inflammatory appeals, addressed to the passions of 
 the hour. He who was meditating the erection of an 
 enduring creation, such as the world " would not wil- 
 lingly let die," was content to occupy himself with the 
 most ephemeral of all hackwork. His own polemical 
 writings may be justly described in the words he himself 
 uses of a book by one of his opponents, as calculated " to 
 gain a short, contemptible, and soon-fading reward, not to 
 stir the constancy and solid firmness of any wise man .... 
 but to catch the worthless ajiprobation of an inconstant, 
 irrational, and image-doting rabble." 
 
 It would have been not unnatural that the public 
 school and university man, the admirer of Shakspeare 
 and the old romances, the pet of Italian academies, the 
 poet-scholar, himself the author of two Masks, who was 
 nursing his wings for a new flight into the realms of 
 verse, should have sided with the cavaliers against the 
 Puritans, with the party of culture and the humanities 
 
 F 2
 
 6S SECOND PERIOD. 1610-1660. [chap. 
 
 against the party which shut up the theatres and despised 
 profane learning. But we have seen that there was 
 another side to Milton's mind. This may he spoken of 
 as his other self, the Puritan self, and regarded as in 
 internal conflict with the poet's self. His twenty years' 
 pamphlet warfare may he presented hy his "biographer as 
 the expression of the Puritanic Milton, who shall have 
 heen driven back upon his suppressed instincts as a poet 
 hy the ruin of his political hopes. This chart of Milton's 
 life is at once simple and true. But like all physiological 
 diagrams it falls short of the suhtlety and complexity of 
 human character. A study of the pamphlets will show that 
 the poet is all there, indeed only too openly for influence on 
 opinion, and that the hlighted hope of the patriot lends a 
 secret pathos to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. 
 
 This other element in Milton is not accurately named 
 Puritanism. Even the term republicanism is a coarse and 
 conventional description of that sentiment which domi- 
 nated his whole being, and which is the inspiration at once 
 of his poetry and of his prose. To give a name to this 
 sentiment, I must call it the love of liberty. It was an 
 aspiration at once real and vague, after a new order of 
 things, an order in which the old injustices and oppres- 
 sions should cease ; after a new Jerusalem, a millennium, 
 a Utopia, an Oceana. Its aim was to realise in political 
 institutions that great instauration of which Bacon dreamed 
 in the world of intelligence. It was much more negative 
 than affirmative, and knew better, as we all do, how good 
 was hindered than how it should be promoted. " I did 
 hut prompt the age to quit their clogs." Milton embodied, 
 more perfectly than any of his cotemporaries, this spirit 
 of the age. It is the ardent aspiration after the pure and 
 noble life, the aspiration which stamps every line he
 
 vi.] PAMPHLETS. 69 
 
 wrote, verse or prose, with a dignity as of an heroic age. 
 This gives consistency to all his utterances. The doctri- 
 naire republican of to-day cannot understand how the 
 man who approved the execution of the would-be despot 
 Charles Stuart, should have been the hearty supporter of 
 the real autocrat Oliver Cromwell. Milton was not the 
 slave of a name. He cared not for the word republic, 
 so as it was well with the commonwealth. Parliaments 
 or single rulers, he knew, are but means to an end ; if 
 that end was obtained, no matter if the constitutional 
 guarantees exist or not. Many of Milton's pamphlets are 
 certainly party pleadings, choleric, one-sided, personal. 
 But through them all runs the one redeeming charac- 
 teristic — that they are all written on the side of liberty. 
 He defended religious liberty against the prelates, civil 
 liberty against the crown, the liberty of the press against 
 the executive, liberty of conscience against the Presby- 
 terians, and domestic liberty against the tyranny of canon 
 law. Milton's pamphlets might have been stamped with 
 the motto which Selden inscribed (in Greek) in all his 
 books, " Liberty before everything." 
 
 One virtue these pamphlets possess, the virtue of style. 
 They are monuments of our language so remarkable that 
 Milton's prose works must always be resorted to by 
 students, as long as English remains a medium of ideas. 
 Yet even on the score of style, Milton's prose is subject 
 to serious deductions. His negligence is such as to 
 amount to an absence of construction. He who, in his 
 verse, trained the sentence with delicate sensibility to 
 follow his guiding hand into excpuisite syntax, seems in 
 his prose writing to abandon his meaning to shift for 
 itself. Here Milton compares disadvantageously with 
 Hooker. Hooker's elaborate sentence, like the sentence
 
 70 SECOND PEEIOD. 1610-1660. Lciiap. 
 
 of Demosthenes, is composed of parts so hinged, of clauses 
 so subordinated to the main thought, that we foresee the 
 end from the beginning, and close the period with a sense 
 of perfect roundness and totality. Milton does not seem 
 to have any notion of what a period means. He begins 
 anywhere, and leaves off, not when the sense closes, 
 but when he is out of breath. We might have thought 
 this pell-mell huddle of his words was explained, if not 
 excused, by the exigencies of the party pamphlet, which 
 cannot wait. But the same asyntactic disorder is equally 
 found in the History of Britain, which he had in hand 
 for forty years. Nor is it only the Miltonic sentence 
 wbich is incoherent ; the whole arrangement of his topics 
 is equally loose, disjointed, and desultory. His inspira- 
 tion comes from impulse. Had he stayed to chastise his 
 emotional writing by reason and the laws of logic, he would 
 have deprived himself of the sources of his strength. 
 
 These serious faults are balanced by virtues of another 
 kind. Putting Bacon aside, the condensed force and 
 poignant brevity of whose aphoristic wisdom has no 
 parallel in English, there is no other prosaist who possesses 
 anything like Milton's command over the resources of our 
 language. Milton cannot match the musical harmony 
 and exactly balanced periods of his predecessor Hooker. 
 He is without the power of varied illustration, and accu- 
 mulation of ornamental circumstance, possessed by his 
 contemporary, Jeremy Taylor (1G13 — 16G7). But neither 
 of these great writers impresses the reader with a sense of 
 unlimited power such as wc feel to reside in Milton. 
 Yast as is the wealth of magnificent words which he 
 flings with both hands carelessly upon the page, we feel 
 that there is still much more in reserve. 
 
 The critics have observed (Collier's Poetical Decameron)
 
 vi.] MILTON'S PROSE. 71 
 
 that as Milton advanced in life lie gradually disused the 
 compound words he had heen in the hahit of making for 
 himself. However this may be, his words are the words 
 of one who made a study of the language, as a poet 
 studies language, searching its capacities for the expression 
 of surging emotion. Jeremy Taylor's prose is poetical 
 prose. Milton's prose is not poetical prose, but a 
 different thing, the prose of a poet ; not like Taylor's, 
 loaded with imagery on the outside ; but coloured by 
 imagination from within. Milton is the first English 
 writer who, possessing in the ancient models a standard 
 of the effect which could be produced by choice of words, 
 set himself to the conscious study of our native tongue 
 with a firm faith in its as yet undeveloped powers as an 
 instrument of thought. 
 
 The words in Milton's poems have been counted, and 
 it appears that he employs 8000, while Shakspeare's plays 
 and poems yield about 15,000. From this it might be 
 inferred that the Miltonic vocabulary is only half as rich 
 as that of Shakspeare. But no inference can be founded 
 upon the absolute number of words used by any writer. 
 We must know, not the total of different words, but 
 the }oroportion of different words to the whole of any 
 writer's words. Now to furnish a list of 100 different 
 words the English Bible requires 531 common words, 
 Shakspeare 164, Milton 135 only. This computation is 
 founded on the poems ; it would be curious to have the 
 same test tried upon the prose writings, though no such 
 test can be as trustworthy as the educated ear of a listener 
 to a continued reading. 
 
 It is no part of a succinct biography, such as the present, 
 to furnish an account in detail of the various controversies 
 of the time, as Milton engaged in them. The reader will
 
 72 SECOND PERIOD. 16-10-1660. [chap. 
 
 doubtless be content with the bare indication of the sub- 
 jects on which he wrote. The whole number of Milton's 
 political pamphlets is twenty-five. Of these, twenty-one 
 are written in English, and four in Latin. Of the Tractate 
 of Education and the four divorce pamphlets something 
 has been already said. Of the remaining twenty, nine, 
 or nearly half, relate to church government, or ecclesiastical 
 affairs ; eight treat of the various crises of the civil strife ; 
 and two are personal vindications of himself against one of 
 his antagonists. There remains one tract of which the 
 subject is of a more general and permanent nature, the 
 best known of all the series, Areopagitica : A Speech for 
 the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of 
 England. The whole series of twenty-five extends over 
 a period of somewhat less than twenty years ; the earliest, 
 viz., Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in Eng- 
 land, and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it, having 
 been published in 1641 ; the latest, entitled, ^4. ready and 
 easy way to establish a free Commonwealth, coming out in 
 March, 16G0, after the torrent of royalism had set in, 
 which was to sweep away the men and the cause to which 
 Milton had devoted himself. Milton's pen thus accom- 
 panied the whole of the Puritan revolution from the 
 modest constitutional opposition in which it commenced, 
 through its unexpected triumph, to its crushing overthrow 
 by the royalist and clerical reaction. 
 
 The autumn of 1641 brought with it a sensible lull in 
 the storm of revolutionary passion. Indeed, there began 
 to appear all the symptoms of a reaction, and of the 
 formation of a solid conservative party, likely to be strong 
 enough to check, or even to suppress, the movement. The 
 impulse seemed to have spent itself, and a desire for rest
 
 vi.] POLITICS. 73 
 
 from political agitation began to steal over the nation. 
 Autumn and the harvest turn men's thoughts towards 
 country occupations and sports. The King went off to 
 Scotland in August ; the Houses adjourned till the 20th 
 October. The Scottish army had been paid off, and had 
 repassed the border; the Scottish commissioners and 
 preachers had left London. 
 
 It was a critical moment for the Puritan party. Some 
 very considerable triumphs they had gained. The arch- 
 enemy Strafford had been brought to the block ; Laud 
 was in the tower ; the leading members of Convocation, 
 bishops, deans, and archdeacons, had been heavily fined ; 
 the Star Chamber and the High Commission Court had 
 been abolished ; the Stannary and Forestal jurisdictions 
 restrained. But the Puritan movement aimed at far more 
 than this. It was not only that the root-and-branch men 
 were pushing for a generally more levelling policy, but 
 the whole Puritan party was committed to a struggle with 
 the hierarchy of the Established Church. It was not so 
 much that they demanded more and more reform, with 
 the growing appetite of revolution, but that as long as 
 bishops existed, nothing that had been wrested from them 
 was secure. The Puritans could not exist in safety side 
 by side with a church whose principle was that there was 
 no church without the apostolic succession. The abolition 
 of episcopacy and the substitution of the Presbyterian 
 platform was, so it then seemed, a bare measure of neces- 
 sary precaution, and not merely the extravagant demand 
 of dissatisfied spirits. Add to this, that it was well 
 understood by those near enough to the principal actors 
 in the drama, that the concessions made by the Court 
 had been easily made, because they coidd be taken back, 
 when the time should come, with equal ease. Even the
 
 74 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 most moderate men, who were satisfied with the amount 
 of reform already obtained, must have tremhled at its 
 insecurity. The Puritan leaders must have viewed with 
 dismay the tendency in the nation towards a reaction in 
 favour of things as they were. 
 
 It was upon this condition of the public mind that 
 Milton persistently poured pamphlet after pamphlet, 
 successive vials of apocalyptic wrath. He exhausts all 
 the resources of rhetoric, and plays upon every note in the 
 gamut of public feeling, that he may rouse the apathetic, 
 confirm the wavering, dumbfound the malignant ; where 
 there was zeal, to fan it into flame; where there was 
 opposition, to cow and browheat it by indignant scorn and 
 terrific denunciation. The first of these manifestoes was 
 (1) Of Reformation touching Church Discipline, of which 
 I have already spoken. This was immediately followed 
 by (2) Of Prelaticall Episcopacy. This tract was a reply, 
 in form, to a publication of Archbishop Usher. It was 
 about the end of May, 1641, that Usher had come 
 forward on the breach with his Judgment of Dr. Rainolds 
 touching the Original of Episcopacy. Rainolds, who had 
 been President of Corpus (1598— 1G07), had helonged to 
 the Puritan party in his day, had refused a bishopric, and 
 was known, like Usher himself, to be little favourable to 
 the exclusive claims of the high prelatists. He was thus 
 an unexceptionable witness to adduce in favour of the 
 apostolic origin of the distinction between bishop and 
 presbyter. Usher, in editing Rainolds' opinions, had 
 backed them up with all the additional citations which 
 his vast reading could supply. 
 
 Milton could not speak with the weight that attached 
 to Usher, the most learned Churchman of the ago, who 
 had spent eighteen years in going through a completo
 
 vi.] PAMPHLETS. 75 
 
 course of fathers and councils. But, in the first paragraph 
 of his answer, Milton adroitly puts the controversy upon 
 a footing by which antiquarian research is put out of 
 court. Episcopacy is either of human or divine origin. 
 If of human origin, it may he either retained or abolished, 
 as may be found expedient. If of divine appointment, it 
 must be proved to be so out of Scripture. If this cannot 
 be proved out of inspired Scripture, no accumulation of 
 merely human assertion of the point can be of the least 
 authority. Having thus shut out antiquity as evidence 
 in the case, he proceeds nevertheless to examine his oppo- 
 nent's authorities, and sets them aside by a style of argu- 
 ment which has more of banter than of criticism. 
 
 One incident of this collision between Milton, young 
 and unknown, and the venerable prelate, whom he was 
 assaulting with the rude wantonness of untempered youth, 
 deserves to be mentioned here. Usher had incautiously 
 included the Ignatian epistles among his authorities. 
 This laid the most learned man of the day at the mercy 
 of an adversary of less reading than himself. Milton, 
 who at least knew so much suspicion of the genuineness 
 of these remains as Casaubon's Exercitations on Baronius 
 and Vedelin's edition (Geneva, 1623) could suggest, 
 pounced upon this critical flaw, and delightedly denounced 
 in trenchant tones this " Perkin "Warbeck of Ignatius," 
 and the " supposititious offspring of some dozen epistles." 
 This rude shock it was which set Usher upon a more 
 careful examination of the Ignatian question. The result 
 was his welbknown edition of Ignatius, printed 1642, 
 though not published till 1644, in which he acknow- 
 ledged the total spuriousness of nine epistles, and the 
 partial interpolation of the other six. I have not noticed 
 in Usher's Prolegomena that he alludes to Milton's
 
 7G SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 onslaught. JSbr, indeed, was he called upon to do so in a 
 scientific investigation, as Milton had brought no contribu- 
 tion to the solution of the question beyond sound and fury. 
 
 Of Milton's third pamphlet, entitled (3) Animadversions 
 on the Remonstrants' defence against Smectymnuus, it need 
 only be said that it is a violent personal onfall upon 
 Joseph Hall, bishop, first, of Exeter and afterwards of 
 Norwich. The bishop, by descending into the arena of 
 controversy, had deprived himself of the privilege which 
 his literary eminence should have secured to him. But 
 nothing can excuse or reconcile us to the indecent scur- 
 rility with which he is assailed in Milton's pages, which 
 reflect more discredit on him who wrote them, than on 
 him against whom they are written. 
 
 The fifth pamphlet, called (5) An Apology against a 
 Pamphlet called, "A Modest Confutation, #c." (1612), is 
 chiefly remarkable for a defence of his own Cambridge 
 career. A man who throws dirt, as Milton did, must not 
 be surprised if some of it comes back to him. A son of 
 Bishop Hall, coming forward as his father's champion 
 and avenger, had raked up a garbled version of Milton's 
 quarrel with his tutor Chappell (see p. 6), and by a 
 further distortion had brought it out in the shape that, 
 "after an inordinate and violent youth spent at the 
 university," Milton had been "vomited out thence." 
 From the university this " alchemist of slander " follows 
 him to the city, and declares that where Milton's morn- 
 ing haunts are, he wisses not, but that his afternoons are 
 spent in playhouses and bordelloes. Milton replies to 
 these random charges by a lengthy account of himself and 
 his studious habits. As the reader may expect a specimen 
 of Milton's prose style, I quote a part of this autobio- 
 graphical paragraph : —
 
 vi.] PAMPHLETS. 77 
 
 " I had my time, as others have who have good learning 
 bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places where the 
 opinion was it might be sooner attained ; and, as the manner 
 is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most com- 
 mended, whereof some were grave orators and historians, whom 
 methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I under- 
 stood them ; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the 
 schools are not scarce ; whom both for the pleasing sound of 
 their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy, 
 and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, 
 which what it is there be few who know not, I was so allowed 
 
 to read, that no recreation came to me better welcome 
 
 Whence having observed them to account it the chief glory of 
 their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by 
 that could esteem themselves worthiest to love those high per- 
 fections which under one or other name they took to celebrate, 
 I thought with myself by eveiy instinct and presage of nature 
 which is not wont to be false, that what emboldened them to 
 this task might with such diligence as they used embolden me, 
 and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share, would 
 herein best appear and best value itself by how much more 
 wisely and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude 
 
 ears be absent) the object of not unlike praises Nor blame 
 
 it in those years to propose to themselves such a reward as the 
 noblest dispositions above other things in this life have some- 
 times preferred. Whereof not to be sensible when good and 
 fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judg- 
 ment, and withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For by the 
 firm settling of these persuasions I became so much a proficient, 
 that if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy 
 things of themselves, or unchaste of those names which before 
 they had extolled, this effect it wrought with me, from that 
 time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored ; 
 and above them all preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice 
 and Laura, who never write but honour of them to whom they 
 devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts with- 
 out transgression. And long it was not after, when I was 
 confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate
 
 78 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 1G60. [chap. 
 
 of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought 
 himself to be a true poem, that is a composition and pattern of 
 the best and honourablest things, not presuming to sing high 
 praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in him- 
 self the experience and the practice of all that which is praise- 
 worthy. 
 
 " These reasonings together with a certain niceness of nature, 
 an honest haughtiness and self-esteem, either of what I was or 
 what I might be, which let envy call pride, and lastly that 
 modesty, whereof, though not in the title-page, yet here, I may 
 be excused to make some beseeming profession, all these uniting 
 the supply of their natural aid together, kept me still above 
 those low descents of mind, beneath which he must deject and 
 plunge himself, that can agree to saleable and unlawful pros- 
 titutions. 
 
 " Next, for hear me out now, readers, that I may tell ye 
 whither my younger feet wandered, I betook me among those 
 lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the 
 deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from 
 hence had in renown over all Christendom. There I read it in 
 the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expence 
 of his best blood, or of his life if it so befel him, the honour aud 
 chastity of virgin or matron. From whence even then I learnt 
 what a noble virtue chastity ever must be, to the defence of 
 which so many worthies by such a dear adventure of themselves 
 had sworn. And if I found in the story afterwards any of them 
 by word or deed breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault 
 of the poet as that which is attributed to Homer to have written 
 undecent things of the gods. Only this my mind gave me, that 
 every free and gentle spirit without that oath ought to be 
 borne a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying 
 of a sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up both by his counsel 
 and his arm to serve and protect the weakness of any attempted 
 chastity. So that even those books which to many others have 
 been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how 
 unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements 
 to the love and steadfast observation of virtue." 
 
 This is one of the autobiographical oases in these pam-
 
 vi.] PAMPHLETS. 79 
 
 phlets, which are otherwise arid deserts of sand, scorched 
 hy the fire of extinct passion. It may he asked why it is 
 that a few men, Gihbon or Milton, are indulged without 
 challenge in talk ahout themselves, which would he 
 childish vanity or odious egotism in others. When a 
 Frenchman writes, " Nous avons tons, nous autres Fran- 
 cais, des seduisantes qualites " (Gaffarel), he is ridiculous- 
 The difference is not merely that we tolerate in a man of 
 confessed superiority what would he intolerable in an 
 equal. This is true ; hut there is a further distinction of 
 moral quality in men's confessions. In Milton, as in 
 Gihbon, the gratification of self-love, which attends all 
 autobiography, is felt to he subordinated to a nohler 
 intention. The lofty conception which Milton formed 
 of his vocation as a poet, expands his soul and absorbs his 
 personality. It is his office, and not himself, which lie 
 magnifies. The details of his life and nurture are im- 
 portant, not because they belong to him, but because he 
 belongs, by dedication, to a high and sacred caUing. He 
 is extremely jealous, not of his own reputation, but of the 
 credit which is due to lofty endeavour. "We have only to 
 compare Milton's magnanimous assumption of the first 
 place with the paltry conceit with which, in the following 
 age of Dryden and Pope, men spoke of themselves as 
 authors, to see the wide difference between the profes- 
 sional vanity of successful authorship and the proud con- 
 sciousness of a prophetic mission. Milton leads a 
 dedicated life, and has laid down for himself the law 
 that " he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write 
 well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a 
 true poem." 
 
 If Milton had not been the author of Lycidas and 
 Paradise Lost, his political pamphlets would have been
 
 80 SECOND PERIOD. 1640— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 as forgotten as are the thousand civil war tracts preserved 
 in the Thomason collection in the Museum, or have 
 served, at most, as philological landmarks. One, how- 
 ever, of his prose tracts has continued to enjoy some 
 degree of credit down to the present time, for its matter 
 as well as for its words, Areopagitica. This tract helongs 
 to the year 1644, the most fertile year in Milton's life, as 
 in it he brought out two of his divorce tracts, the 
 Tractate of Education, and the Areopagitica. As Milton's 
 moving principle was not any preconceived system of 
 doctrine but the passion for liberty in general, it was 
 natural that he should plead, when occasion called, for 
 liberty of the press, among others. The occasion was one 
 personal to himself. 
 
 It is well known that, early in the history of printing, 
 governments became jealous of this new instrument for 
 influencing opinion. In England, in 1556, under Mary, 
 the Stationers' Company was invested with legal privileges, 
 having the twofold object of protecting the book trade and 
 controlling writers. All publications were required to 
 be registered in the register of the company. No per- 
 sons could set up a press without a licence, or print 
 anything which had not been previously approved by 
 some official censor. The court, which had come to be 
 known as the court of Star-chamber, exercised criminal 
 jurisdiction over offenders, and even issued its own 
 decrees for the regulation of printing. The arbitrary 
 action of this court had no small share in bringing about 
 the resistance to Charles I. But the fall of the royal 
 authority did not mean the emancipation of the press. 
 The Parliament had no intention of letting go the control 
 which the monarchy had exercised ; the incidence of the 
 coercion Avas to be shifted from themselves upon their
 
 vr.] PAMPHLETS. 81 
 
 opponents. The Star-chamber was abolished, but its 
 powers of search and seizure were transferred to the Com- 
 pany of Stationers. Licensing was to go on as before, but 
 to be exercised by special commissioners, instead of by the 
 Archbishop and the Bishop of London. Only whereas, 
 before, contraband had consisted of Presbyterian books, 
 henceforward it was Catholic and Anglican books which 
 would be suppressed. 
 
 Such was not Milton's idea of the liberty of thought 
 and speech in a free commonwealth. He had himself 
 written for the Presbyterians four unlicensed pamphlets. 
 It was now open to him to write any number, and to get 
 them licensed, provided they were written on the same 
 side. This was not liberty, as he had learned it in his 
 classics, "ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere 
 licet." Over and above this encroachment on the liberty 
 of the free citizen, it so happened that at this moment 
 Milton himself was concerned to ventilate an opinion 
 which was not Presbyterian, and had no chance of passing 
 a Presbyterian licenser. His Doctrine and Discipline of 
 Divorce was just ready for press when the ordinance of 
 1643 came into operation. He published it without 
 licence and without printer's name, in defiance of the law, 
 and awaited the consequences. There were no conse- 
 quences. He repeated the offence in a second edition in 
 February, 1644, putting his name now (the first edition 
 had been anonymous), and dedicating it to the very Par- 
 liament whose ordinance he was setting at nought. This 
 time the Commons, stirred up by a petition from the 
 Company of Stationers, referred the matter to the com- 
 mittee of printing. It went no further. Either it was 
 deemed inexpedient to molest so sound a Parliamentarian 
 as Milton, or Cromwell's "accommodation resolution" of 
 
 G
 
 82 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [chap. 
 
 September 13, 1644, opened the eyes of the Presbyterian 
 zealots to the existence in the kingdom of a new, and 
 much wider, phase of opinion, which ominously threat- 
 ened the compact little edifice of Presbyterian truth that 
 they had been erecting with a profound conviction of its 
 exclusive orthodoxy. 
 
 The occurrence had been sufficient to give a new direc- 
 tion to Milton's thoughts. Eegardless of the fact that his 
 plea for liberty in marriage had fallen upon deaf ears, he 
 would plead for liberty of speech. The Areopagitica, for 
 the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, came out in November, 
 1644, an unlicensed, unregistered publication, without 
 printer's or bookseller's name. It was cast in the form of 
 a speech addressed to the Parliament. The motto was 
 taken from Euripides, and printed in the original Greek, 
 which was not, when addressed to the Parliament of 
 1644, the absurdity which it would be now. The title is 
 less appropriate, being borrowed from the Areopagitic 
 Discourse of Isocrates, between which and Milton's 
 Speech there is no resemblance either in subject or style. 
 All that the two productions have in common is their form. 
 They are both unspoken orations, written to the address 
 of a representative assembly — the one to the Boule or 
 Senate of Athens, the other to the Parliament of England. 
 
 Milton's Speech is in his own best style; a copious 
 flood of majestic eloquence, the outpouring of a noble 
 soul with a divine scorn of narrow dogma and paltry 
 aims. But it is a mere pamphlet, extemporised in, at 
 most, a month or two, without research or special know- 
 ledge, with no attempt to ascertain general principles, and 
 more than Milton's usual disregard of method. A jurist's 
 question is hero handled by a rhetorician. He has 
 preached a noble and heartrstirring sermon on his text,
 
 vi.] AREOPAGITICA. S3 
 
 but the problem for the legislator remains where it was. 
 The vagueness and confusion of the thoughts finds a 
 vehicle in language which is too often overcrowded and 
 obscure. I think the Areopagitica has few or no 
 offences against taste ; on the other hand, it has few or 
 none of those grand passages which redeem the scurrility 
 of his political pamphlets. The passage in which Milton's 
 visit to Galileo " grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition," 
 is mentioned, is often quoted for its biographical interest ; 
 and the terse dictum, " as good almost kill a man as kill a 
 good book," has passed into a current axiom. A paragraph 
 at the close, where he hints that the time may be come 
 to suppress the suppressors, intimates, but so obscurely 
 as to be likely to escape notice, that Milton had already 
 made up his mind that a struggle with the Presbyterian 
 party was to be the sequel of the overthrow of the 
 Royalists. He has not yet arrived at the point he will 
 hereafter reach, of rejecting the very idea of a minister 
 of religion, but he is already aggrieved by the implicit 
 faith which the Puritan laity, who had cast out bishops, 
 were beginning to bestow upon their pastor ; " a factor to 
 whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing 
 of his religious affairs." Finally, it must be noted, that 
 Milton, though he had come to see round Presbyterianism, 
 had not, in 1644, shaken off all dogmatic profession. His 
 toleration of opinion was far from complete. He would 
 call in the intervention of the executioner in the case of 
 " mischievous and libellous books," and could not bring 
 himself to contemplate the toleration of Popery and open 
 superstition, " which as it extirpates all religious and civil 
 supremacies, so itself should be extirpate ; provided first 
 that all charitable and compassionate means be used to 
 win and gain the weak and misled." 
 
 G 2
 
 81 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [en. vt. 
 
 The Areopagitica, as might he expected, produced no 
 
 effect upon the legislation of the Long Parliament, of whom 
 
 (says Hallam) "very few acts of political wisdom or 
 
 courage are recorded." Individual licensers "became more 
 
 lax in the performance of the duty, hut this is reasonably 
 
 to he ascribed to the growing spirit of independency — a 
 
 spirit which was incompatible with any emhargo on the 
 
 utterance of private opinion. A curious epilogue to the 
 
 history of this puhlication is the fact, first brought to light 
 
 by Mr. Masson, that the author of the Areopagitica, at a 
 
 later time, acted himself in the capacity of licenser. It 
 
 was in 1651, under the Commonwealth, Marchmont 
 
 Needham being editor of the weekly paper called Mer- 
 
 curius Politicus, that Milton was associated with him as his 
 
 censor or supervising editor. Mr. Masson conjectures, 
 
 with some probability, that the leading articles of the 
 
 Mercurius, during part of the year 1651, received touches 
 
 from Milton's hand. But this was, after all, rather in 
 
 the character of editor, whose business it is to see that 
 
 nothing improper goes into the paper, than in that of 
 
 press licenser in the sense in which the Areopagitica had 
 
 denounced it.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL. 1640 1649. 
 
 In September, 1645, Milton left tbe garden-bouse in 
 Aldersgate, for a larger bouse in Barbican, in tbe 
 same neighbourhood, but a little further from the city 
 gate, i. e. more in tbe country. The larger house was, 
 perhaps, required for tbe accommodation of his pupils 
 (see above, p. 44), but it served to shelter his wife's 
 family, when they were thrown upon the world by the 
 surrender of Oxford in June, 1646. In this Barbican 
 house Mr. Powell died at the end of that year. Milton 
 had been promised with his wife a portion of 1000Z.; but 
 Mr. Powell's affairs had long been in a very embarrassed 
 condition, and now by the consequences of delinquency 
 that condition had become one of absolute ruin. Great 
 pains have been bestowed by Mr. Masson in unravelling 
 the entanglement of the Powell accounts. The data which 
 remain are ample, and we cannot but feel astonished at the 
 accuracy with which our national records, in more im- 
 portant matters so defective, enable us to set out a debtor 
 and creditor balance of the estate of a private citizen, who 
 died more than 200 years ago. But the circumstances are 
 peculiarly intricate, and we are still unable to reconcile
 
 86 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 Mr. Powell's will with the composition records, "both of 
 wliich are extant. As a compounding delinquent, his fine, 
 assessed at the customary rate of two years' income, was 
 fixed by the commissioners at 1807. The commissioners 
 must have, therefore, been satisfied that his income did 
 not exceed 907. a year. Yet by his will of date December 
 30, 1646, he leaves his estate of Forest Hill, the annual 
 value of which alone far exceeded 907., to his eldest son. 
 This property is not mentioned in the inventory of his 
 estate, real and personal, laid before the commissioners, 
 sworn to by the delinquent, and by them accepted. The 
 possible explanation is that the Forest Hill property had 
 really passed into the possession, by foreclosure, of the 
 mortgagee, Sir Eobert Pye, who sate for Woodstock in 
 the Long Parliament, but that Mr. Powell, making his 
 Avill on his deathbed, pleased himself with the fancy of 
 leaving his son and heir an estate which was no longer 
 his to dispose of. Putting Porest Hill out of the account, 
 it would appear that the sequestrators had dealt somewhat 
 harshly with Mr. Powell ; for they had included in their 
 estimate one doubtful asset of 500/., and one non-existent 
 of 4007. This last item was a stock of timber stated to 
 be at Forest Hill, but which had really been appropriated 
 without payment by the Parliamentarians, and part of 
 it voted by Parliament itself towards repair of the church 
 in the staunch Puritan town of Banbury. 
 
 The upshot of the whole transaction is that, in satisfac- 
 tion of his claim of 1500Z. (10007. his wife's dower, 5007. 
 an old loan of 1627), Milton came into possession of some 
 property at Wheatley. This property, consisting of the 
 tithes of Wheatley, certain cottages, and three and a half 
 yard lands, had in the time of the disturbances pro- 
 duced only 407. a year. But as the value of all property
 
 vii.] DOMESTIC INCIDENTS. 87 
 
 improved when the civil war came to an end, Milton 
 found the whole could now be let for 80Z. But then out 
 of this he had to pay Mr. Powell's composition, reduced 
 to 130/. on Milton's petition, and the widow's jointure, 
 computed at 261. 13s. id. per annum. What of income 
 remained after these disbursements he might apply 
 towards repaying- himself the old loan of 1627. This was 
 all Milton ever saw of the 1000/. which Mr. Powell, with 
 the high-flying magnificence of a cavalier who knew he 
 was ruined, had promised as his daughter's portion. 
 
 Mr. Powell's death was followed in less than three 
 months by that of John Milton, senior. He died in the 
 house in Barbican, and the entry, "John Milton, gentle- 
 man, 15 (March)," among the burials in 164-6, is still to bo 
 seen in the register of the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. 
 A host of eminent men have traced the first impulse of 
 their genius to their mother. Milton always acknowledged 
 with just gratitude that it was to his father's discerning taste 
 and fostering care, that he owed the encouragement of his 
 studies, and the leisure which rendered them possible. 
 He has registered this gratitude in both prose and verse. 
 The Latin hexameters, " Ad patrem," written at Horton, 
 are inspired by a feeling far beyond commonplace filial 
 piety, and a warmth which is rare indeed in neo-Latin 
 versification. And when, in his prose pamphlets, he has 
 occasion to speak of himself, he does not omit the acknow- 
 ledgment of " the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, 
 whom God recompense." (Reason of Church Government.) 
 
 After the death of his father, being now more at ease 
 in his circumstances, he gave up taking pupils, and 
 quitted the large house in Barbican for a smaller in High 
 Holborn, opening backwards into Lincoln's-Inn-Pields. 
 This removal was about Michaelmas, 16 47.
 
 88 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 During this period, 1639 — 1649, while his interests were 
 engaged by the all-absorbing events of the civil strife, he 
 wrote no poetry, or none deserving the name. All artists 
 have intervals of non-productiveness, usually caused by 
 exhaustion. This was not Milton's case. His genius 
 was not his master, nor could it pass, like that of 
 Leonardo da Yinci, unmoved through the most tragic 
 scenes. He deliberately suspended it at the call of what he 
 believed to be duty to his country. His unrivalled power 
 of expression was placed at the service of a passionate 
 political conviction. This prostitution of faculty avenged 
 itself; for when he did turn to poetry, his strength was 
 gone from him. The period is chiefly marked by sonnets, 
 not many, one in a year, or thereabouts. That On the 
 religious memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson, in 1646, is 
 the lowest point touched by Milton in poetry, for his 
 metrical psalms do not deserve the name. 
 
 The sonnet, or Elegy on Mrs. Catherine Thomson in 
 the form of a sonnet, though in poetical merit not distin- 
 guishable from the average religious verse of the Caroline 
 age, has an interest for the biographer. It breathes 
 a holy calm that is in sharp contrast with the angry 
 virulence of the pamphlets, which were being written at 
 this very time by the same pen. Amid his intemperate 
 denunciations of his political and ecclesiastical foes, it 
 seems that Milton did not inwardly forfeit the peace which 
 passeth all understanding. He had formerly said himself 
 (Doctrine and Disc.), " nothing more than disturbance of 
 mind suspends us from approaching to God." Now, out 
 of all the clamour and the bitterness of the battle of 
 the sects, he can retire and be alone with his heavenly 
 aspirations, which have lost none of their ardour by 
 having laid aside all their sectarianism. Hie genius has 
 forsaken him, but his soul still glows with the fervour of
 
 vii.] SONNETS. 89 
 
 devotion. And even of this sonnet we may say what 
 Ellis says of Catullus, that Milton never ceases to be a 
 poet, even when his words are most prosaic. 
 
 The sonnet (xv.) On the Lord- General Fairfax, at the 
 siege of Colchester, written in 1648, is again a manifesto 
 of the writer's political feelings, nobly uttered, and invest- 
 ing party with a patriotic dignity not unworthy of the 
 man, Milton. It is a hortatory lyric, a trumpet-call to his 
 party in the moment of victory to remember the duties 
 which that victory imposed upon them. It is not with- 
 out the splendid resonance of the Italian canzone. But 
 it can scarcely be called poetry, expressing, as it does, 
 facts directly, and not indirectly through their imaginative 
 equivalents. Fairfax was, doubtless, well worthy that 
 Milton should have commemorated him in a higher strain. 
 Of Fairfax's eminent qualities the sonnet only dwells on 
 two, his personal valour, which had been tried in many 
 fights — he had been three times dangerously wounded in 
 the Yorkshire campaign — and his superiority to sordid 
 interests. Of his generalship, in which he was second to 
 Cromwell only, and of his love of arts and learning, 
 nothing is said, though the last was the passion of his 
 life, for which at forty he renounced ambition. Perhaps 
 in 1648 Milton, who lived a very retired life, did not 
 know of these tastes, and had not heard that it was by 
 Fairfax's care that the Bodleian library was saved from 
 wreck on the surrender of Oxford in 1646. And it was 
 not till later, years after the sonnet was written, that the 
 same Fairfax, " whose name in arms through Europe 
 rings," became a competitor of Milton in the attempt to 
 paraphrase the Psalms in metre. 
 
 Milton's paraphrase of the Psalms belongs to history, 
 but to the history of psalmody, not that of poetry. At St. 
 Paul's School, at fifteen, the boy had turned two psalms,
 
 90 SECOND PEEIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 the 114th and the 13Gth, hy way of exercise. That in 
 his day of plenary inspiration, Milton, who disdained 
 Dryden as " a rhymist hut no poet," and has recorded his 
 own impatience with the " drawling versifiers," should 
 have undertaken to grind down the noble antistrophic 
 lyrics of the Hebrew bard into ballad rhymes for the use 
 of Puritan worship, would have been impossible. But the 
 idea of being useful to his country had acquired exclusive 
 possession of his mind. Even his faculty of verse should 
 be employed in the good cause. If Parliament had set him 
 the task, doubtless he would have willingly undertaken it, 
 as Corneille, in the blindness of Catholic obedience, versified 
 the Imitatio Cltristi at the command of the Jesuits. 
 Milton was not officially employed, but voluntarily took 
 up the work. The Puritans were bent upon substituting 
 a new version of the Davidic Psalms for that of Sternhold 
 and Hopkins, for no other reason than that the latter 
 formed part of the hated Book of Common Prayer. The 
 Commons had pronounced in favour of a version by one of 
 their own members, the staunch Puritan M.P. for Truro, 
 Francis Eouse. The Lords favoured a rival book, and 
 numerous other claimants were before the public. Dis- 
 satisfied with any of these attempts, Milton would essay 
 himself. In 16-18 he turned nine psalms, and recurring to 
 the task in 1G53, " did into verse " eight more. He thought 
 these specimens worth preserving, and annexing to the 
 volume of his poems which he published himself in 1673. 
 As this doggerel continues to encumber each succeeding 
 edition of the Poetical Works, it is as well that Milton did 
 not persevere with his experiment and produce a complete 
 Psalter. He prudently abandoned a task in which success 
 is impossible. A metrical psalm, being a compromise 
 between the psalm and the hymn, like other compro-
 
 vii.] COLLECTION OP EARLY POEMS. 91 
 
 inises, misses, rather than combines, the distinctive ex- 
 cellences of the things united. That Milton should ever 
 have attempted what poetry forbids, is only another proof 
 how entirely at this period more absorbing motives had 
 possession of his mind, and overbore his poetical judgment. 
 It is a coincidence worth remembering that Milton's con- 
 temporary, Lord Clarendon, was at this very time solacing 
 his exile at Madrid by composing, not a version but a com- 
 mentary upon the Psalms, " applying those devotions to 
 the troubles of this time." 
 
 Yet all the while that he was thus unfaithful in prac- 
 tice to his art, it was poetry that possessed his real affec- 
 tions, and the reputation of a poet which formed his 
 ambition. It was a temporary separation, and not a 
 divorce, which he designed. In each successive pamphlet 
 he reiterates his undertaking to redeem his pledge of a 
 great work, as soon as liberty shall be consolidated in the 
 realm. Meanwhile, as an earnest of what should be here- 
 after, he permitted the publication of a collection of his 
 early poems. 
 
 This little volume of some 200 pages, rude in execution 
 as it is, ranks among the highest prizes of the book col- 
 lector, very few copies being extant, and those mostly in 
 public libraries. It appeared in 1645, and owed its 
 appearance, not to the vanity of the author, but to the 
 zeal of a publisher. Humphrey Moseley, at the sign of 
 the Prince's Arms, in St. Paul's Churchyard, suggested 
 the collection to Milton, and undertook the risk of it, 
 though knowing, as he says in the prefixed address of 
 The Stationer to the Eeader, that " the slightest pam- 
 phlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of 
 learnedest men." It may create some surprise that, in 
 10 45, there should have been any public in England for
 
 92 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [en. vn. 
 
 a volume of verse. Naseby had been fought in June, 
 Philiphaugh in September, Fairfax and Cromwell were 
 continuing their victorious career in the west, Chester, 
 Worcester, and the stronghold of Oxford, alone holding 
 out for the King. It was clear that the conflict was 
 decided in favour of the Parliament, but men's minds 
 must have been strung to a pitch of intense expectation 
 as to what kind of settlement was to come. Yet, at the 
 very crisis of the civil strife, we find a London publisher 
 able to bring out the Poems of Waller (1644), and suffi- 
 ciently encouraged by their reception to follow them up, 
 in the next year, with the Poems of Mr. John Milton. 
 Are we warranted in inferring that a finer public was 
 beginning to loathe the dreary theological polemic of 
 which it had had a surfeit, and turned to a book of poetry 
 as that which was most unlike the daily garbage, just as 
 a later public absorbed five thousand copies of Scott's 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel in the year of Austerlitz 1 One 
 would like to know who were the purchasers of Milton 
 and Waller, when the cavalier families were being ruined 
 by confiscations and compositions, and Puritan families 
 would turn with pious horror from the very name of a 
 Mask. 
 
 Milton was himself editor of his own volume, and pre- 
 fixed to it, again out of Virgil's Eclogues, the charac- 
 teristic motto, " Baccare frontem Cingite, ne vati noceat 
 main lingua fiduro," indicating that his poetry was all to 
 come.
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP. 
 
 The Crown having fallen on January 30, 1649, and the 
 House of Lords by the vote of February 6 following, 
 the sovereign power in England was for the moment in 
 the hands of that fragment of the Long Parliament, which 
 remained after the various purges and expulsions to which 
 it had been subjected. Some of the excluded members 
 were allowed to return, and by occasional new elections 
 in safe boroughs the number of members was raised to 
 one hundred and fifty, securing an average attendance of 
 about seventy. The future government of the nation was 
 declared to be by way of a republic, and the writs ran 
 in the name of the Keepers of the Liberty of England, 
 by authority of Parliament. But the real centre of 
 power was the Council of State, a body of forty-one 
 members, nominated for a period of twelve months, ac- 
 cording to a plan of constitution devised by the army 
 leaders. In the hands of this republican Council was 
 concentrated a combination of power such as had never 
 been wielded by any English monarch. But, though its 
 attribution of authority was great, its exercise of the 
 powers lodged with it was hampered by differences among
 
 94> SECOND PERIOD. 1640 -16G0. [chap. 
 
 its members, and the disaffection of various interests and 
 parties. The Council of State contained most of the 
 notable statesmen of the Parliamentary party, and had 
 before it a vast task in reorganizing the administration of 
 England, in the conduct of an actual war in Ireland, a pos- 
 sible war in Scotland, and in the maintenance of the honour 
 of the republic in its relations with foreign princes. 
 
 The Council of State prepared the business for its con- 
 sideration through special committees for special depart- 
 ments of the public service. The Committee for Foreign 
 Affairs consisted of "Whitelocke, Vane, Lord Lisle, Lord 
 Denbigh, Mr. Marten, Mr. Lisle. A secretary was re- 
 quired to translate despatches, both those which were 
 sent out, and those which were received. Nothing seems 
 more natural than that the author of the Tenure of Kings 
 and Magistrates, who was at once a staunch Parliamen- 
 tarian, an accomplished Latin scholar, and conversant 
 with more than one of the spoken languages of the Con- 
 tinent, sbould be thought of for the office. Yet so little 
 was Milton personally known, living as he did the life of 
 a retired student, that it was the accident of his having 
 the acquaintance of one of the new Council to which he 
 owed the appointment. 
 
 The post was offered him, but would he accept it ? He 
 had never ceased to revolve in his mind subjects capable 
 of poetical treatment, and to cherish his own vocation as 
 the classical poet of the English language. Peace had 
 come, and leisure was within his reach. He was poor, 
 but his Avants were simple, and he had enough wherewith 
 to meet them. Already, in 1649, unmistakable symp- 
 toms threatened his sight, and warned him of the necessity 
 of the most rigid economy in the use of the eyes. The 
 duties that he was now asked to undertake were in-
 
 vin.] THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP. 95 
 
 definite already in amount, and would doubtless extend 
 themselves if zealously discharged. 
 
 But the temptation was strong, and he did not resist it. 
 The increase of income was, doubtless, to Milton the 
 smallest among the inducements now offered him. He 
 had thought it a sufficient and an honourable employment 
 to serve his country with his pen as a volunteer. Here 
 was an offer to become her official, authorised servant, 
 and to bear a part, though a humble part, in the great 
 work of reorganisation which was now to be attempted. 
 Above all other allurements to a retired student, unversed 
 in men, and ready to idealise character, was the oppor- 
 tunity of becoming at once personally acquainted with all 
 the great men of the patriotic party, whom his ardent 
 imagination had invested with heroic qualities. The very 
 names of Fairfax, Vane, and Cromwell, called up in him 
 emotions for which prose was an inadequate vehicle. Nor 
 was it only that in the Council itself he would be in daily 
 intercourse with such men as Henry Marten, Hutchinson, 
 Whitelocke, Harrington, St. John, Ludlow, but his posi- 
 tion would introduce him at once to all the members of 
 the House who Avere worth knowing. It was not merely 
 a new world ; it was the world which was here opened 
 for the first time to Milton. And we must remember that, 
 all scholar as he was, Milton was well convinced of the 
 truth that there are other sources of knowledge besides 
 books. He had himself spent " many studious and contem- 
 plative years in the search of religious and civil knowledge," 
 yet he knew that, for a mind large enough to " take in a 
 general survey of humane things," it was necessary to know — 
 
 The world, . . . her glory, 
 
 Empires and monarchs, and their radiant courts, 
 
 Best school of best experience. 
 
 P. B. iii. 237.
 
 90 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [chap. 
 
 He had repeatedly, as if excusing his political interludes, 
 renewed his pledge to devote all his powers to poetry as 
 soon as they should he fully ripe. To complete his edu- 
 cation as a poet, he wanted initiation into affairs. Here 
 was an opening far heyond any he had ever dreamed of. 
 The sacrifice of time and precious eyesight which he was 
 to make was costly, hut it was not pure waste ; it would 
 he partly returned to him in a ripened experience in 
 this 
 
 Insight 
 In all things that to greatest actions lead. 
 
 He accepted the post at once without hesitation. On 
 March 13, 1649, the Committee for Foreign Affairs was 
 directed to make the offer to him; on March 15, he 
 attended at Whitehall to be admitted to office. Well 
 would it have been both for his genius and his fame if 
 he had declined it. His genius might have reverted to 
 its proper course, while he was in the flower of age, with 
 eyesight still available, and a spirit exalted by the triumph 
 of the good cause. His fame would have been saved 
 from the degrading incidents of the contention with Sal- 
 masius and Morus, and from being tarnished by the 
 obloquy of the faction which he fought, and which 
 conquered him. No man can with impunity insult and 
 trample upon his fellow-man, even in the best of causes. 
 Especially if he be an artist, he makes it impossible to 
 obtain equitable appreciation of his work. 
 
 So far as Milton reckoned upon a gain in experience 
 from his secretaryship, he doubtless reaped it. Such a 
 probation could not be passed without solidifying the 
 judgment, and correcting its tendency to error. And this 
 school of affairs, which is indispensable for the historian,
 
 vni.] THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP. 97 
 
 may also be available for the poet. Yet it would be 
 difficult to point in Milton's subsequent poetry to any 
 element which the poet can be thought to have imbibed 
 from the foreign secretary. Where, as in Milton's two 
 epics and Samson Agonistes, the personages are all 
 supernatural or heroic, there is no room for the employ- 
 ment of knowledge of the world. Had Milton written 
 comedy, like Moliere, he might have said with Moliere 
 after he had been introduced at court, " Je n'ai plus 
 que faire d'etudier Plaute et Terence ; je n'ai qu'a 
 etudier le monde." 
 
 The office into which Milton was now inducted is 
 called in the Council books that of " Secretary for foreign 
 tongues." Its duties were chiefly the translation of 
 despatches from, and to, foreign governments. The 
 degree of estimation in which the Latin secretary was 
 held, may be measured by the amount of salary assigned 
 him Tor while the English chief Secretary had a salary 
 of 730/. (= 2200Z. of our day), the Latin Secretary was 
 paid only 288Z. 13s. 6d. (= 900/.). Tor this, not very 
 liberal pay, he was told that all his time was to be at the 
 disposal of the government. Lincoln's Inn Fields was 
 too far off for a servant of the Council who might have 
 to attend meetings at seven in the morning. He accord- 
 ingly migrated to Charing Cross, now become again 
 Charing without the cross, this work of art having been 
 an early (1647) victim of religious barbarism. In No- 
 vember he was accommodated with chambers in "White- 
 hall. But from these he was soon ousted by claimants 
 more considerable or more importunate, and in 1651 he 
 removed to " a pretty garden-house " in Petty France, 
 in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamoro's, and 
 opening into St. James's Park. The house was extant 
 
 H
 
 98 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 till 1877, when it disappeared, the last of Milton'a many 
 London residences. It had long ceased to look into St. 
 James's Park, more than one row of houses, encroach- 
 ments upon the public park, having grown up "between. 
 The garden-house had hecome a mere ordinary street 
 house in York-street, only distinguished from the 
 squalid houses on either side of it "by a tablet affixed by 
 Bentkam, inscribed " sacred to Milton, prince of poets." 
 Petty France lost its designation in the French Kevo- 
 lution, in ohedience to the childish petulance which 
 ohliterates the name of any one who may displease you 
 at the moment, and "became one of the seventeen York- 
 streets of the metropolis. Soon after the re-baptism of 
 the street, Milton's house was occupied by "William 
 Hazlitt, who rented it of Bentham. Milton had lived in 
 it for nine years, from 1651 till a few weeks before the 
 Restoration. Its nearness to Whitehall where the Council 
 sat, was less a convenience than a necessity. 
 
 For Milton's life now became ODe of close attention, 
 and busy service. As Latin secretary, and Weckherlin's 
 successor, indeed, his proper duties were only those of a 
 clerk or translator. But his aptitude for business of a 
 lih'i'ary kind soon drew on him a great variety of employ- 
 ment. The demand for a Latin translation of a despatch 
 was not one of frequent occurrence. The Letters of 
 the Parliament, and of Oliver and llichard, Protectors, 
 ■which are, intrusively, printed among Milton's works, are 
 but one hundred and thirty-seven in all. This number is 
 spread over ten years, being at the rate of about fourteen 
 per year ; most of them are very short. For the purposes 
 of a biography of Milton, it is sufficient to observe, that 
 the dignified attitude which the Commonwealth took up 
 towards foreign powers lost none of its elevation in being
 
 vin.] THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP. 99 
 
 conveyed in Miltonic Latin. Whether satisfaction for 
 the murder of an envoy is to he extorted from the arro- 
 gant court of Madrid, or an apology is to he offered to a 
 liumhle count of Oldenhurg for delay in issuing a salva- 
 guardia which had heen promised, the same equable 
 dignity of expression is maintained, equally remote from 
 crouching before the strong, and hectoring the weak. 
 
 His translations were not all the duties of the new 
 secretary. He must often serve as interpreter at audi- 
 ences of foreign envoys. He must superintend the semi- 
 official organ, the Mercurins Politicus. He must ansAver 
 the manifesto of the Presbyterians of Ireland. The Ob- 
 servations on the peace of Kilkenny are Milton's com- 
 position, but from instructions. By the peace the Irish 
 had obtained home rule in its widest extent, release from 
 the oath of supremacy, and the right to tie their ploughs 
 to the tail of the horse. The same peace also conceded 
 to them the militia, a trust which Charles I. had said he 
 would not devolve on the Parliament of England, " not 
 for an hour ! " Milton is indignant that these indulgences, 
 which had been refused to their obedience, should have 
 been extorted by their rebellion, and the massacre of 
 " 200,000 Protestants." This is an exaggeration of a 
 butchery sufficiently tragic in its real proportions, and in 
 a later tract (EikonoMastes) he reduces it to 154,000. 
 Though the savage Irish are barbarians, uncivilised and 
 uncivilisable, the Observations distinctly affirm the new 
 principle of toleration. Though popery be a supersti- 
 tion, the death of all true religion, still conscience is not 
 within the cognisance of the magistrate. The civil sword 
 is to be employed against civil offences only. In adding 
 that the one exception to this toleration is atheism, Milton 
 is careful to state this limitation as being the tolera- 
 
 H 2
 
 100 SECOND PERIOD. 1640— 1G60. [chap. 
 
 tion professed by Parliament, and not as his private 
 opinion. 
 
 So well satisfied were the Council with their secretary's 
 Observations on the peace of Kilkenny, that they next 
 imposed upon him a far more important labour, a reply to 
 the Eikon Basililie. The execution of Charles I. was not 
 an act of vengeance, but a measure of public safety. If, as 
 Hallani affirms, there mingled in the motives of the managers 
 any strain of personal ill-will, this was merged in the 
 necessity of securing, themselves from the vengeance of 
 the King, and what they had gained from being taken 
 back. They were alarmed by the reaction which had set 
 in, and had no choice but to strengthen themselves by a 
 daring policy. But the first effect of the removal of the 
 King by violence was to give a powerful stimulus to the 
 reaction already in progress. The groan which burst from 
 the spectators before "Whitehall on January 30, 1649, 
 was only representative of the thrill of horror which ran 
 through England and Scotland in the next ten days. 
 This feeling found expression in a book entitled " Eikon 
 Basililie, the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his 
 solitude and sufferings." The book was, it should seem, 
 composed by Dr. Gauden, but professed to be an authen- 
 tic copy of papers written by the King. It is possible 
 that Gauden may have had in his hands some written 
 scraps of the King's meditations. If he had such, he 
 only used them as hints to work upon. Gauden was a 
 churchman whom his friends might call liberal, and 
 his enemies time-serving. He was a churchman of the 
 stamp of Archbishop "Williams, and preferred bishops and 
 the Common-prayer to presbyters and extempore sermons, 
 but did not think the difference between the two of the 
 essence of religion. In better times Gauden would have
 
 viir.] REPLY TO EIKON BASILIKE. 101 
 
 passed for "broad, though, his latitudinarianisni was more 
 the result of love of ease than of philosophy. Though a 
 royalist he sat in the Westminster Assembly, and took 
 the covenant, for -which compliance he nearly lost the 
 reward which, after the Eestoration, became his due. 
 Like the university-bred men of his day, Gauden was 
 not a man of ideas, but of style. In the present instance 
 the idea was supplied by events. The saint and martyr, 
 the man of sorrows, praying for his murderers, the King, 
 who renounced an earthly kingdom to gain a heavenly, 
 and who in return for his benefits received from an un- 
 thankful people a crown of thorns — this was the theme 
 supplied to the royalist advocate. Poet's imagination 
 had never invented one more calculated to touch the 
 popular heart. This imitatio Christi to which every 
 private Christian theoretically aspires, had been realised by 
 a true prince upon an actual scaffold with a graceful 
 dignity of demeanour, of which it may be said, that 
 nothing in life became him like the leaving it. 
 
 This moving situation Gauden, no mean stylist, set out 
 in the best academical language of the period. Frigid 
 and artificial it may read now, but the passion and pity, 
 which is not in the book, was supplied by the readers of 
 the time. And men are not dainty as to phrase when 
 they meet with an expression of their own sentiments. 
 The readers of Eikon Basilike — and forty-seven editions 
 were necessary to supply the demand of a population of 
 eight millions — attributed to the pages of the book emo- 
 tions raised in themselves by the tragic catastrophe. 
 They never doubted that the meditations were those of 
 the royal martyr, and held the book, in the words of 
 Sir Edward Nicholas, for " the most exquisite, pious, and 
 princely piece ever written." The Parliament thought
 
 102 SECOXD PERIOD. 1610—1660. [chap. 
 
 themselves called upon to put forth a reply. If one book 
 could cause such a commotion of spirits, another hook 
 could allay it — the ordinary illusion of those who do not 
 consider that the vogue of a printed appeal depends, not 
 on the contents of the appeal, hut on a predisposition of 
 the puhlic temper. 
 
 Selden, the most learned man, not only of his party, 
 hut of Englishmen, was first thought of, hut the task was 
 finally assigned to the Latin Secretary. Milton's ready 
 pen completed the answer, Eikonolclastes, a quarto of 242 
 pages, before October, 1649. It is, like all answers, 
 worthless as a book. Eikonoklastes, the Image-breaker, 
 takes the Image, Eikon, paragraph by paragraph, turn- 
 ing it round, and asserting the negative. To the Koyalist 
 view of the points in dispute Milton opposes the Indepen- 
 dent view. A refutation, which follows each step of an 
 adverse book, is necessarily devoid of originality. But 
 Milton is worse than tedious ; his reply is in a tone of 
 rude railing and insolent swagger, which would have been 
 always unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly 
 indecent. 
 
 Milton must, however, be acquitted of one charge 
 which has been made against him, viz., that he taunts the 
 king with his familiarity with Shakespeare. The charge 
 rests on a misunderstanding. In quoting Richard III. in 
 illustration of his own meaning, Milton says, " I shall not 
 instance an abstruse author, wherein the King might be 
 less conversant, but one whom we well know was the 
 closet companion of these his solitudes, William Shake- 
 speare." Though not an overt gibe, there certainly lurks 
 an insinuation to Milton's Puritan readers, to whom 
 stage plays were an abomination — an unworthy device 
 of rhetoric, as appealing to a superstition in others which
 
 vi"-] REPLY TO EIKON BASILIKE. 103 
 
 the writer himself does not share. In Milton's contemp- 
 tuous reference to Sidney's Arcadia as a vain amatorious 
 poem, we feel that the finer sense of the author of 
 L' Allegro has suffered from immersion in the slough of 
 religious and political faction. 
 
 Gauden, raking up material from all quarters, had 
 inserted in his compilation a prayer taken from the 
 Arcadia. Milton mercilessly works this topic against 
 his adversary. It is surprising that this plagiarism from 
 so well-known a hook as the Arcadia should not have 
 opened Milton's eyes to the unauthentic character of the 
 Eikon. He alludes, indeed, to a suspicion which was 
 ahroad that one of the royal chaplains was a secret 
 coadjutor. But he knew nothing of Gauden at the time 
 of writing the Eilconoldastes, and prohahly he never came 
 to know anything. The secret of the authorship of the 
 Eikon was well kept, heing known oidy to a very few 
 persons — the two royal brothers, Bishop Morley, the Earl 
 of Bristol, and Clarendon. These were all safe men, and 
 Gauden was not likely to proclaim himself an impostor. 
 He pleaded his authorship, however, as a claim to prefer- 
 ment at the Bestoration, when the church spoils came to 
 he partitioned among the conquerors, and he received the 
 bishopric of Exeter. A bishopric — because less than the 
 highest preferment could not be offered to one whose pen 
 had done such signal service ; and Exeter — because the 
 poorest see (then valued at 500Z. a year) was good enough 
 for a man who had taken the covenant and complied with 
 the usurping government. By ceaseless importunity the 
 author of the Eikon Basilike obtained afterwards the see 
 of "Worcester, while the portion of the author of Eikono- 
 klastes was poverty, infamy, and calumny. A century 
 after Milton's death it was safe for the most popular
 
 104 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 16G0. [en. vin 
 
 writer of the day to say that the prayer from the Arcadia 
 had heeu interpolated in the Eikon hy Milton himself, 
 and then hy him charged upon the King as a plagiarism. 
 (Johnson, Lives of the Poets.)
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 MILTON AND SALMASIUS. —BLINDNESS. 
 
 The mystery which long surrounded the authorship of 
 Eikon Basililce lends a literary interest to Mil ton's share in 
 that controversy, which does not "belong to his next ap- 
 pearance in print. Besides, his pamphlets against Salma- 
 sius and Morus are written in Latin, and to the general 
 reader in this country and in America inaccessible in 
 consequence. In Milton's day it was otherwise ; the 
 widest circle of readers could only be reached through 
 Latin. For this reason, when Charles II. wanted a 
 public vindication of his father's memory, it was indis- 
 pensable that it should be composed in that language. 
 The Eikon was accordingly turned into Latin, by one of 
 the royal chaplains, Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. 
 But this was not enough ; a defence in form was necessary, 
 an Apologia Socratis, such as Plato composed for his 
 master after his death. It must not only be written in 
 Latin, but in such Latin as to ensure its being read. 
 
 In 1349 Charles II. was living at the Hague, and it so 
 happened that the man, who was in the highest repute in 
 all Europe as a Latinist, was professor at the neighbouring 
 university of Leyden. Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise)
 
 106 SECOND PERIOD. 16 10— 1660. [chap. 
 
 ■was commissioned to prepare a manifesto, which should bo 
 at once a vindication of Charles's memory, and an indict- 
 ment against the regicide government. Salmasius was a 
 man of enormous reading and no judgment. He says of 
 himself that he wrote Latin more easily than his mother- 
 tongue (French). And his Latin was all the more read- 
 able because it was not classical or idiomatic. With all 
 his reading — and Isaac Casaubon had said of him when 
 in his teens that he had incredible erudition — he was 
 still, at sixty, qiute unacquainted with public affairs, and 
 had neither the politician's tact necessary to draw a state 
 paper as Clarendon would have drawn it, nor the literary 
 tact which had enabled Erasmus to command the ear of 
 the public. Salmasius undertook his task as a profes- 
 sional advocate, though without pay, and Milton accepted 
 the duty of replying as advocate for the Parliament, also 
 without reward ; he was fighting for a cause which was not 
 another's but his own. 
 
 Salmasius' Defermo regia — that was the title of his 
 book — reached this country before the end of 1G49. The 
 Council of State, in very unnecessary alarm, issued a pro- 
 hibition. On 8th January, 1650, the Council ordered 
 " that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the 
 book of Salmasius." Early in March, 1651, Milton's 
 answer, entitled Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, was out. 
 
 Milton was as much above Salmasius in mental power, 
 as he was inferior to him in extent of book knowledge. 
 But the conditions of retort which he had chosen to 
 accept neutralised this superiority. His greater power 
 was spent in a greater force of invective. Instead of 
 setting out the case of the Parliament in all the strength 
 of which it was capable, Milton is intent upon tripping 
 up Salmasius, contradicting him, and making him odious
 
 ix.] MILTON AND SALMASIUS. 107 
 
 or ridiculous. He called his book a Defence, of the People 
 of England ; but when he should have been justifying 
 his clients from the charges of rebellion and regicide 
 before the bar of Europe, Milton is bending all his inven- 
 tion upon personalities. He exaggerates the foibles of 
 Salmasius, his vanity, and the vanity of Madame de 
 Saumaise, her ascendancy over her husband, his narrow 
 pedantry, his ignorance of everything but grammar and 
 words. He exhausts the Latin vocabulary of abuse to 
 pile up every epithet of contumely and execration on the 
 head of his adversary. It but amounts to calling Salma- 
 sius fool and knave through a couple of hundred pages, 
 till the exaggeration of the style defeats the orator's pur- 
 pose, and we end by regarding the whole, not as a serious 
 pleading, but as an epideictic display. Hobbes said truly 
 that the two books were " like two declamations, for and 
 against, made by one and the same man as a rhetorical 
 exercise " (Behemoth). 
 
 Milton's Defensio was not calculated to advance the 
 cause of the Parliament, and there is no evidence that it 
 produced any effect upon the public, beyond that of rais- 
 ing Milton's personal credit. That England, and Puritan 
 England, where humane studies were swamped in a bib- 
 lical brawl, should produce a man who could write Latin 
 as well as Salmasius, was a great surprise to the learned 
 world in Holland. Salmasius was unpopular at Leyden, 
 and there was therefore a predisposition to regard Milton's 
 book with favour. Salmasius was twenty years older than 
 Milton, and in these literary digladiations readers are 
 always ready to side with a new writer. The contending 
 interests of the two great English parties, the wider issue 
 between republic and absolutism, the speculative inquiry 
 into the right of resistance, were lost sight of by the
 
 108 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [chap. 
 
 spectators of this literary duel. The only question was 
 ■whether Sahnasius could heat the new champion, or the 
 new man heat Salmasius, at a match of vituperation. 
 
 Salmasius of course put in a rejoinder. His rapid pen 
 found no difficulty in turning off 300 pages of fluent 
 Latin. It was his last occupation. He died at Spa, 
 where he was taking the waters, in September, 1653, and 
 his reply was not published till 1660, after the Eestoration, 
 when all interest had died out of the controversy. If it 
 he true that the work was written at Spa, without hooks 
 at hand, it is certainly a miraculous effort of memory. It 
 does no credit to Salmasius. He had raked together, after 
 the example of Scioppius against Scaliger, all the tittle- 
 tattle which the English exiles had to retail about Milton 
 and his antecedents. Bramhall, who bore Milton a special 
 grudge, was the channel of some of this scandal, and 
 Biamhall's source was possibly Chappell, the tutor with 
 whom Milton had had the early misunderstanding. (See 
 above p. 6). If any one thinks that classical studies of 
 themselves cultivate the taste and the sentiments, let him 
 look into Salmasius's Responsio. There he will see the 
 first scholar of his age not thinking it unbecoming to taunt 
 Milton with his blindness, in such language as this : " a 
 puppy, once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or 
 rather a blindling ; having never had any mental vision, 
 he has now lost his bodily sight ; a silly coxcomb, fancy- 
 ing himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with nothing 
 more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the 
 fittest doom for him would be to hang him on the highest 
 gallows, and set his head on the Tower of London." These 
 are some of the incivilities, not by any means the most 
 revolting, but such as I dare reproduce, of this literary 
 warfare.
 
 ix.] MILTON AND SALMASIUS. 109 
 
 Salmasius's taunt about Milton's venal pen is no less 
 false than his other gibes. The places of those who 
 served the Commonwealth, were places of " hard work and 
 short rations." Milton never received for his Dcfensio a 
 sixpence beyond his official salary. It has indeed been 
 asserted that he was paid 10007. for it by order of Parlia- 
 ment, and this falsehood having been adopted by Johnson 
 — himself a pensioner — has passed into all the biographies, 
 and will no doubt continue to be repeated to the end of 
 time. This is a just nemesis upon Milton, who on his 
 part had twitted Salmasius with having been complimented 
 by the exiled King with a purse of 100 Jacobuses for his 
 performance. The one insinuation was as false as the 
 other. Charles II. was too poor to offer more than thanks. 
 Milton was too proud to receive for defending his country 
 what the Parliament was willing to pay. Sir Peter 
 "YVentworth, of Lillingston Lovell, in Oxfordshire, left in 
 his will 100Z. to Milton for his book against Salmasius. 
 But this was long after the Eestoration, and Milton did 
 not live to receive the legacy. 
 
 Instead of receiving an honorarium for his Defence of 
 the English People, Milton had paid for it a sacrifice for 
 which money could not compensate him. His eyesight, 
 though quick, as he was a proficient with the rapier, had 
 never been strong. His constant headaches, his late 
 study, and (thinks Phillips) his perpetual tampering with 
 physic to preserve his sight, concurred to bring the 
 calamity upon him. It had been steadily coming on for 
 a dozen years before, and about 1650 the sight of the left 
 eye was gone. He was warned by his doctor that if he 
 persisted in using the remaining eye for book-work, he 
 would lose that too. " The choice lay before me," Milton 
 writes in the Second Defence, " between dereliction of a
 
 110 SECOND PERIOD. 1610—1660. [chap. 
 
 supreme duty and loss of eyesight ; in such a case I could 
 not listen to the physician, not if iEsculapius himself had 
 spoken from his sanctuary ; I could not hut obey that 
 inward monitor, I know not what, that spake to me from 
 heaven. 1 considered with myself that many had pur- 
 chased less good with worse ill, as they who give their 
 lives to reap only glory, and I thereupon concluded to 
 employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in 
 doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was 
 in my power to render." 
 
 It was ahout the early part of the year 1652 that the 
 calamity was consummated. At the age of forty-three he 
 was in total darkness. The deprivation of sight, one of 
 the severest afflictions of which humanity is capable, falls 
 more heavily on the man whose occupation lies among 
 hooks, than upon others. He who has most to lose, loses 
 most. To most persons hooks are hut an amusement, an 
 interlude between the hours of serious occupation. The 
 scholar is he who has found the key to knowledge, and 
 knows his way about in the world of printed books. To 
 find this key, to learn the map of this country, requires a 
 long apprenticeship. This is a point few men can hope to 
 roach much before the age of forty. Milton had attained 
 it only to find fruition snatched from him. He had 
 barely time to spell one line in the book of wisdom, before, 
 like the wizard's volume in romance, it was hopelessly 
 closed against him for ever. Any human being is shut 
 out by loss of sight from accustomed pleasures, the scholar 
 is shut out from knowledge. Shut out at forty-three, 
 Avhen his great work was not even begun ! He consoles 
 himself with the fancy that in his pamphlet, the Defcnsio, 
 he had done a great work {quanta maxima quivi) for his 
 country. This poor delusion helped him doubtless to
 
 ix.] BLINDNESS. Ill 
 
 support his calamity. He could not foresee that, in 
 less than ten years, the great work would be totally anni- 
 hilated, his pamphlet would be merged in the obsolete 
 mass of civil war tracts, and the Defensio, on which he 
 had expended his last year of eyesight, only mentioned 
 because it had been written by the author of Paradise 
 Lost. 
 
 The nature of Milton's disease is not ascertainable from 
 the account he has given of it. In the well-known passage 
 of Paradise Lost, iii. 25, he hesitates between amaurosis 
 (drop serene) and cataract (suffusion) 
 
 So thick a drop sereue hath quench'd their orbs, 
 Or dim suffusion veil'd. 
 
 A medical friend referred to by Professor Alfred Stern, 
 tells him that some of the symptoms are more like 
 glaucoma. Milton himself has left such an account as a 
 patient ignorant of the anatomy of the organ could give. 
 It throws no light on the nature of the malady. But it is 
 characteristic of Milton that even his affliction does not 
 destroy his solicitude about his personal appearance. The 
 taunts of his enemies about " the lack-lustre eye, guttering 
 with prevalent rheum " did not pass unfelt. In his Second, 
 Defence Milton informs the world that his eyes " are ex- 
 ternally uninjured. They shine with an unclouded light, 
 just like the eyes of one whose vision is perfect. This is 
 the only point in which I am, against my will, a hypo- 
 crite." The vindication appears again in Sonnet xix. 
 " These eyes, though clear To outward view of blemish or 
 of spot." In later years, when the exordium of Book iii. of 
 Paradise Lost was composed, in the pathetic story of his 
 blindness, this little touch of vanity has disappeared, as 
 incompatible with the solemn dignity of the occasion.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MILTON AND MORUS — THE SECOND DEFENCE — THE DEFENCE 
 
 FOR HIMSELF. 
 
 Civil history is largely a history of wars between states, 
 and literary history is no less the record of quarrels in 
 print between jealous authors. Poets and artists, more 
 susceptible than practical men, seem to live a life of per- 
 petual wrangle. The history of these petty feuds is not 
 healthy intellectual food, it is at best amusing scandal. 
 But these quarrels of authors do not degrade the authors 
 in our eyes, they only show them to be, what we 
 knew, as vain, irritable, and opinionative as other men. 
 Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Voltaire, Eousseau, belabour 
 their enemies, and we see nothing incongruous in their 
 doing so. It is not so when the awful majesty of Milton 
 descends from the empyrean throne of contemplation to 
 use the language of the gutter or the fish-market. The 
 bathos is unthinkable. The universal intellect of Bacon 
 shrank to the paltry pursuit of place. The disproportion 
 between the intellectual capaciousness and the moral aim 
 jars upon the sense of fitness, and the name of Bacon, 
 " wisest, meanest," has passed into a proverb. Milton's fall 
 is far worse. It is not here a union of grasp of mind with an
 
 en. x.] MILTON AND MORUS. 113 
 
 ignoble ambition, but the plunge of the moral nature itself 
 from the highest heights to that despicable region of 
 vulgar scurrility and libel, which is below the level of 
 average gentility and education. The name of Milton is a 
 synonym for sublimity. He has endowed our language 
 with the loftiest and noblest poetry it possesses, and the 
 same man is found employing speech for the most unworthy 
 purpose to which it can be put, that of defaming and 
 vilifying a personal enemy, and an enemy so mean that 
 barely to have been mentioned by Milton had been an 
 honour to him. In Salmasius, Milton had at least been 
 measuring his Latin against tbe Latin of the first classicist 
 of the age. In Alexander Morus he wreaked august 
 periods of Roman eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of 
 chance fortunes and tarnished reputation, a grceculus 
 esuriens, who appeared against Milton by the turn of 
 accidents, and not as the representative of the opposite 
 principle. In crushing Morus, Milton could not beguile 
 himself with the idea that he was serving a cause. 
 
 In 1652 our country began to reap the fruits of the 
 costly efforts it had made to obtain good government. A 
 central authority was at last established, stronger than 
 any which had existed since Elisabeth, and one which 
 extended over Scotland and Ireland, no less than over 
 England. The ecclesiastical and dynastic aims of the 
 Stuart monarchy had been replaced by a national policy, 
 in which the interests of the people of Great Britain sprang 
 to the first place. The immediate consequence of this 
 union of vigour and patriotism, in the government, was the 
 self-assertion of England as a commercial, and therefore 
 as a naval power. This awakened spirit of conscious 
 strength meant war with the Dutch, who while England 
 was pursuing ecclesiastical ends, had possessed themselves 
 
 i
 
 114 SECOND PEEIOD. 1640— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 of the trade of the world. War accordingly broke out 
 early in 1G52. Even before it came to real fighting, the 
 Avar of pamphlets had recommenced. The prohibition of 
 Salmasius' Defensio regia annulled itself as a matter of 
 course, and Salmasius was free to prepare a second 
 Defensio in answer to Milton. For the most vulnerable 
 point of the neAv English Commonwealth, was through the 
 odium excited on the continent against regicide. And 
 the quarter from which the monarchical pamphlets were 
 hurled against the English republic, was the press of the 
 republic of the United Provinces, the country which had 
 set the first example of successful rebellion against its law- 
 ful prince. 
 
 Before Salmasius' reply was ready, there was launched 
 from the Hague, in March, 1652, a virulent royalist 
 piece in Latin, under the title of Regii sanguinis clamor 
 ad coelum (Cry of the King's blood to Heaven against the 
 English parricides). Its 160 pages contained the usual 
 royalist invective in a rather common style of hyperbolical 
 declamation, such as that " in comparison of the execution 
 of Charles I., the guilt of the Jews in crucifying Christ 
 was as nothing." Exaggerated praises of Salmasius Avere 
 followed by scurrilous and rabid abuse of Milton. In the 
 style of the most shameless Jesuit lampoon, the Ampin'- 
 theai.nnn or the Scaliger hypobolimceus, and Avith Jesuit 
 tactics, every odious crime is imputed to the object of 
 the satire, without regard to truth or probability. Exiles 
 are proverbially credulous, and it is hkely enough that 
 the gossip of the English refugees at the Hague was much 
 employed in improving or inventing stories about the 
 man, avIio had dared to answer the royalist champion in 
 Latin as good as his own. Salmasius in his Defensio had 
 employed these stories, distorting the eA T ents of Milton's
 
 x.] MILTON AND MORUS. 115 
 
 life to discredit Lira. But for the author of the Clamor 
 there was no such excuse, for the hook was composed in 
 England, by an author living in Oxford and London, Avho 
 had every opportunity for informing himself accurately 
 of the facts about Milton's life and conversation. He 
 chose rather to heap up at random the traditional vocabu- 
 lary of defamation, which the Catholic theologians had 
 employed for some generations past, as their best weapon 
 against their adversaries. In these infamous productions, 
 hatched by celibate pedants in the foul atmosphere of the 
 Jesuit colleges, the gamut of charges always ranges from 
 bad grammar to unnatural crime. The only circumstance 
 which can be alleged in mitigation of the excesses of the 
 Regit sanguinis clamor is that Milton had provoked the 
 onfall by his own violence. He who throws dirt must 
 expect that dirt will be thrown back at him, and when it 
 comes to mud-throwing, the blackguard has, as it is right 
 that he should have, the best of it. 
 
 The author of the Clamor was Peter Du Moulin, a son 
 of the celebrated French Calvinist preacher of the same 
 name. The author not daring to entrust his pamphlet to 
 an English press, had sent it over to Holland, where it 
 was printed under the supervision of Alexander Morus. 
 This Morus (More or Moir) was of Scottish parentage, but 
 born (1G16) at Castres, Avhere his father was principal of 
 the Protestant college. Morus fitted the Clamor with a 
 preface, in which Milton was further reviled, and styled a 
 "monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen 
 ademtum." The secret of the authorship was strictly 
 kept, and Morus having been known to be concerned it: 
 the publication, was soon transformed in public belief into 
 the author. So it was reported to Milton, and so Milton 
 believed. He nursed his wrath, and took two years to 
 
 i 2
 
 116 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 meditate his blow. He caused inquiries to be made into 
 Morus's antecedents. It happened that Morus's conduct 
 had been wanting in discretion, especially in his relations 
 with women. He had been equally imprudent in his 
 utterances on some of the certainties of Calvinistic divinity. 
 It was easy to collect any amount of evidence under both 
 these heads. The system of kirk discipline offered a 
 ready-made machinery of espionage and delation. The 
 standing jest of the fifteenth century on the " governante " 
 of the cure was replaced, in Calvinistic countries, by the 
 anxiety of every minister to detect his brother minister in 
 any intimacy upon which a scandalous construction could 
 be put. 
 
 Morus endeavoured, through every channel at his com- 
 mand, to convince Milton that he was not the author of 
 the Glamor. He could have saved himself by revealing 
 the real author, who was lurking all the Avhile close to 
 Milton's elbow, and whose safety depended on Morus' 
 silence. This high-minded respect for another's secret is 
 more to Morus' honour, than any of the petty gossip about 
 him is to his discredit. He had nothing to offer, there- 
 fore, but negative assurances, and mere denial weighed 
 nothing with Milton, who was fully convinced that Morus 
 lied from terror. Milton's Defensio Secnnda came out in 
 May, 1654. In this piece (written in Latin) Morus is 
 throughout assumed to be the author of the Clamor, and 
 as such is pursued through many pages in a strain of 
 invective, in which banter is mingled with ferocity. The 
 Hague tittle-tattle about Morus's love-affairs is set forth 
 in the pomp of Milton's loftiest Latin. Sonorous periods 
 could hardly be more disproportioned to their material 
 content. To have kissed a girl is painted as the blackest 
 of crimes. The sublime and the ridiculous are hero
 
 x.] MILTON AND ATORUS. 117 
 
 blended without the step between. Milton descends even 
 to abuse the publisher, Viae, who had officially signed his 
 name to Morus's preface. The mixture of fanatical choler 
 and grotesque jocularity, in which he rolls forth his 
 charges of incontinence against Morus, and of petty 
 knavery against Viae, is only saved from being unseemly 
 by being ridiculous. The comedy is complete when we 
 remember that Morus had not written the Clamor, nor 
 Viae the preface. Milton's rage blinded him ; he is mad 
 Ajax castigating innocent sheep instead of Achreans. 
 
 The Latin pamphlets are indispensable to a knowledge 
 of Milton's disposition. We see in them his grand dis- 
 dain of his opponents, reproducing the concentrated in- 
 tellectual scorn of the Latin Persius ; his certainty of the 
 absolute justice of his own cause, and the purity of his own 
 motives. This lofty cast of thought is combined with an 
 eagerness to answer the meanest taunts. The intense sub- 
 jectivity of the poet breaks out in these paragraphs, and 
 while he should be stating the case of the republic, he holds 
 Europe listening to an account of himself, his accomplish- 
 ments, his studies and travels, his stature, the colour of his 
 eyes, his skill in fencing, &c. These egoistic utterances 
 must have seemed to Milton's contemporaries to be intru- 
 sive and irrelevant vanity. Paradise Lost was not as yet, 
 and to the Council of State Milton was, what he was 
 to Whitelocke, "a blind man who wrote Latin." But 
 these paragraphs, in which he talks of himself, are to us 
 the only living fragments out of many hundred worthless 
 pages. 
 
 To the Defensio Secunda there was of course a reply 
 by Morus. It was entitled Fides Puhlica, because it 
 was largely composed of testimonials to character. "When 
 one priest charges another with unchastity, the world
 
 118 SECOND PERIOD. 1640— 1GG0. [en. x. 
 
 looks on and laughs. But it is no laughing matter to 
 the defendant in such an action. He can always hring 
 exculpatory evidence, and in spite of any evidence he is 
 always helieved to he guilty. The effect of Milton's 
 furious denunciation of Morus had been to damage his 
 credit in religious circles, and to make mothers of families 
 shy of allowing him to visit at their houses. 
 
 Milton might have been content with a victory which, 
 as Gibbon said of his own, "over such an antagonist 
 Avas a sufficient humiliation." Milton's magnanimity was 
 no match for his irritation. He published a rejoinder 
 to Morus's Fides Publico,, reiterating his belief that Morus 
 was author of the Clamor, but that it was no matter 
 whether he was or not, since by publishing the book, 
 and furnishing it with a recommendatory preface, he had 
 made it his own. The charges against Morus' character 
 he reiterated, and strengthened by new " facts," which 
 Morus's enemies had hastened to contribute to the budget 
 of calumny. These imputations on character, mixed with 
 insinuations of unorthodoxy, such as are ever rife in 
 clerical controversy, Milton invests with the moral indig- 
 nation of a prophet denouncing the enemies of Jehovah. 
 He expends a wealth of vituperative Latin which makes 
 us tremble, till we remember that it is put in motion to 
 crush an insect. 
 
 This Pro se defensio (Defence for himself), appeared in 
 August, 1655. Morus met it by a supplementary Fides 
 Publica, and Milton, resolved to have the last word, met 
 him by a Supplement to the Defence. The reader will be 
 glad to hear that this is the end of the Morus controversy. 
 We leave Milton's victim buried under the mountains of 
 opprobrious Latin here heaped upon him — this "circum- 
 foraneus pharmacopola, vanissimus circulator, propudi- 
 nm hominis et prostibulum."
 
 CHAPTER XT. 
 
 LATIN SECRETARYSHIP COMES TO AN END — MILTOn's 
 
 FRIENDS. 
 
 It is no part of Milton's biography to relate the course of 
 public events in these momentous years, merely because 
 as Latin secretary he formulated the despatches of the 
 Protector or of his Council, and because these Latin 
 letters are incorporated in Milton's works. On the 
 course of affairs Milton's voice had no influence, as he 
 had no part in their transaction. Milton was the last 
 man of whom a practical politician would have sought 
 advice. He knew nothing of the temper of the nation, 
 and treated all that opposed his own view with supreme 
 disdain. On the other hand, idealist though he was, he 
 does not move in the sphere of speculative politics, or 
 count among those philosophic names, a few in each 
 century, who have influenced, not action but thought. 
 Accordingly his opinions have for us a purely personal 
 interest. They are part of the character of the poet 
 Milton, and do not belong to either world, of action or 
 of mind. 
 
 The course of his political convictions up to 1654 has 
 been traced in our narrative thus far. His breeding at
 
 120 SECOND PERIOD. 1610-1660. [chap. 
 
 home, at school, at college, was that of a ruemher of the 
 Established Church, but of the Puritan and Calvinistic, 
 not of the Laudian and Arminian, party within its pale. 
 By 1641, we find that his Puritanism, has developed 
 into Presbyterianism ; he desires, not to destroy the 
 Church, hut to reform it by abolishing government by 
 bishops, and substituting the Scotch or Genevan disci- 
 pline. When he wrote his Reason of Church Govern- 
 ment (1642), he is still a royalist; not in the cavalier 
 sense of a person attached to the reigning sovereign, or 
 the Stuart family, but still retaining the belief of his 
 age that monarchy in the abstract had somewhat of divine 
 sanction. Before 1649, the divine right of monarchy, 
 and the claim of Presbytery to be scriptural, have yielded 
 in his mind to a wider conception of the rights of the man 
 and the Christian. To use the party names of the time, 
 Milton the Presbyterian has expanded into Milton the 
 Independent. There is to be no State Church, and in- 
 stead of a monarchy there is to be a commonwealth. 
 Very soon the situation developes the important question 
 how this commonwealth shall be administered — whether 
 by a representative assembly, or by a picked council, or 
 a single governor. This question was put to a test in the 
 Parliament of 1654. The experiment of a representative 
 assembly, begun in September 1654, broke down in 
 January 1655. Before it was tried we find Milton in his 
 Second Defence, in May 1654, recommending Cromwell to 
 govern not by a Parliament, but by a council of officers ; 
 i. e. ho is a commonwealth's man. Arrived at this point, 
 would Milton take his stand upon doctrinaire repub- 
 licanism, and lose sight of liberty in the attempt to 
 secure equality, as his friends Vane, Overton, Bradshaw 
 would have done 1 Or would his idealist exaltation sweep
 
 xi.] MILTON AND THE COMMONWEALTH. 121 
 
 him on into some one of the current fanaticisms, Leveller, 
 Fifth Monarchy, or Muggletonian 1 Unpractical as he 
 ■was, he was close enough to State affairs as Latin Secre- 
 tary, to see that personal government hy the Protector 
 was, at the moment, the only solution. If the liberties 
 that had been conquered hy the sword were to he main- 
 tained, between levelling chaos on the one hand, and 
 royalist reaction on the other, it was the Protector alone 
 to whom those who prized liberty above party names 
 could look. Accordingly Milton may be regarded from 
 the year 1654 onwards as an Oliverian, though with 
 particular reservations. He saw — it was impossible for 
 a man in his situation not to see — the unavoidable 
 necessity which forced Cromwell, at this moment, to 
 undertake to govern without a representative assembly. 
 The political necessity of the situation was absolute, and 
 all reasonable men who were embarked in the cause felt 
 it to be so. 
 
 Through all these stages Milton passed in the space of 
 twenty years — Church-Puritan, Presbyterian, Royalist, 
 Independent, Commonwealth's man, Oliverian. These 
 political phases were not the acquiescence of a placeman, 
 or indifferentist, in mutations for which he does not care ; 
 still less were they changes either of party or of opinion. 
 Whatever he thought, Milton thought and felt intensely, 
 and expressed emphatically ; and even his enemies could 
 not accuse him of a shadow of inconsistency or wavering 
 in his principles. On the contrary, tenacity, or persistence 
 of idea, amounted in him to a serious defect of character. 
 A conviction once formed dominated him, so that, as in 
 the controversy with Morus, he could not be persuaded 
 that he had made a mistake. No mind, the history of 
 which we have an opportunity of intimately studying,
 
 122 SECOND PERIOD. 1640— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 could "be more of one piece and texture than was that of 
 Milton from youth to age. The names, which we are 
 obliged to give to his successive political stages, do not 
 indicate shades of colour adopted from the prevailing 
 political ground, but the genuine development of the 
 public consciousness of Puritan England repeated in an 
 individual. Milton moved forward, not "because Cromwell 
 and the rest advanced, but with Cromwell and the rest. 
 We may perhaps describe the motive force as a passionate 
 attachment to personal liberty, liberty of thought and 
 action. This ideal force working in the minds of a few, 
 " those worthies which are the soul of that enterprise " 
 (Tenure of Kings), had been the mainspring of the whole 
 re vol ution . The Levellers, Quakers, Fifth. Monarchy men , 
 and the wilder Anabaptist sects, only showed the work- 
 ings of the same idea in men, whoso intellects had not 
 been disciplined by education or experience. The idea of 
 liberty, formulated into a doctrine, and bowed down to as 
 a holy creed, made some of its best disciples, such as 
 Harrison and Overton, useless at the most critical junc- 
 ture. The party of anti-Oliverian republicans, the In- 
 transigentes, became one of the greatest difficulties of the 
 Government. Milton, with his idealism, his thorough- 
 ness, and obstinate persistence, was not unlikely to have 
 shipwrecked upon the same rock. He was saved by his 
 constancy to the principle of religious liberty, which was 
 found with the party that had destroyed the King 
 because he would not be ruled by a Parliament, while in 
 1G55 it supported the Protector in governing without a 
 Parliament. Supreme authority in itself was not Croni- 
 av ell's aim ; he used it only to secure the fulfilment of 
 those ideas of religious liberty, civil order, and Protestant, 
 ascendancy in Europe, which filled his whole soul. To
 
 xi.] MILTON AND THE COMMONWEALTH. 123 
 
 Milton, as to Cromwell, forms, ■whether of worship or 
 government, were hut means to an end, and were to he 
 changed whenever expediency might require. 
 
 In 1655, then, Milton was an Oliverian, hut with 
 reservations. The most important of these reservations 
 regarded the relation of the state to the church. Crom- 
 well never wholly dropped the scheme of a national 
 church. It was, indeed, to he as comprehensive as pos- 
 sible ; Episcopacy was pulled down, Presbytery was not 
 set up, but individual ministers might he Episcopalian or 
 Presbyterian in sentiment, provided they satisfied a certain 
 standard, intelligible enough to that generation, of " god- 
 liness." Here Milton seems to have remained throughout 
 upon the old Independent platform ; he will not have 
 the civil power step over its limits into the province of 
 religion at all. Many matters, in which the old prelatic 
 church had usurped upon the domain of the state, should 
 he replaced under the secular authority. But the spiritual 
 region was matter of conscience, and not of external 
 regulation. 
 
 A further reservation which Milton would make related 
 to endowments, or the maintenance of ministers. The 
 Protectorate, and the constitution of 1657, maintained an 
 established clergy in the enjoyment of tithes or other 
 settled stipends. Nothing was more abhorrent to Milton's 
 sentiment than state payment in religious things. The 
 minister who receives such pay "becomes a state pensioner, 
 " a hireling." The law of tithes is a Jewish law, repealed 
 by the Gospel, under which the minister is only main- 
 tained by the freewill offerings of the congregation to 
 which he ministers. This antipathy to hired preachers 
 was one of Milton's earliest convictions. It thrusts itself, 
 rather importunately, into Lycidas (1636), and reappears
 
 124 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 1GG0. [chap. 
 
 in the Sonnet to Cromwell (Sonnet xvn., 1652), before it is 
 dogmatically expounded in the pamphlet, Considerations 
 touching means to remove Hirelings out of the Cliurch 
 (1G59). Of the two corruptions of the church by the 
 secular power, one by force, the other by pay, Milton 
 regards the last as the most dangerous. " Under force, 
 though no thank to the forcers, true religion ofttimes best 
 thrives and flourishes ; but the corruption of teachers, 
 most commonly the effect of hire, is the very bane of 
 truth in them who are so corrupted." Nor can we tax 
 this aversion to a salaried ministry, with being a mono- 
 mania of sect. It is essentially involved in the conception 
 of religion as a spiritual state, a state of grace. A soul in 
 this state can only be ministered to by a brother in a like 
 frame of mind. To assign a place with a salary, is to offer 
 a pecuniary inducement to simulate this qualification. 
 This principle may be wrong, but it is not unreasonable. 
 It is the very principle on which the England of our day 
 has decided against the endowment of science. The 
 endowment of the church was to Milton the poison of 
 religion, and in so thinking he was but true to his con- 
 ception of religion. Cromwell, whatever may have been 
 his speculative opinions, decided in favour of a state 
 endowment, upon the reasons, or some of them, which 
 have moved modern statesmen to maintain church esta- 
 blishments. 
 
 With whatever reservations, Milton was an Oliverian. 
 Supporting the Protector's policy, he admired his conduct, 
 and has recorded his admiration in the memorable sonnet 
 xii. How the Protector thought of Milton, or even 
 that he knew him at all, there remains no evidence. 
 Napoleon said of Corneille that, if he had lived in his 
 day, he would have made him his first minister.
 
 xi.] MILTON AND THE COMMONWEALTH. 125 
 
 Milton's ideas were not such as could have value in the 
 eyes of a practical statesman. Yet Cromwell was not 
 always taking advice, or discussing husiness. He, who 
 could take a liking for the genuine inwardness of the 
 enthusiast George Fox, might have heen expected to 
 appreciate equal unworldliness, joined with culture and 
 reading, in Milton. " If," says Neal, " there was a man 
 in England who excelled hi any faculty or science, the 
 Protector would find him out and reward him." But the 
 excellence which the Protector prized was aptness for 
 public employment, and this was the very quality in 
 which Milton was deficient. 
 
 The poverty of Milton's state letters has been often 
 remarked. Whenever weighty negotiations are going on, 
 other pens than his are employed. "We may ascribe this 
 to his blindness. Milton could only dictate, and there- 
 fore everything entrusted to him must pass through an 
 amanuensis, who might blab. One exception to the 
 commonplace character of the state papers there is. The 
 massacre of the Yaudois by their own sovereign, Charles 
 Emanuel II., Duke of Savoy, excited a thrill of horror in 
 England greater than the massacres of Scio or of Batak 
 roused in our time. For in Savoy it was not humanity 
 only that was outraged, it was a deliberate assault of the 
 Papal half of Europe upon an outpost of the Protestant 
 cause. 
 
 One effect of the Puritan revolution had been to 
 alter entirely the foreign policy of England. By nature, 
 by geographical position, by commercial occupations, 
 and the free spirit of the natives, these islands were 
 marked out to be members of the northern confederacy 
 of progressive and emancipated Europe. The foreign 
 policy of Elisabeth had been steady adhesion to this
 
 126 SECOND PERIOD. 1610— 1GG0. [chap. 
 
 law of nature. The two first Stuarts, coquetting 
 with semi-catholicism at home, had leaned with all the 
 weight of the crown and of government towards catholic 
 connexions. The country had always offered a vain re- 
 sistance ; the Parliament of 1621 had been dismissed for 
 advising James to join the continental protestants against 
 Spain. It was certain, therefore, that when the govern- 
 ment became Puritan, its foreign policy would again 
 become that of Elisabeth. This must have been the case 
 even if Cromwell had not been there. He saw not only 
 that England must be a partner in the general protestant 
 interest, but that it fell to England to make the com- 
 bination and to lead it. He acted in this with his usual 
 decision. He placed England in her natural antagonism 
 to Spain ; he made peace with the Dutch ; he courted 
 the friendship of the Swiss Cantons, and the alliance of 
 the Scandinavian and German Princes ; and to France, 
 which had a divided interest, he made advantageous 
 offers provided the Cardinal would disconnect himself 
 from the ultramontane party. 
 
 lb was in April 1655, that the Vaudois atrocities 
 suddeuly added the impulse of religious sympathy to the 
 permanent gravitation of the political forces. In all 
 catholic countries the Jesuits had by this time made 
 themselves masters of the councils of the princes. The 
 aim of Jesuit policy in the seventeenth century was nothing 
 less than the entire extirpation of protestantism, and pro- 
 testants in the countries which they ruled. The in- 
 habitants of certain Piedmontese valleys had held from 
 time immemorial, and long before Luther, tenets and 
 forms of worship very like those to which the German 
 reformers had sought to bring back the church. The 
 Vaudois were wretchedly poor, and had been incessantly
 
 xi.] TIIE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT. 127 
 
 the objects of aggression and persecution. In January 
 1655, a sudden determination was taken by the Turin 
 government to make them conform to the catholic re- 
 ligion by force. The whole of the inhabitants of three 
 valleys were ordered to quit the country within three 
 days, under pain of death and confiscation of goods, unless 
 they would become, or undertake to become, catholic. 
 They sent their humble remonstrances to the court of 
 Turin against this edict. The remonstrances were clis- 
 
 O 
 
 regarded, and military execution was ordered. On April 
 17, 1655, the soldiers, recruits from all countries — the 
 Irish are specially mentioned — were let loose upon the 
 unarmed population. Murder and rape and burning 
 are the ordinary incidents of military execution. These 
 were not enough to satisfy the ferocity of the catholic 
 soldiery, who revelled for many days in the infliction of 
 all that brutal lust or savage cruelty can suggest to men. 
 
 It was nearly a month before the news reached Eng- 
 land. A cry of horror went through the country, and 
 Cromwell said it came "as near his heart as if his own 
 nearest and dearest had been concerned." A day of hu- 
 miliation was appointed, large collections were made for 
 the sufferers, and a special envoy was despatched to re- 
 monstrate with the Duke of Savoy. Cardinal Mazarin, 
 however, seeing the importance which the Lord Protector 
 would acquire by taking the lead on this occasion, stepped 
 in, and patched up a hasty arrangement, the treaty of 
 Pignerol, by which some sort of fallacious protection was 
 ostensibly secured to the survivors of the massacre. 
 
 All the despatches in this business were composed by 
 Milton. But he only found the words ; especially in the 
 letter to the Duke of Savoy, the tone of which is much 
 more moderate than we should have expected, consider-
 
 128 SECOND PEEIOD. 1G10-16G0. [chap. 
 
 ing that Blake was in the Mediterranean, and master of 
 the coasts of the Duke's dominions. It is impossible to 
 extract from these letters any characteristic trait, unless 
 it is from the speech which the envoy, Morland, was in- 
 structed to deliver at Turin, in which it is said that all 
 the Neros of all ages had never contrived inhumanities 
 so atrocious, as what had taken place in the Yaudois 
 valleys. Thus restricted in his official communications, 
 Milton gave vent to his personal feelings on the occasion 
 in the well-known sonnet (xvm.) "Avenge, Lord, thy 
 slaughtered saints, whose hones Lie scattered on the Alpine 
 mountains cold." 
 
 It has been already said that there remains no trace of 
 any personal intercourse between Milton and Cromwell. 
 He seems to have remained equally unknown to, or un- 
 regarded by, the other leading men in the Government or 
 the Council. It is vain to conjecture the cause of this 
 general neglect. Some have found it in the coldness 
 with which Milton regarded, parts at least of, the policy 
 of the Protectorate. Others refer it to the haughty nature 
 of the man, who will neither ask a favour, nor make the 
 first advances towards intimacy. This last supposition is 
 nearer the truth than the former. An expression he uses 
 in a private letter may be cited in its support. "Writing 
 to Peter Heimbach in 1G57, to excuse himself from giving 
 him a recommendation to the English ambassador in 
 Holland, he says : "I am sorry that I am not able to do 
 this ; I have very little acquaintance with those in power, 
 inasmuch as I keep very much to my own house, and 
 prefer to do so." Something may also bo set down to 
 the character of the Puritan leaders, alien to all poetry, 
 and knowing no books but the Bible. 
 
 The mental isolation in which the great poet lived his
 
 XI.] MILTON AND HIS FRIENDS. 129 
 
 life, is a remarkable feature of his "biography. It was not 
 only after the Kestoration that he appears lonely and 
 friendless ; it was much the same during the previous 
 period of the Parliament and the Protectorate. Just at 
 one time, about 1641, we hear from our best authority, 
 Phillips, of his cultivating the society of men of his own 
 age, and " keeping a gawdy-day," but this only once in 
 three weeks or a month, Avith " two gentlemen of Gray's 
 Inn." He had, therefore, known what it was to be 
 sociable. But the general tenour of his life was other ; 
 proud, reserved, self-contained, repellent ; brooding over 
 his own ideas, not easily admitting into his mind the 
 ideas of others. It is indeed an erroneous estimate of 
 Milton to attribute to him a hard or austere nature. He 
 had all the quick sensibility which belongs to the poetic 
 temperament, and longed to be loved that he might love 
 again. But he had to pay the penalty of all who believe 
 in their own ideas, in that their ideas come between 
 them and the persons that approach them, and constitute 
 a mental barrier which can only be broken down by 
 sympathy. And sympathy for ideas is hard to find, just 
 in proportion as those ideas are profound, far-reaching, 
 the fruit of long study and meditation. Hence it was 
 that Milton did not associate readily with his contem- 
 poraries, but was affable and instructive in conversation 
 with young persons, and those who would approach him 
 in the attitude of disciples. His daughter Deborah, who 
 could tell so little about him, remembered that he was 
 delightful company, the life of a circle, and that he was 
 so, through a flow of subjects, and an unaffected cheerful- 
 ness and civility. I would interpret this testimony, the 
 authenticity of which is indisputable, of his demeanour 
 with the young, and those who were modest enough to 
 
 K
 
 130 SECOND PERIOD. 1G10— 16G0. [chap. 
 
 wait upon his utterances. His isolation from his coevals, 
 and from those who offered resistance, was the necessary- 
 consequence of his force of character, and the moral 
 tenacity which endured no encroachment on the narrow 
 scheme of thought, over which it was incessantly brood- 
 in". 
 
 Though, as Johnson says, "his literature Avas immense," 
 there was no humanity in it; it was fitted immovably 
 into a scholastic frame-work. Hence it was no bond of 
 sympathy between him and other men. "We find him in 
 no intimate relation with any of the contemporary men of 
 learning, poets, or wits. From such of them as were of 
 the cavalier party he was estranged by politics. That 
 it was Milton's interposition which saved Davenant's 
 life in 1651, even were the story better authenticated 
 than it is, is not an evidence of intimacy. The three 
 men most eminent for learning (in the usually received 
 sense of the word) in England at that day were Selden 
 (d. 1654), Gataker (d. 1654), and Archbishop Usher 
 (d. 1656), all of whom were to be found in London. 
 With none of the three is there any trace of Milton ever 
 having had intercourse. 
 
 It is probable, but not certain, that it was at Milton's 
 intercession that the Council proposed to subsidise Brian 
 Walton in his great enterprise — the Polyglott Bible. 
 This, the noblest monument of the learning of the Anglican 
 Church, was projected and executed by the silenced 
 clergy. Fifteen years of spoliation and humiliation thus 
 bore richer fruit of learning than the two centuries of 
 wealth and honour which have since elapsed. As Brian 
 Walton had, at one time, been curate of Allhallows, 
 Bread Street, Milton may have known him, and it has 
 been inferred that by T wells' expression — "The Council of
 
 xi.] MILTON AND HIS FRIENDS. 131 
 
 state, before whom some, having relation to them, brought 
 tbis business " — Milton is meant. 
 
 Not with John Hales, Cud worth, Whichcote, Nicholas 
 Bernard, Meric Casaubon, nor with any of the men of 
 letters who were churchmen, do we find Milton in corre- 
 spondence. The interest of religion was more powerful 
 than the interest of knowledge ; and the author of Eikono- 
 Mastes must bave been held in special abhorrence by the 
 loyal clergy. The general sentiment of this party is ex- 
 pressed in Hacket's tirade, for which the reader is referred 
 to his Life of Archbishop "Williams. 
 
 From Presbyterians, such as Theophilus Gale or Baxter, 
 Milton was equally separated by party. Of Hobbes, 
 Milton's widow told Aubrey "that he was not of his 
 acquaintance ; that her husband did not like him at all, 
 but would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts." 
 
 Owing to these circumstances, the circle of Milton's 
 intimates contains few, and those undistinguished names. 
 One exception there was. In Andrew Marvel Milton 
 found one congenial spirit, incorruptible amid poverty, 
 unbowed by defeat. Marvel was twelve years Milton's 
 junior, and a Cambridge man (Trinity), like himself. He 
 had had better training still, having been for two years 
 an inmate of Nunappleton, in the capacity of instructor 
 to Mary, only daughter of the great Lord Fairfax. In 
 1652, Milton had recommended Marvel for the appoint- 
 ment of assistant secretary to himself, now that he was 
 partially disabled by his blindness. The recommendation 
 was not effectual at the time, another man, Philip Mea- 
 dows, obtaining the post. It was not till 1657, when 
 Meadows was sent on a mission to Denmark, that Marvel 
 became Milton's colleague. He remained attached to him 
 to the last. It were to be wished that he had left some 
 
 K 2
 
 132 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 reminiscences of his intercourse with the poet in his later 
 years, some authentic notice of him in his prose letters, 
 instead of a copy of verses, which attest, at least, his 
 affectionate admiration for Milton's great epic, though 
 they are a poor specimen of his own poetical efforts. 
 
 Of Marchmont Keedham, and Samuel Hartlib mention 
 has been already made. Daring the eight years of his 
 sojourn in the house in Petty France, " he was frequently 
 visited by persons of quality," says Phillips. The only 
 name he gives is Lady Eanelagh. This lady, by birth a 
 Boyle, sister of Eobert Boyle, had placed first her nephew, 
 and then her son, under Milton's tuition. Of an excel- 
 lent understanding, and liberally cultivated, she sought 
 Milton's society, and as he could not go to visit her, 
 she went to him. There are no letters of Milton addressed 
 to her, but he mentions her once as "a most superior 
 woman," and when, in 1G56, she left London for Ireland, 
 he " grieves for the loss of the one acquaintance which 
 was worth to him all the rest." These names, with that 
 of Dr. Paget, exhaust the scanty list of Milton's intimates 
 during this period. 
 
 To these older friends, however, must be added his 
 former pupils, now become men, but remaining ever 
 attached to their old tutor, seeing him often when in 
 London, and when absent corresponding with him. "With 
 them he was " affable and instructive in conversation." 
 Henry Lawrence, son of the President of Oliver's Council, 
 and Cyriac Skinner, grandson of Chief Justice Coke, were 
 special favourites. With these he would sometimes " by 
 the fire help waste a sullen day ;" and it was these two 
 who called forth from him the only utterances of this 
 time which are not solemn, serious, or sad. Sonnet xvi 
 is a poetical invitation to Henry Lawrence, " of virtuous
 
 xi.] MILTON AND HIS FRIENDS. 133 
 
 father virtuous son," to a " neat repast," not without wine 
 and song, to cheer the winter season. Besides these two, 
 whose names are familiar to us through the Sonnets, there 
 was Lady Eanelagh's son, Eichard Jones, who went, in 
 1656, to Oxford, attended hy his tutor, the German 
 Heinrich Oldenhurg. We have two letters (Latin) 
 addressed to Jones at Oxford, which are curious as show- 
 ing that Milton was as dissatisfied with that university 
 even after the reform, with Oliver Chancellor, and Owen 
 Vice-Chancellor, as he had heen with Camhriclge. 
 
 His two nephews, also his pupils, must have ceased at 
 a very early period to he acceptahle either as friends or 
 companions. They had "both — hut the younger hrother, 
 John, more decidedly than Edward — passed into the 
 opposite camp. This is a result of the uncle's strict system 
 of Puritan discipline, which will surprise no one who has 
 ohserved that, in education, mind reacts against the pres- 
 sure of will. The teacher who seeks to impose his views 
 raises antagonists, and not disciples. The generation of 
 young men who grew up under the Commonwealth were 
 in intellectual revolt against the constraint of Puritanism, 
 hefore they proceeded to political revolution against its 
 authority. Long hefore the reaction emhodied itself in 
 the political fact of the Restoration, it had manifested 
 itself in popular literature. The theatres were still closed 
 hy the police, hut Davenant found a puhlic in London to 
 applaud an "entertainment hy declamations and music, 
 after the manner of the ancients" (1656). The press 
 "began timidly to venture on hooks of amusement, in a 
 style of humour which seemed rihald and heathenish to 
 the staid and soher covenanter. Something of the jollity 
 and merriment of old Elisabethan days seemed to he in 
 the air. But with a vast difference. Instead of " dally-
 
 13 1 SECOND PERIOD. 1640— 16C0. [chap. 
 
 ing with the innocence of love," as in England's Helicon 
 (1G00), or The Passionate Pilgrim, the sentiment, crushed 
 and maimed by unwise repression, found a less honest and 
 less refined expression. The strongest and most universal 
 of human passions when allowed freedom, light, and air, 
 becomes poetic inspiration. The same passion coerced by 
 police is but driven underground. 
 
 So it came to pass that, in these years, the Protector's 
 Council of state was much exercised by attempts of the 
 London press to supply the public, weary of sermons, 
 with some light literature of the class now (1879) 
 known as facetious. On April 25, 1656, the august body 
 which had upon its hands the government of three king- 
 doms and the protection of the protestant interest mili- 
 tant throughout Europe, could find nothing better to do 
 than to take into consideration a book entitled Sportive 
 Wit, or The Muse's Merriment. Sad to relate, the book 
 was found to contain " much lascivious and profane 
 matter." And the editor?— no other than John Phillips, 
 Milton's youngest nephew ! It is as if nature, in reassert- 
 ing herself, had made deliberate selection of its agent. 
 The pure poet of Comus, the man who had publicly 
 boasted his chastity, had trained up a pupil to become 
 the editor of an immodest drollery ! Another and more 
 original production of John Phillips, the Satyr against 
 Hypocrites, was an open attack, with mixed banter and 
 serious indignation, on the established religion. "It 
 affords," says Godwin, " unequivocal indication of the 
 company now kept by the author with cavaliers, and bon 
 vivans, and demireps, and men of ruined fortunes." 
 Edward Phillips, the elder brother, followed suit with the 
 Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), a book, accord- 
 ing to Godwin, " entitled to no insignificant rank among
 
 xi.] HIS REPUTATION WITH FOREIGNERS. 135 
 
 the multifarious productions issued from the press, to 
 debauch the manners of the nation, and to bring back the 
 King." Truly, a man's worst vexations come to him from 
 his own relations. Milton had the double annoyance of 
 the public exposure before the Council of State, and the 
 private reflection on the failure of his own system of 
 education. 
 
 The homage which was wanting to the prophet in his 
 own country was more liberally tendered by foreigners. 
 Milton, it must be remembered, was yet only known in 
 England as the pamphleteer of strong republican, but 
 somewhat eccentric, opinions. On the continent he was 
 the answerer of Salmasius, the vindicator of liberty 
 against despotic power. " Learned foreigners of note," 
 Phillips tells us, " could not part out of this city without 
 giving a visit " to his uncle. A ubrey even exaggerates 
 this flocking of the curious, so far as to say that some 
 came over into England only to see Oliver Protector and 
 John Milton. That Milton had more than he liked of 
 these sightseers, who came to look at him when he could 
 not see them, we can easily believe. Such visitors would 
 of course be from protestant countries. Italians, though 
 admiring his elegant Latin, had "disliked him on account 
 of his too severe morals." A glimpse, and no more than 
 a glimpse, of the impression such visitors could carry 
 away, we obtain in a letter written, in 1G51, by a Nurem- 
 berg pastor, Christoph Arnold, to a friend at home : — 
 " The strenuous defender of the new regime, Milton, enters 
 readily into conversation ; his speech is pure, his written 
 style very pregnant. He has committed himself to a 
 harsh, not to say unjust, criticism of the old English 
 divines, and of their Scripture commentaries, which are 
 truly learned, be witness the genius of learning himself ! "
 
 138 SECOND PERIOD. 1G10-1GG0. [cuap. 
 
 It must not be supposed from this that Milton had dis- 
 coursed with Arnold on the English divines. The allusion 
 is to that onfall upon the reformers, Cranmer, Latimer, &c, 
 which had escaped from Milton's pen in 1642 to the great 
 grief of his friends. If the information of a dissenting 
 minister, one Thomas Bradbury, who professed to derive 
 it from Jeremiah White, one of Oliver's chaplains, 
 may be trusted, Milton " was allowed by the Parliament 
 a weekly table for the entertainment of foreign minis- 
 ters and persons of learning, such especially as came 
 from protestant states, which allowance was also con- 
 tinued by Cromwell." 
 
 Such homage, though it may be a little tiresome, may 
 have gratified for the moment the political writer, but it 
 would not satisfy the poet who was dreaming of an 
 immortality of far other fame — 
 
 Two equal'd with me in fate, 
 
 So were I equal'd with them in renown. 
 
 And to one with Milton's acute sensibility, yearning for 
 sympathy and love, dependent, through his calamity, on 
 the eyes, as on the heart, of others, his domestic interior 
 was of more consequence than outside demonstrations 
 of respect. Four years after the death of his first 
 wife he married again. We know nothing more of this 
 second wife, Catharine Woodcock, than what may be 
 gathered from the Sonnet xis. in which he comme- 
 morated his " late espoused saint," in whose person " love, 
 sweetness, goodness shin'd." After only fifteen months 
 union she died (1658), after having given birth to a 
 daughter, who lived only a few months. Milton was 
 again alone. 
 
 His public functions as Latin Secretary had been con-
 
 xi.] DEATH OF CROMWELL. 137 
 
 tracted within narrow limits by his blindness. The 
 heavier part of the duties had been transferred to others, 
 first to Weckherlin, then to Philip Meadows, and lastly 
 to Andrew Marvel. The more confidential diplomacy 
 Thurloe reserved for his own cabinet. But Milton con- 
 tinued up to the last to be occasionally called upon for a 
 Latin epistle. On September 3, 1658, passed away the mas- 
 ter-mind which had hitherto compelled the jarring elements 
 in the nation to co- exist together, and chaos was let loose. 
 Milton retained and exercised his secretaryship under 
 Eichard Protector, and even under the restored Parlia- 
 ment. His latest Latin letter is of date May 16, 1659. 
 He is entirely outside all the combinations and complica- 
 tions which filled the latter half of that year, after 
 Richard's retirement in May. It is little use writing to 
 foreign potentates now, for, with one man's life, England 
 has fallen from her lead in Europe, and is gravitating 
 towards the catholic and reactionary powers, Prance or 
 Spain. Milton, though he knows nothing more than one 
 of the public, " only what it appears to us without doors," 
 he says, will yet write about it. The habit of pam- 
 phleteering was on him, and he will write what no one 
 will care to read. The stiff-necked commonwealth men, 
 with their doctrinaire republicanism, were standing out 
 for their constitutional ideas, blind to the fact that the 
 royalists were all the while undermining the ground 
 beneath the feet alike of Presbyterian and Independent, 
 Parliament and army. The Greeks of Constantinople 
 denouncing the Azymite, when Mohammed II. was forming 
 his lines round the doomed city, were not more infatuated 
 than these pedantic commonwealth men with their parlia- 
 mentarianism when Charles II. was at Calais. 
 
 Not less inopportune than the public men of the party,
 
 133 SECOND PERIOD. 1640—1660. [chap. 
 
 Milton chooses this time for inculcating his views on 
 endowments. A fury of utterance was upon him, and he 
 poured out, during the death-throes of the republic, pam- 
 phlet upon pamphlet, as fast as he could get them written 
 to his dictation. These extemporised effusions hetray in 
 their style, hurry and confusion, the restlessness of a 
 coming despair. The passionate enthusiasm of the early 
 tracts is gone, and all the old faults, the obscurity, the 
 inconsecutiveness, the want of arrangement, are ex- 
 aggerated. In the Ready Way there is a monster sen- 
 tence of thirty-nine lines, containing 336 words. Though 
 his instincts were perturhed, he was unaware what turn 
 things were taking. In Fehruary 1660, when all persons 
 of ordinary information saw that the restoration of 
 monarchy was certain, Milton knew it not, and put out a 
 tract to show his countrymen a Ready and easy loay to 
 establish a free Commonwealth. "With the same perti- 
 nacity with which he had adhered to his own assumption 
 that Morus was author of the Clamor, he now refused to 
 believe in the return of the Stuarts. Fast as his pen 
 moved, events outstripped it, and he has to rewrite the 
 Ready and easy way to suit their march. The second 
 edition is overtaken hy the Eestoration, and it should 
 seem was never circulated. Milton will ever "give 
 advice to Sylla," and writes a letter of admonition to 
 Monk, which, however, never reached either the press or 
 Sylla. 
 
 The month of May 1660, put a forced end to his 
 illusion. Before the 29th of that month he had fled from 
 the house in Petty France, and heen sheltered hy a friend 
 in the city. In this friend's house, in Bartholomew 
 Close, he lay concealed till the passing of the Act of 
 Oblivion, 29th August. Phillips says that he owed his
 
 xi.] THE RESTORATION. 139 
 
 exemption from the vengeance which overtook so many 
 of his friends, to Andrew Marvel, " who acted vigorously 
 in his behalf, and made a considerable party for him." But 
 in adding that "he was so far excepted as not to bear any 
 office in the commonwealth," Phillips is in error. 
 Milton's name does not occur in the Act. Pope used to 
 tell that Davenant had employed his interest to protect a 
 brother-poet, thus returning a similar act of generosity 
 done to himself by Milton in 1650. Pope had this story 
 from Betterton the actor. How far Davenant exaggerated 
 to Betterton his own influence or his exertions, we cannot 
 tell. Another account assigns the credit of the interven- 
 tion to Secretary Morris and Sir Thomas Clarges. After 
 all, it is probable that he owed his immunity to his insig- 
 nificance and his harmlessness. The formality of burning 
 two of his books by the hands of the hangman was gone 
 through. He was also for some time during the autumn 
 of 1660 in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms, for on 
 15th December, there is an entry in the Commons 
 journals ordering his discharge. It is characteristic of 
 Milton that, even in this moment of peril, he stood up 
 for his rights, and refused to pay an overcharge, which the 
 official thought he might safely exact from a rebel and a 
 covenanter.
 
 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0— 1674. 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL. — LITERARY OCCUPATION. — RELIGIOUS 
 
 OPINIONS. 
 
 Revolutions are of two kinds ; they are either progressive 
 or reactionary. A revolution of progress is often destruc- 
 tive, sweeping away much which should have heen pre- 
 served. But such a revolution has a regenerating force ; 
 it renews the youth of a nation, and gives free play to its 
 vital powers. Lost limbs are replaced by new. A revolu- 
 tion of reaction, on the other hand, is a benumbing influ- 
 ence, paralysing effort, and levelling character. In such a 
 conservative revolution the mean, the selfish, and the 
 corrupt come to the top ; man seeks ease and enjoyment 
 rather than duty ; virtue, honour, patriotism, and dis- 
 interestedness disappear altogether from a society which 
 has ceased to believe in them. 
 
 The Restoration of 1660 was such a revolution. Com- 
 plete and instantaneous inversion of the position of the two 
 parties in the nation, it occasioned much individual hard- 
 ship. But this was only the fortune of war, the necessary 
 consequence of party ascendancy. The Restoration was 
 much more than a triumph of the party of the royalists 
 over that of the roundheads ; it was the deathblow to
 
 ch. xii.] EFFECTS OF THE RESTORATION. 141 
 
 national aspiration, to all those aims which raise man 
 ahove himself. It destroyed and trampled under foot 
 his ideal. The Restoration was a moral catastrophe. It 
 was not that there wanted good men among the church- 
 men, men as pious and virtuous as the Puritans whom 
 they displaced. But the royalists came hack as the party 
 of reaction, reaction of the spirit of the world against 
 asceticism, of self-indulgence against duty, of materialism 
 against idealism. For a time virtue was a public laugh- 
 ing-stock, and the word " saint," the highest expression 
 in the language for moral perfection, connoted everything 
 that was ridiculous. I do not speak of the gallantries of 
 "Whitehall, which figure so prominently in the histories of 
 the reign. Far too much is made of these, when they are 
 made the scapegoat of the moralist. The style of court 
 manners was a mere incident on the surface of social life. 
 The national life was more profoundly tainted hy the 
 discouragement of all good men, which penetrated every 
 shire and every parish, than hy the distant reports of the 
 loose behaviour of Charles II. Servility, meanness, 
 venality, time-serving, and a dishelief in virtue diffused 
 themselves over the nation like a pestilential miasma, the 
 depressing influence of which was heavy, even upon those 
 souls which individually resisted the poison. The heroic 
 age of England had passed away, not hy gradual decay, 
 hy imperceptible degeneration, hut in a year, in a single 
 day, like the winter's snow in Greece. It is for the 
 historian to describe, and unfold the sources of this con- 
 tagion. The "biographer of Milton has to take note of the 
 political change only as it affected the worldly circum- 
 stances of the man, the spiritual environment of the 
 poet, and the springs of his inspiration. 
 
 The consequences of the Restoration to Milton's worldly
 
 142 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0— 1674. [chap. 
 
 fortunes were disastrous. As a partisan he was necessarily 
 involved in the ruin of his party. As a matter of course 
 he lost his Latin secretaryship. There is a story that he 
 was offered to he continued in it, and that when urged to 
 accept the offer hy his wife, he replied, " Thou art in the 
 right ; you, as other women, would ride in your coach ; for 
 me, my aim is to live and die an honest man." This tradi- 
 tion, handed on by Pope, is of doubtful authenticity. It 
 is not probable that the man who had printed of Charles I. 
 what Milton had printed, could have been offered office 
 under Charles II. Even were court favour to be pur- 
 chased by concessions, Milton was not the man to make 
 them, or to belie his own antecedents, as Marchmont 
 Xeedham, Dry den, and so many others did. Our wish 
 for Milton is that he should have placed himself from the 
 beginning above party. But he had chosen to be the 
 champion of a party, and he loyally accepted the conse- 
 quences. He escaped with life and liberty. The re- 
 action, though barbarous in its treatment of its victims, 
 was not bloodthirsty. Milton was already punished by 
 the loss of his sight, and he was now mulcted in three- 
 fourths of his small fortune. A sum of 2000Z. which 
 he had placed in government securities was lost, the 
 restored monarchy refusing to recognise the obligations 
 of the protectorate. He lost another like sum by mis- 
 management, and for want of good advice, says Phillips, 
 or according to his dranddaughter's statement, by the 
 dishonesty of a money-scrivener. He had also to give up, 
 Avithout compensation, some property, valued at GO/, a 
 year, which he had purchased Avhen the estates of the 
 Chapter of Westminster were sold. In the great fire, 
 1GGG, his house in Bread-street was destroyed. Thus, 
 from easy circumstances, he was reduced, if not to desti- 
 tution, at least to narrow means. He left at his death
 
 xii.] EFFECTS OF THE RESTORATION. 143 
 
 1-500?., which Phillips calls a considerable sum. And if 
 he sold his books, one by one, during his lifetime, this 
 was because, knowing their value, he thought he could 
 dispose of them to greater advantage than his wife would 
 be able to do. 
 
 But far outweighing such considerations as pecuniary 
 ruin, and personal discomfort, was the shock which the 
 moral nature felt from the irretrievable discomfiture of all 
 the hopes, aims, and aspirations which had hitherto sus- 
 tained and nourished his soul. In a few months the 
 labour of twenty years was swept away without a trace of 
 it being left. It was not merely a political defeat of his 
 party, it was the total wreck of the principles, of the social 
 and religious ideal, with which Milton's life was bound up. 
 Others, whose convictions only had been engaged in the 
 cause, could hasten to accommodate themselves to the new 
 era, or even to transfer then: services to the conqueror. 
 But such flighty allegiance was not possible for Milton, 
 who had embarked in the Puritan cause not only intel- 
 lectual convictions, but all the generosity and ardour of 
 his passionate nature. " I conceive myself to be," he had 
 written in 1642, " not as mine own person, but as a mem- 
 ber incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded, 
 and whereof I had declared myself openly to be the par- 
 taker." It was now in the moment of overthrow that 
 Milton became truly great. " Wandellos im ewigen Euin," 
 he stood alone, and became the party himself. He took 
 the only course open to him, turned away his thoughts 
 from the political disaster, and directed the fierce enthu- 
 siasm which burned within, upon an absorbing poetic task. 
 His outward hopes were blasted, and he returned with 
 concentrated ardour to woo the muse, from whom he had 
 so long truanted. The passion which seethes beneath the 
 stately march of the verse in Paradise Lost, is not the
 
 144 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1671. [chap. 
 
 hopeless moan of despair, but the intensified fanaticism 
 which defies misfortune to make it " bate one jot of heart 
 or hope." The grand loneliness of Milton after 1G68, "is 
 reflected in his three great poems by a sublime indepen- 
 dence of human sympathy, like that with which mountains 
 fascinate and rebuff us "{Lowell). 
 
 Late then, but not too late, Milton, at the age of fifty- 
 two, fell back upon the rich resources of his own mind, upon 
 poetical composition, and the study of good books, which 
 he always asserted to be necessary to nourish and sustain 
 a poet's imagination. Here he had to contend with the 
 enormous difficulty of blindness. He engaged a kind of 
 attendant to read to him. But this only sufficed for 
 English books — imperfectly even for these — and the greater 
 part of the choice, not extensive, library upon which 
 Milton drew, was Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the modern 
 languages of Europe. In a letter to Heimbach, of date 
 1G66, he complains pathetically of the misery of having 
 to spell out, letter by letter, the Latin words of the epistle, 
 to the attendant who was writing to his dictation. At 
 last he fell upon the plan of engaging young friends, who 
 occasionally visited him, to read to him and to write for 
 him. In the precious volume of Milton MSS. preserved 
 in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, six different 
 hands have been distinguished. "Who they were is not 
 always known. But Phillips tells us that, " he had daily 
 about him one or other to read to him ; some persons of 
 man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catch'd at 
 the opportunity of being his reader, that they might as 
 well reap the benefit of what they read to him, as oblige 
 him by the benefit of their reading ; others of younger 
 years sent by their parents to the same end." Edward 
 Phillips himself, who visited his uncle to the last, may
 
 xir.] HIS THIRD MARRIAGE. 145 
 
 have been among the number, as much as his own engage- 
 ments as tutor, first to the only son of John Evelyn, then 
 in the family of the Earl of Pembroke, and finally to tho 
 Bennets, Lord Arlington's children, would permit him. 
 Others of these casual readers were Samuel Barrow, body 
 physician to Charles II., and Cyriac Skinner, of whom 
 mention has been already made (above, p. 132). 
 
 To a blind man, left with three little girls, of whom the 
 youngest was only eight at the Restoration, marriage 
 seemed equally necessary for their sake as for his own. 
 Milton consulted his judicious friend and medical adviser, 
 Dr. Paget, who recommended to him Elizabeth Minshull, 
 of a family of respectable position near Nantwich, in 
 Cheshire. She was some distant relation of Paget, who 
 must have felt the terrible responsibility of undertaking to 
 recommend. She justified his selection. The marriage 
 took place in Eebruary 1663, and during the remaining 
 eleven years of his life, the poet was surrounded by the 
 thoughtful attentions of an active and capable woman. 
 There is but scanty evidence as to what she was like, 
 either in person or character. Aubrey, who knew her, 
 says she was " a gent. (? genteel) person, (of) a peaceful 
 and agreeable humour." Newton, Bishop of Bristol, who 
 wrote in 1749, had heard that she was " a woman of a most 
 violent spirit, and a hard mother-in-law to his children." 
 It is certain that she regarded her husband with great 
 veneration, and studied his comfort. Mary Eisher, a maid- 
 servant in the house, deposed that at the end of his life, 
 when he was sick and infirm, his wife having provided 
 something for dinner she thought he would like, he " spake 
 to his said wife these or like words, as near as this de- 
 ponent can remember : ' God have mercy, Betty, I see 
 thou wilt perform according to thy promise, in providing 
 
 h
 
 146 THIRD PEEIOD. 1660-1674. [chap. 
 
 me such dishes as I think fit while I live, and when I die 
 thou knowest I have left thee all.' " There is no evidence 
 that his wife rendered him literary assistance. Perhaps, 
 as she looked so thoroughly to his material comfort, her 
 function was held, "by tacit agreement, to end there. 
 
 As casual visitors, or volunteer readers, were not always 
 in the way, and a hired servant who could not spell Latin 
 was of very restricted use, it was not unnatural that Milton 
 should look to his daughters, as they grew up, to take a 
 share in supplying his voracious demand for intellectual 
 food. Anne, the eldest, though she had handsome features, 
 was deformed and had an impediment in her speech, which 
 made her unavailable as a reader. The other two, Mary 
 and Dehorah, might now have heen of inestimable service 
 to their father, had their dispositions led them to adapt 
 themselves to his needs, and the circumstances of the house. 
 Unfortunate it was for Milton, that his "biblical views on 
 the inferiority of woman had been reduced to practice in 
 the bringing up of his own daughters. It cannot indeed 
 be said that the poet whose imagination created the Eve 
 of Paradise Lost, regarded woman as the household 
 drudge, existing only to minister to man's wants. Of all 
 that men have said of women nothing is more loftily con- 
 ceived than the well-known passage at the end of Book 
 
 viii. : — 
 
 When I approach 
 Her loveliness, so absolute she seems, 
 And in herself complete, so well to know 
 Her own, that what she wills to do or say 
 Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best ; 
 All higher knowledge in her presence falls 
 Degraded ; wisdom in discourse with her 
 Loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shows ; 
 Authority and reason on her wait, 
 As one intended first, not after made
 
 xii.] HIS DAUGHTERS. 147 
 
 Occasionally ; and, to consummate all, 
 Greatness of mind, and nobleness, their seat 
 Build in her loveliest, and create an awe 
 About her, as a guard angelic plac'd. 
 
 Bishop Newton thought that, in drawing Eve, Milton 
 had in mind his third wife, because she had hair of the 
 colour of Eve's " golden tresses." But Milton had never 
 seen Elizabeth Minshull. If reality suggested any trait, 
 physical or mental, of the Eve, it would certainly have 
 been some woman seen in earlier years. 
 
 But wherever Milton may have met with an incarnation 
 of female divinity such as he has drawn, it was not in his 
 own family. We cannot but ask, how is it that one, 
 whose type of woman is the loftiest known to English 
 literature, should have brought up his own daughters on so 
 different a model 1 Milton is not one of the false prophets, 
 who turn round and laugh at their own enthusiasms, who 
 say one thing in their verses, and another thing over their 
 cups. What he writes in his poetry is what he thinks, 
 what he means, and what he will do. But in directing 
 the bringing up of his daughters, he put his own typical 
 woman entirely on one side. His practice is framed on 
 the principle that 
 
 Nothing lovelier can be found 
 In woman, than to study household good. 
 
 Paradise Lost, ix. 233. 
 
 He did not allow his daughters to learn any language, 
 saying with a gibe that one tongue was enough for a woman. 
 They were not sent to any school, and had some sort of 
 teaching at home from a mistress. But in order to make 
 them useful in reading to him, their father was at the 
 pains to train them to read aloud in five or six languages, 
 
 l 2
 
 148 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 of none of which they understood one word. "When we 
 think of the time and labour which must have been ex- 
 pended to teach them to do this, it must occur to us that 
 a little more labour would have sufficed to teach them so 
 much of one or two of the languages, as would have made 
 their reading a source of interest and improvement to 
 themselves. This Milton refused to do. The conse- 
 quence was, as might have been expected, the occupation 
 became so irksome to them, that they rebelled against it. 
 In the case of one of them, Mary, who was like her mother 
 in person, and took after her in other respects, this restive- 
 ness passed into open revolt. She first resisted, then 
 neglected, and finally came to hate, her father. "When 
 some one spoke in her presence of her father's approaching 
 marriage, she said " that was no news to hear of his wed- 
 ding ; but if she could hear of his death, that was some- 
 thing." She combined with Anne, the eldest daughter, 
 " to counsel his maidservant to cheat him in his market- 
 ings." They sold his books without his knowledge. 
 " They made nothing of deserting him," he was often 
 heard to complain. They continued to live with him five 
 or six years after his marriage. But at last the situation 
 became intolerable to both parties, and they were sent out 
 to learn embroidery in gold or silver, as a means of obtain- 
 ing their livelihood. Deborah, the youngest, was included 
 in the same arrangement, though she seems to have been 
 more helpful to her father, and to have been at one time 
 his principal reader. Aubrey says that he " taught her 
 Latin, and that she was his amanuensis." She even spoke 
 of him when she was old — she lived to be seventy-four — 
 with some tenderness. She was once, in 1725, shewn 
 Faithorne's crayon drawing of the poet, without being told 
 for whom it was intended. She immediately exclaimed,
 
 xii.] THOMAS ELLWOOD. 149 
 
 " Lord ! that is the picture of my father ! " and stroking 
 down the hair of her forehead, added, " Just so my father 
 wore his hair. " 
 
 One of Milton's volunteer readers, and one to whom we 
 owe the most authentic account of him in his last years, 
 Avas a young Quaker, named Thomas Ellwood. Milton's 
 Puritanism had been all his life slowly gravitating in the 
 direction of more and more liberty, and though he would 
 not attach himself to any sect, he must have felt in no re- 
 mote sympathy with men who repudiated state interference 
 in religious matters, and disdained ordinances. Some 
 such sympathy with the pure spirituality of the Quaker 
 may have disposed Milton favourably towards Ellwood. 
 The acquaintance once begun, was cemented by mutual 
 advantage. Milton, besides securing an intelligent reader, 
 had a pleasure in teaching ; and Ellwood, though the 
 reverse of humble, was teachable from desire to expand 
 himself. Ellwood took a lodging near the poet, and went 
 to him every day, except " first-day," in the afternoon, to 
 read Latin to him. 
 
 Milton's frequent change of abode has been thought 
 indicative of a restless temperament, seeking escape from 
 petty miseries by change of scene. On emerging from 
 hiding, or escaping from the serjeant-at-arms in 1660, he 
 lived for a short time in Hoi born, near Red Lion Square. 
 From this he removed to Jewin Street, and moved again, 
 on his marriage, in 1662, to the house of Millington, the 
 bookseller, who was now beginning business, but who, 
 before his death in 1704, had accumulated the largest 
 stock of second-hand books to be found in London. His 
 last remove was to a house in a newly- created row facing 
 the Artillery-ground, on the site of the west side of what 
 is now called Bunhill Row. This was his abode from his
 
 150 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0— 1G7-1. [chap. 
 
 marriage till his death, nearly twelve years, a longer stay 
 than he had made in any other residence. This is the 
 house which must he associated with the poet of Paradise 
 Lost, as it was here that the poem was in part written, and 
 wholly revised and finished. But the Bunhill Row house 
 is only producible by the imagination ; every trace of it 
 has long been swept away, though the name Milton Street, 
 bestowed upon a neighbouring street, preserves the re- 
 membrance of the poet's connexion with the locality. 
 Here " an ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, 
 found John Milton in a small chamber, hung with rusty 
 green, sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in 
 black ; pale, but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers 
 gouty and with chalk-stones." At the door of this house, 
 sitting in the sun, looking out upon the Artillery-ground, 
 " in a grey coarse cloth coat," he would receive his visitors. 
 On colder days he would walk for hours — three or four 
 hours at a time, in his garden. A garden was a sine qua non, 
 and he took care to have one to every house he lived in. 
 
 His habit in early life had been to study late into the 
 night. After he lost his sight, he changed his hours, and 
 retired to rest at nine. In summer he rose at four, in 
 winter at five, and began the day with having the Hebrew 
 Scriptures read to him. " Then he contemplated. At 
 seven his man came to him again, and then read to him 
 and wrote till dinner. The writing was as much as the 
 reading" (Aubrey). Then -he took exercise, either walk- 
 ing in the garden, or swinging in a machine. His only 
 recreation, besides conversation, was music. He played 
 the organ and the bass viol, the organ most. Sometimes 
 he would sing himself or get his wife to sing to him, 
 though she had, ho said, no ear, yet a good voice. Then 
 he went up to his study to be read to till six. After six 
 his friends were admitted to visit him, and would sit with
 
 xii.] LITERARY OCCUPATIONS. 151 
 
 him till eight. At eight he went down to supper, usually 
 olives or some light thing. He was very abstemious in 
 his diet, having to contend Avith a gouty diathesis. He 
 was not fastidious in his choice of meats, hut content with 
 anything that was in season, or easy to be procured. 
 After supping thus sparingly, he smoked a pipe of to- 
 bacco, drank a glass of water, and then retired to bed. 
 He was sparing in his use of wine. His Samson, who in 
 this as in other things, is Milton himself, allays his thirst 
 "from the clear milky juice." 
 
 Bed with its warmth and recumbent posture he found 
 favourable to composition. At other times he would 
 compose or prune his verses, as he walked in the garden, 
 and then, coming in, dictate. His verse was not at the 
 command of his will. Sometimes he would lie awake 
 the whole night, trying but unable to make a single line. 
 At other times lines flowed without premeditation " with 
 a certain impetus and oestro." What was his season of 
 inspiration is somewhat uncertain. In the elegy " To 
 Spring," Milton says it was the spring which restored his 
 poetic faculty. Phillips, however, says, " that his vein 
 never floAved happily but from the autumnal equinox to 
 the vernal," and that the poet told him this. Phillips' 
 reminiscence is perhaps true at the date of Paradise Lost, 
 when Milton's habits had changed from what they had 
 been at twenty. Or we may agree with Toland, that 
 Phillips has transposed the seasons, though preserving 
 the fact of intermittent inspiration. What he composed 
 at night, he dictated in the day, sitting obliquely in an 
 elbow-chair, with his leg thrown over the arm. He 
 would dictate forty lines, as it were in a breath, and then 
 reduce them to half the number. 
 
 Milton's piety is admitted, even by his enemies; and it 
 is a piety which oppresses his writings as well as his life.
 
 152 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1671. [chap. 
 
 The fact that a man, with a deep sense of religion, should 
 not have attended any place of public worship, has given 
 great trouble to Milton's biographers. And the principal 
 biographers of this thorough-going nonconformist have 
 been Anglican clergymen; Bishop Newton, Todd, Mitford; 
 Dr. Johnson, more clerical than any cleric, being no ex- 
 ception. Mitford would give Milton a dispensation on 
 the score of his age and infirmities. But the cause lay 
 deeper. A profound apprehension of the spiritual world 
 leads to a disregard of rites. To a mind so disposed ex- 
 ternals become, first indifferent, then impedient. Minis- 
 tration is officious intrusion. I do not find that Milton, 
 though he wrote against paid ministers as hirelings, ever 
 expressly formulated an opinion against ministers as such. 
 But as has already been hinted, there grew up in him, in 
 the last period of his life, a secret sympathy with the 
 mode of thinking which came to characterise the Quaker 
 sect. Not that Milton adopted any of their peculiar 
 fancies. He affirms categorically the permissibility of 
 oaths, of military service, and requires that women should 
 keep silence in the congregation. But in negativing all 
 means of arriving at truth except the letter of scripture 
 interpreted by the inner light, he stood upon the same 
 platform as the followers of George Fox. 
 
 Milton's latest utterance on theological topics is found 
 in a tract published by him the year before his death, 
 1G73. The piece is entitled Of true religion, heresy, 
 scliism, toleration; but its meagre contents do not bear 
 out the comprehensiveness of the title. The only matter 
 really discussed in the pages of the tract is the limit of 
 toleration. The stamp of age is upon the style, which is 
 more careless and incoherent even than usual. He has 
 here dictated his extempore thoughts, without premedi- 
 tation or revision, so that we have here a record of
 
 xii.] RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. 153 
 
 Milton's habitual mind. Having watched him gradually- 
 emancipating himself from the contracted Calvinistic 
 mould of the Bread-street home, it is disappointing to 
 see that, at sixty-five, his development has proceeded 
 no further than we here find. He is now willing to 
 extend toleration to all sects who make the Scriptures 
 their sole rule of faith. Sects may misunderstand Scrip- 
 ture, hut to err is the condition of humanity, and will 
 he pardoned by God, if diligence, prayer, and sincerity 
 have been used. The sects named as to be tolerated are, 
 Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Arians, Socinians, 
 Arminians. They are to be tolerated to the extent of 
 being allowed, on all occasions, to give account of their 
 faith, by arguing, preaching in their several assemblies, 
 writing and printing. 
 
 In this pamphlet the principle of toleration is flatly 
 enunciated in opposition to the practice of the Restoration. 
 But the principle is rested not on the statesman's ground 
 of the irrelevancy of religious dispute to good government, 
 but on the theological ground of the venial nature of 
 religious error. And to permissible error there are very 
 narrow limits ; limits which exclude Catholics. For 
 Milton will exclude Romanists from toleration, not on 
 the statesman's ground of incivism, but on the theologian's 
 ground of idolatry. All his antagonism in this tract is 
 reserved for the Catholics. There is not a hint of dis- 
 content with the prelatry, once intolerable to him. Yet 
 that prelatry was now scourging the nonconformists 
 with scorpions instead of with whips, with its Act of 
 Uniformity, its Conventicle Act, its Five-mile Act, filling 
 the gaols with Milton's own friends and fellow -religionists. 
 Several times, in these thirteen pages, he appeals to the 
 practice or belief of the Church of England, once even 
 calling it " our church."
 
 154 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0— 1674. [chap. 
 
 This tract alone is sufficient refutation of an idle story 
 that Milton died a Eoman Catholic. The story is not well 
 vouched, being hearsay three times removed. Milton's 
 younger brother, Sir Christopher, is said to have said so 
 at a dinner entertainment. If he ever did say as much, 
 it must be set down to that peculiar form of credulity 
 which makes perverts think that every one is about to 
 follow their example. In Christopher Milton, " a man of 
 no parts or ability, and a superstitious nature" (Toland), 
 such credulity found a congenial soil. 
 
 The tract Of true religion was Milton's latest pub- 
 lished work. But he was preparing for the press, at the 
 time of his death, a more elaborate theological treatise. 
 Daniel Skinner, a nephew of his old friend Cyriac, was 
 serving as Milton's amanuensis in writing out a fair copy. 
 Death came before a third of the work of correction, 
 196 pages out of 735, had been completed, of which the 
 whole rough draft consists. The whole remained in 
 Daniel Skinner's hands in 1674. Milton, though in his 
 preface he is aware that his pages contain not a little 
 which will be unpalatable to the reigning opinion in re- 
 ligion, would have dared publication, if he could have 
 passed the censor. But Daniel Skinner, who was a 
 Fellow of Trinity, and had a career before him, was not 
 equally free, "What could not appear in London, how- 
 ever, might be printed at Amsterdam. Skinner accord- 
 ingly put both the theological treatise, and the epistles 
 written by the Latin Secretary, into the hands of Daniel 
 Elzevir. The English government getting intelligence 
 of the proposed publication of the foreign correspondence 
 of the Parliament and the Protector, interfered, and 
 pressure was put upon Skinner, through the Master of 
 Trinity, Isaac Barrow. Skinner hastened to save him-
 
 xii.] .RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. 155 
 
 self from the fate which in 1G81 befel Locke, and gave 
 up to the Secretary of State, not only the Latin letters, 
 but the MS. of the theological treatise. Nothing further 
 was known as to the fate of the MS. till 1823, when it 
 was disinterred from one of the presses of the old State 
 Paper Office. -The Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Wil- 
 liamson, when he retired from office in 1678, instead 
 of carrying away his correspondence as had been the cus- 
 tom, left it behind him. Thus it was that the Treatise 
 of Christian doctrine first saw light, one hundred and 
 fifty years after the author's death. 
 
 In a work which had been written as a text-book for 
 the use of learners, there can be little scope for origi- 
 nality. And Milton follows the division of the matter 
 into heads usual in the manuals then current. But it 
 was impossible for Milton to handle the dry bones of a 
 divinity compendium without stirring them into life. 
 And divinity which is made to live, necessarily becomes 
 unorthodox. 
 
 The usual method of the school text-books of the 
 seventeenth century was to exhibit dogma in the artificial 
 terminology of the controversies of the sixteenth century. 
 For this procedure Milton substitutes the words of Scrip- 
 ture simply. The traditional terms of the text-books 
 are retained, but they are employed only as heads under 
 which to arrange the words of Scripture. This process, 
 which in other hands would be little better than index 
 making, becomes here pregnant with meaning. The 
 originality which Milton voluntarily resigns, in em- 
 ploying only the words of the Bible, he recovers by his 
 freedom of exposition. He shakes himself loose from the 
 trammels of traditional exposition, and looks at the texts 
 for himself. The truth was
 
 156 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 Left only in those written records pure, 
 Though not but by the spirit understood. 
 
 Paradise Lost, xii. 510. 
 
 Upon the points which interested him most closely, 
 Milton knew that his understanding of the text differed 
 from the standard of Protestant orthodoxy. That God 
 created matter, not out of nothing, hut out of Himself, 
 and that death is, in the course of nature, total extinction 
 of being, though not opinions received, were not singular. 
 More startling, to European modes of thinking, is his as- 
 sertion that polygamy is not, in itself, contrary to morality, 
 though it may bo inexpedient. The religious sentiment 
 of his day was offended by his vigorous vindication of the 
 freewill of man against the reigning Calvinism, and his 
 assertion of the inferiority of the Son in opposition to the 
 received Athanasianism. He labours this point of the 
 nature of God with especial care, showing how greatly it 
 occupied his thoughts. He arranges his texts so as to 
 exhibit in Scriptural language the semi-Arian scheme, i. e. 
 a scheme which, admitting the co-essentiality, denies the 
 eternal generation. Through all this manipulation of 
 texts we seem to see, that Milton is not the school logi- 
 cian erecting a consistent fabric of words, but that he is 
 dominated by an imagination peopled with concrete per- 
 sonalities, and labouring to assign their places to the 
 Father and the Son as separate agents in the mundane 
 drama. The De dodrina Christiana is the prose counter- 
 part of Paradise Lost and Regained, a caput mortuum of 
 the poems, with every ethereal particle evaporated. 
 
 In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered 
 students in the universities not to insist too long upon 
 compendiums, but to study the Scriptures, and to bestow 
 their time upon the fathers and councils. In his attempt
 
 xii.] HISTORY OF PARADISE LOST. 157 
 
 to express dogmatic theology in the words of Scripture, 
 Milton was unwittingly obeying this injunction. The 
 other part of the royal direction as to fathers and councils 
 it was not in Milton's plan to carry out. Neither indeed 
 was it in his power, for he had not the necessary learning. 
 M. Scherer says that Milton " laid all antiquity, sacred 
 and profane, under contribution." So far is this from 
 being the case, that while he exhibits, in this treatise, an 
 intimate knowledge of the text of the canonical books, 
 Hebrew and Greek, there is an absence of that average 
 acquaintance with Christian antiquity which formed at 
 that day the professional outfit of the episcopal divine. 
 Milton's references to the fathers are perfunctory and 
 second-hand. The only citation of Chrysostom, for in- 
 stance, which I have noticed is in these words: "the same 
 is said to be the opinion of Chrysostom, Luther, and other 
 moderns." He did not esteem the judgment of the fathers 
 sufficiently, to deem them worth studying. In the inter- 
 pretation of texts, as in other matters of opinion, Milton 
 withdrew within the fortress of his absolute personality. 
 
 I have now to relate the external history of the com- 
 position of Paradise Lost. When Milton had to skulk 
 for a time in 1660, he was already in steady work upon 
 the poem. Though a few lines of it were composed as 
 early as 1642, it was not till 1658 that he took up the 
 task of composition continuously. If we may trust our 
 only authority (Aubrey-Phillips), he had finished it in 
 1663, about the time of his marriage. In polishing, 
 re-writing, and writing out fair, much might remain 
 to be done, after the poem was, in a way, finished. 
 It is in 1665, that we first make acquaintance with 
 Paradise Lost in a complete state. This was the year
 
 158 THIED PERIOD. 16C0-1G74. [chap. 
 
 of the plague, known in our annals as the Great Plague, 
 to distinguish its desolating ravages from former slighter 
 visitations of the epidemic. Every one who could fled 
 from the city of destruction. Milton applied to his 
 young friend Ellwood to find him a shelter. Ellwood, 
 who was then living as tutor in the house of the Pen- 
 ningtons, took a cottage for Milton in their neighbour- 
 hood, at Chalfont St. Giles, in the county of Bucks. 
 Not only the Penningtons, but General Fleetwood had 
 also his residence near this village, and a report is men- 
 tioned by Howitt that it was Fleetwood who provided 
 the ex-secretary with a refuge. The society of neither 
 of these friends was available for Milton. For Fleetwood 
 was a sentenced regicide, and in July, Pennington and 
 Ellwood were hurried off to Aylesbury gaol by an inde- 
 fatigable justice of the peace, who was desirous of giving 
 evidence of his zeal for the king's government. That 
 the Chalfont cottage " was not pleasantly situated," must 
 have been indifferent to the blind old man, as much so 
 as that the immediate neighbourhood, with its heaths and 
 wooded uplands, reproduced the scenery he had loved 
 when he wrote V Allegro. 
 
 As soon as Ellwood was relieved from imprisonment, he 
 returned to Chalfont. Then it was that Milton put into 
 his hands the completed Paradise Lost, " bidding me take 
 it home with me, and read it at my leisure, and when I had 
 so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon." 
 On returning it, besides giving the author the benefit of 
 his judgment, a judgment not preserved, and not indis- 
 pensable — the Quaker made his famous speech, "Thou 
 hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou 
 to say of Paradise found? " Milton afterwards told 
 Ellwood that to this casual question was due his writing 
 Paradise Regained. We are not, however, to take this
 
 xii.] HISTORY OF PARADISE LOST. 159 
 
 complaisant speech quite literally, for it is highly probahle 
 that the later poem was included in the original con- 
 ception, if not in the scheme of the first epic. But we do 
 get from Ellwood's reminiscence a date for the beginning 
 of Paradise Regained, which must have been at Chalfont 
 in the autumn of 16G5. 
 
 When the plague was abated, and the city had become 
 safely habitable, Milton returned to Artillery Eow. He 
 had not been long back when London was devastated by 
 a fresh calamity, only less terrible than the plague, because 
 it destroyed the home, and not the life. The Great Fire 
 succeeded the Great Plague. 13,000 houses, two-thirds 
 of the city, were reduced to ashes, and the whole current 
 of life and business entirely suspended. Through these 
 two overwhelming disasters, Milton must have been 
 supporting his solitary spirit by writing Paradise Re- 
 gained, Samson Agonistes, and giving the final touches 
 to Paradise Lost. He was now so wholly unmoved by 
 his environment, that we look in vain in the poems for 
 any traces of this season of suffering and disaster. The 
 past and his own meditations were now all in all to him ; 
 the horrors of the present were as nothing to a man who 
 had outlived his hopes. Plague and fire, what were they, 
 after the ruin of the noblest of causes 1 The stoical com- 
 pression of Paradise Regained is in perfect keeping with 
 the fact that it was in the middle of the ruins of London 
 that Milton placed his finished poem in the hands of the 
 licenser. 
 
 For licenser there was now, the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury to wit, for religious literature. Of course the 
 Primate read by deputy, usually one of his chaplains. 
 The reader into whose hands Paradise Lost came, though 
 an Oxford man, and a cleric on his preferment, who had 
 written his pamphlet against the dissenters, happened
 
 160 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 to be one whose antecedents, as Fellow of All Souls, 
 and Proctor (in 1G63), ensured his taking a less pedantic 
 and bigoted view of his duties. Still, though Dryden's 
 dirty plays would have encountered no objection before 
 such a tribunal, the same facilities were not likely to bo 
 accorded to anything which bore the name of John 
 Milton, ex-secretary to Oliver, and himself an austere 
 republican. Tomkyns— that was the young chaplain's 
 name — did stumble at a phrase in Book i. 598, 
 
 With fear of change 
 Perplexes monarchs. 
 
 There had been in England, and were to be again, times 
 when men had hanged for less than this. Tomkyns, who 
 was sailing on the smooth sea of preferment Avith a fair 
 wind, did not wish to get into trouble, but at last he let 
 the book pass. Perhaps he thought it was only religious 
 verse written for the sectaries, which would never be 
 heard of at court, or among the wits, and that therefore it 
 was of little consequence what it contained. 
 
 A publisher was found, notwithstanding that Paul's, or 
 as it now was again, St. Paul's-Churchyard had ceased 
 to exist, in Aldersgate, which lay outside the circuit of 
 the conflagration. The agreement, still preserved in the 
 national museum, between the author, "John Milton, 
 gent, of the one parte, and Samuel Symons, printer, 
 of the other parte," is among the curiosities of our literary 
 history. The curiosity consists not so much in the 
 illustrious name appended (not in autograph) to the deed, 
 as in the contrast between the present fame of the book, 
 and the waste-paper price at which the copyright is being 
 valued. The author received 5/. down, was to receive a 
 second 57. when the first edition should be sold, a third 
 51. when the second, and a fourth 51. when the third
 
 xii.] HISTORY OF PARADISE LOST. 1G1 
 
 edition should be gone. Milton lived to receive the 
 second 51., and no more, 101. in all, for Paradise Lost. 
 I cannot bring myself to join in the lamentations of the 
 biographers over this bargain. Surely it is better so ; 
 better to know that the noblest monument of English 
 letters had no money value, than to think of it as having 
 been paid for at a pound the line. 
 
 The agreement with Symons is dated 27 April, 1667, the 
 eutry in the register of Stationers' Hall is 20th August. 
 It was therefore in the autumn of 1667 that Paradise 
 Lost was in the hands of the public. "We have no data 
 for the time occupied in the composition of Paradise 
 Regained and Samson Ayonistes. We have seen that the 
 former poem was begun at Chalfont in 1665, and it may 
 be conjecturally stated that Samson was finished before 
 September, 1667. At any rate, both the poems were pub- 
 lished together in the autumn of 1670. 
 
 Milton had four years more of life granted him after 
 this publication. But he wrote no more poetry. It was 
 as if he had exhausted his strength in a last effort, in the 
 Promethean agony of Samson, and knew that his hour of 
 inspiration was passed away. But, like all men who have 
 once tasted the joys and pangs of composition, he could 
 not now do without its excitement. The occupation, and 
 the indispensable solace of the last ten sad years, had been 
 his poems. He would not write more verse, when the 
 oestrus was not on him, but he must write. He took up all 
 the dropped threads of past years, ambitious plans formed 
 in the fulness of vigour, and laid aside, but not abandoned. 
 He was the very opposite of Shelley, who could never look 
 at a piece of Iris own composition a second time, but when 
 he had thrown it off at a heat, rushed into something else. 
 Milton's adhesiveness was such that he could never give 
 
 M
 
 162 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 up a design once entered upon. In these four years, as if 
 conscious that his time was now nearly out, he laboured 
 to complete five such early undertakings. 
 
 (1.) Of his Compendium of Theology I have already 
 spoken. He was overtaken by death while preparing this 
 for the press. 
 
 (2.) His History of Britain must have cost him much 
 labour, bestowed upon comparison of the conflicting 
 authorities. It is the record of the studies he had made 
 for his abandoned epic poem, and is evidence how much 
 the subject occupied his mind. 
 
 The History of Britain, 1670, had been preceded by 
 (3) a Latin grammar, in 1669, and was followed by (4) 
 a Logic on the method of Ramus, 1672. 
 
 (5.) In 1673 he brought out a new edition of his early 
 volume of Poems. In this volume he printed for the 
 first time the sonnets, and other pieces, which had been 
 written in the interval of twenty-seven years since the date 
 of his first edition. Not, indeed, all the sonnets which we 
 now have. Four, in which Fairfax, Vane, Cromwell, and 
 the Commonwealth are spoken of as Milton would speak 
 of them, were necessarily kept back, and not put into print 
 tdl 1694, by Phillips, at the end of his life of his uncle. 
 
 In proportion to the trouble which Milton's words cost 
 him, was his care in preserving them. His few Latin 
 letters to his foreign friends are remarkably barren either 
 of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked them well enough 
 to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a publisher, 
 Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them, 
 with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, 
 which he had also preserved. 
 
 Among the papers which he left at his death, were the 
 beginnings of two undertakings, either of them of over-
 
 xir.] LITERARY OCCUPATIONS. 163 
 
 whelming magnitude, which, he did not live to complete. 
 We have seen that he taught his pupils geography out of 
 Davity, Description de VUnivers. He was not satisfied 
 with this, or with any existing compendium. They were 
 all dry ; exact enough with their latitudes and longitudes, 
 hut omitted such uninteresting stuff as manners, govern- 
 ment, religion, &c. Milton would essay a hetter system. 
 All he had ever executed was Eussia, taking the pains to 
 turn over and extract for his purpose all the "best travels 
 in that country. This is the fragment which figures in his 
 "Works as a Brief History of Moscovia. 
 
 The hackneyed metaphor of Pegasus harnessed to & 
 luggage trolley, will recur to us when we think of the 
 author of L' Allegro, setting himself to compile a Latin 
 lexicon. If there is any literary drudgery more mechani- 
 cal than another, it is generally supposed to he that of 
 making a dictionary. Nor had he taken to this industry 
 as a resource in age, Avhen the genial flow of invention had 
 dried up, and original composition had ceased to he in his 
 power. The three folio volumes of MS. which Milton left 
 were the work of his youth ; it was a work which the loss 
 of eyesight of necessity put an end to. It is not Milton 
 only, hut all students who read- with an alert mind, read- 
 ing to grow, and not to remember, who have felt the want 
 of an occupation which shall fill those hours when mental 
 vigilance is impossible, and vacuity unendurahle. Index- 
 making or cataloguing has heen the resource of many in 
 such hours. But it was not, I think, as a mere shifting 
 of mental posture that Milton undertook to rewrite Eohert 
 Stephens ; it was as part of his language training. Only 
 hy diligent practice and incessant exercise of attention and 
 care, could Milton have educated his susceptihility to the 
 specific power of words, to the nicety which he attained 
 
 m 2
 
 16-i THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [ch. xii. 
 
 beyond any other of our poets. Part of this education is 
 recorded in the seemingly withered leaves of his Latin 
 Thesaurus, though the larger part must have been 
 achieved, not by a reflective and critical collection of 
 examples, but by a vital aud impassioned reading. 
 
 Milton's complaint was what the profession of that day 
 called gout. "He would be very cheerful even in his 
 gout fits, aud sing," says Aubrey. This gout returned 
 again and again, and by these repeated attacks wore out 
 his resisting power. He died of the " gout struck in " on 
 Sunday, 8th November, 1674, and was buried, near his 
 father, in the chancel of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The 
 funeral was attended, Toland says, " by all his learned and 
 great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse 
 of the vulgar." The disgusting profanation of the leaden 
 coffin, and dispersion of the poet's bones by the parochial 
 authorities, during the repair of the church in August, 
 1790, has been denied, but it is to be feared the fact is 
 too true.
 
 CHAPTER XIIT. 
 
 rARADISE LOST PARADISE REGAINED SAMSON AGONISTES. 
 
 " Many men of forty," it has been said, " are dead poets ;" 
 and it might seem that Milton, Latin secretary, and party 
 pamphleteer, had died to poetry about the fatal age. In 
 1645, when he made a gathering of his early pieces for the 
 volume published by Humphry Moseley, he wanted three 
 years of forty. That volume contained, besides other 
 things, Comas, Lycidas, V Allegro, and II Penseroso ; 
 then, when produced, as they remain to this day, the 
 finest flower of English poesy. But, though thus like a 
 wary husbandman, garnering his sheaves in presence of 
 the threatening storm, Milton had no intention of bidding 
 farewell to poetry. On the contrary, he regarded this 
 volume only as first-fruits, an earnest of greater things to 
 come. 
 
 The ruling idea of Milton's life, and the key to his 
 mental history, is his resolve to produce a great poem. 
 Not that the aspiration in itself is singular, for it is pro- 
 bably shared by every young poet in his turn. As every 
 clever schoolboy is destined by himself or his friends to 
 become Lord Chancellor, and every private in the French 
 army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, so 
 it is a necessary ingredient of the dream on Parnassus,
 
 166 THIRD PERIOD. 1660— 1674 [chap. 
 
 that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing bril- 
 liance. What distinguishes Milton from the crowd of 
 young ambition, "audax juventa," is the constancy of 
 resolve. He not only nourished through manhood the 
 dream of youth, keeping under the importunate instincts 
 which carry off most ambitions in middle life into the 
 pursuit of place, profit, honour — the thorns which spring 
 up and smother the wheat — but carried out his dream in 
 its integrity in old age. He formed himself for this 
 achievement, and for no other. Study at home, travel 
 abroad, the arena of political controversy, the public 
 service, the practice of the domestic virtues, were so many 
 parts of the schooling which was to make a poet. 
 
 The reader who has traced with me thus far the course 
 of Milton's mental development will perhaps be ready to 
 believe, that this idea had taken entire possession of his 
 mind from a very early age. The earliest written record 
 of it is of date 1632, in Sonnet n. This was written 
 as early as the poet's twenty -third year ; and in these 
 lines the resolve is uttered, not as then just conceived, but 
 as one long brooded upon, and its non-fulfilment matter 
 of self-reproach. 
 
 If this sonnet stood alone, its relevance to a poetical, or 
 even a literary performance, might be doubtful. But at 
 the time of its composition it is enclosed in a letter to an 
 unnamed friend, who seems to have been expressing his 
 surprise that the Cambridge B.A. was not settling himeelf, 
 now that his education was complete, to a profession. 
 Milton's apologetic letter is extant, and was printed by 
 Birch in 1738. It intimates that Milton did not consider 
 his education, for the purposes he had in view, as anything 
 like complete. It is not " the endless delight of specula- 
 tion," but "a religious advisement how best to undergo ;
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 167 
 
 not taking thought of "being late, so it give advantage io 
 be more fit." He repudiates the love of learning for its 
 own sake ; knowledge is not an end, it is only equipment 
 for performance. There is here no specific engagement as 
 to the nature of the performance. But what it is to be, is 
 suggested by the enclosure of the " Petrarchian stanza " 
 (i. e. the sonnet). This notion that his life was like 
 Samuel's, a dedicated life, dedicated to a service which 
 required a long probation, recurs again more than once in 
 his writings. It is emphatically repeated, in 1641, in a 
 passage of the pamphlet No. 4 : — 
 
 None hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with 
 more unwearied spirit none shall, — that I dare almost aver of 
 myself, as far as life and full license will extend. Neither do I 
 think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader that for 
 some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the pay- 
 ment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be 
 raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that 
 which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or 
 the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained 
 by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, 
 but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich 
 with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim 
 with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the life 
 of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and 
 select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and 
 generous acts and affairs. Till which in some measure be com- 
 passed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this 
 expectation, from as many as are not loth to hazard so much 
 credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them. 
 
 In 1638, at the age of nine and twenty, Milton has 
 already determined that this lifework shall be a poem, 
 an epic poem, and that its subject shall probably be the 
 Arthurian legend.
 
 168 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [cuap. 
 
 Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, 
 Arturamque etiam sub terris bella moventem, 
 Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensta 
 Magnanimos heroas, et, o modo spiritus adsit ! 
 Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub marte phalangas. 
 
 May I find such a friend .... when, if ever, I shall revive 
 in song our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to 
 the fray even in the nether world, and when I shall, if only 
 inspiration be mine, break the Saxon bands before our Britons' 
 prowess. 
 
 The same announcement is reproduced in the Epi- 
 taphium Damonis, 1639, and, in Pamphlet No. 4, in the 
 often-quoted words : — 
 
 Perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, com- 
 posed at under twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance, . . . 
 I began to assent to them (the Italians) and divers of my 
 friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting 
 which now grows daily upon me, that by labour and intent 
 study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with 
 the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave some- 
 thing so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let 
 it die. 
 
 Between the publication of the collected Poems in 
 1645, and the appearance of Paradise Lost in 1667, a 
 period of twenty-two years, Milton gave no public sign 
 of redeeming this pledge. He seemed to his cotempo- 
 raries to have renounced the follies of his youth, the 
 gewgaws of verse, and to have sobered down into the 
 useful citizen. "Le bon poete," thought Malherbe, 
 "n'est pas plus utile a letat qu'un bon joueur de quilles." 
 Milton had postponed his poem, in 1641, till "the land 
 had once enfranchished herself from this impertinent yoke 
 of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical
 
 xiii.] PARADISE LOST. 109 
 
 duncery no free and splendid wit can nourish." Prelatry 
 was swept away, and he asked for further remand on 
 account of the war. Peace was concluded, the country 
 was settled under the strong government of a Protector, 
 and Milton's great work did not appear. It was not even 
 preparing. He was writing not poetry hut prose, and 
 that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose, pam- 
 phlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He 
 poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that 
 they had no influence whatever on the current of events. 
 
 Nor was it that, during all these years, Milton was 
 meditating in secret what he could not hring forward in 
 public ; that he was only holding hack from publishing, 
 because there was no public ready to listen to his 
 song. In these years Milton was neither writing nor 
 thinking poetry. Of the twenty-four sonnets indeed — 
 twenty-four, reckoning the twenty-lined piece, "The 
 forcers of conscience," as a sonnet — eleven belong to this 
 period. But they do not form a continuous series, such 
 as do Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, nor do they 
 evince a sustained mood of poetical meditation. On the 
 contrary, their very force and beauty consist in their 
 being the momentary and spontaneous explosion of an 
 emotion welling up from the depths of the soul, and 
 forcing itself into metrical expression, as it were, in spite 
 of the writer. While the first eight sonnets, written 
 before 1645, are sonnets of reminiscence and intention, 
 like those of the Italians, or the ordinary English sonnet, 
 the eleven sonnets of Milton's silent period, from 1645 to 
 1658, are records of present feeling kindled by actual 
 facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, 
 they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to 
 be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the
 
 170 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1G74. [ciup. 
 
 circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to 
 feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over 
 emotion meditated and revived. History has in it that 
 which can touch us more abidingly than any fiction. It 
 is this actuality which distinguishes the sonnets of Milton 
 from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth 
 was conscious when he struck out the phrase, "In his 
 hand the thing became a trumpet." Macaulay compared 
 the sonnets in their majestic severity to the collects. 
 They remind us of a Hebrew psalm, with its undisguised 
 outrush of rage, revenge, exultation, or despair, where 
 nothing is due to art or artifice, and whose poetry is the 
 expression of the heart, and not a branch of literature. 
 It is in the sonnets we most realise the force of Words- 
 worth's image — 
 
 Thou hadst a voice whoso sound was like the sea. 
 
 We are not then to look in the sonnets for latent traces 
 of the suspended poetic creation. They come from the 
 other side of Milton's nature, the political, not the artistic. 
 They are akin to the prose pamphlets, not to Paradise Lost. 
 Just when the sonnets end, the composition of the epic 
 was taken in hand. The last of the sonnets (23 in the 
 ordinary numeration) was written in 1G58, and it is to 
 the same year that our authority, Aubrey-Phillips, refers 
 his beginning to occupy himself with Paradise Lost. He 
 had by this time settled the two points about which he 
 had been long in doubt, the subject, and the form. Long 
 before bringing himself to the point of composition, he 
 had decided upon the Fall of man as subject, and upon the 
 narrative, or epic, form, in preference to the dramatic. It 
 is even possible that a few isolated passages of the poem, 
 as it now stands, may have been written before. Of one
 
 xtrr.] PARADISE LOST. 171 
 
 such passage we know that it was written fifteen or 
 sixteen years before 1658, and while he was still con- 
 templating a drama. The lines are Satan's speech, P. L. 
 iv. 32, beginning, — 
 
 0, thou that with surpassing glory crowned. 
 
 These lines, Phillips says, his uncle recited to him, as 
 forming the opening of his tragedy. They are modelled, 
 as the classical reader will perceive, upon Euripides. 
 Possibly they were not intended for the very first lines, 
 since if Milton intended to follow the practice of his model, 
 the lofty lyrical tone of this address should have been 
 introduced by a prosaic matter-of-fact setting forth of the 
 situation, as in the Euripidean prologue. There are other 
 passages in the poem which have the air of being insiti- 
 tious in the place where they stand. The lilies in Book iv, 
 now in question, may reasonably be referred to 1640-42, 
 the date of those leaves in the Trinity College MS., in 
 which Milton has written down, with his own hand, 
 various sketches of tragedies, which might possibly be 
 adopted as his final choice. 
 
 A passage in The Reason of Church Government, written 
 at the same period, 1641, gives us the the fullest account 
 of his hesitation. It was a hesitation caused, partly by 
 the wealth of matter which his reading su""'ested to him, 
 partly by the consciousness that he ought not to begin in 
 haste while each year was ripening his powers. Every 
 one who has undertaken a work of any length has made 
 the experience, that the faculty of composition will not 
 work with ease, until the reason is satisfied that the sub- 
 ject chosen is a congenial one. Gibbon has told us him- 
 self of the many periods of history upon which he tried 
 his pen, even after the memorable 15 October, 1764, when
 
 172 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1674. [chap. 
 
 he "sate musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the 
 hare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of 
 Jupiter." We know how many sketches of possible 
 tragedies Racine would make before he could adopt one 
 as the appropriate theme, on which he could work with 
 that thorough enjoyment of the labour, which is necessary 
 to give life and verve to any creation, whether of the poet 
 or the orator. 
 
 The leaves of the Trinity College MS., which are con- 
 temporary with his confidence to the readers of his tract 
 Of Church Government, exhibit a list of nearly one hun- 
 dred subjects, which had occurred to him from time to time 
 as practicable subjects. From the mode of entry we see 
 that, already in 1641, a scriptural was likely to have the 
 preference over a profane subject, and that among scriptural 
 subjects Paradise Lost (the familiar title appears in this 
 early note), stands out prominently above the rest. The 
 historical subjects are all taken from native history, none 
 are foreign, and all are from the time before the Eoman 
 conquest. The scriptural subjects are partly from the Old, 
 partly from the New, Testament. Some of these subjects 
 are named and nothing more, while others are slightly 
 sketched out. Among these latter are Baptistes, on the 
 death of John the Baptist, and Christus Patiens, apparently 
 to be confined to the agony in the garden. Of Paradise 
 Lost there are four drafts in greater detail than any of the 
 others. These drafts of the plot or action, though none 
 of them that which was finally adopted, are sufficiently 
 near to the action of the poem as it stands, to reveal to us 
 the fact that the author's imaginative conception of what 
 he intended to produce was generated, cast, and moulded, 
 at a comparatively early age. The commonly received 
 notion, therefore, with which authors, as they age, are
 
 xiii.] PARADISE LOST. 173 
 
 wont to comfort themselves, that one of the greatest feats 
 of original invention achieved by man, was begun after 
 fifty, must be thus far modified. Paradise Lost was cum- 
 X>osed after fifty, but was conceived at thirty-two. Hence 
 the high degree of perfection realised in the total result. 
 For there were combined to produce it the opposite virtues 
 of two distinct periods of mental development ; the daring 
 imagination and fresh emotional play of early manhood, 
 with the exercised j udgment and chastened taste of ripened 
 years. "We have regarded the twenty-five years of Milton's 
 life between 1641 and the commencement of Paradise 
 Lost, as time ill laid out upon inferior work which any 
 one could do, and which was not worth doing by any one. 
 Yet it may be made a question if in any other mode than 
 by adjournment of his early design, Milton could have 
 attained to that union of original strength with severe 
 restraint, which distinguishes from all other poetry, except 
 that of Virgil, the three great poems of his old age. If the 
 fatigue of age is sometimes felt in Paradise Regained, we 
 feel in Paradise Lost only (in the words of Chateaubriand), 
 " la maturite de l'age a travers les passions des legeres 
 annees ; une charme extraordinaire de vieillesse et de 
 jeunesse." 
 
 A still further inference is warranted by the Trinity 
 College jottings of 1641. Not the critics merely, but 
 readers ready to sympathise, have been sometimes inclined 
 to wish that Milton had devoted his power to a more 
 human subject, in which the poet's invention could have 
 had freer play, and for which his reader's interest could 
 have been more ready. And it has been thought that the 
 choice of a Biblical subject indicates the narrowing effect 
 of age, adversity, and blindness combined. We now know 
 that the Fall was the theme, if not determined on, at
 
 174 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1G74. [chap. 
 
 least predominant in Milton's thoughts, at the age of 
 thirty-two. His ripened judgment only approved a 
 selection made in earlier years, and in days full of hope. 
 That in selecting a scriptural subject he was not in fact 
 exercising any choice, but was determined by his circum- 
 stances, is only what must be said of all choosing. With 
 all his originality, Milton was still a man of his age. A 
 Puritan poet, in a Puritan environment, could not have 
 done otherwise. But even had choice been in his power, 
 it is doubtful if he would have had the same success with 
 a subject taken from history. 
 
 First, looking at his public. He was to write in 
 English. This, which had at one time been matter of 
 doubt, had at an early stage come to be his decision. ]S"or 
 had the choice of English been made for the sake of popu- 
 larity, which he despised. He did not desire to write for 
 the many, but for the few. But he was enthusiastically 
 patriotic. He had intire contempt for the shouts of the 
 mob, but the English nation, as embodied in the persons 
 of the wise and good, he honoured and reverenced with all 
 the depth of his nature. It was for the sake of his nation 
 that he was to devote his life to a work, which was to 
 ennoble her tongue among the languages of Europe. 
 
 He was then to write in English, for the English, not 
 popularly, but nationally. This resolution at once limited 
 his subject. He who aspires to be the poet of a nation is 
 bound to adopt a hero who is already dear to that people, 
 to choose a subject and characters which are already 
 familiar to them. This is no rule of literary art 
 arbitrarily enacted by the critics, it is a dictate of reason, 
 and has been the practice of all the great national poets. 
 The more obvious examples will occur to every reader. 
 But it may be observed that even the Greek tragedians,
 
 xm.] PARADISE LOST. 175 
 
 who addressed a more limited audience than the epic poets, 
 took their plots from the hest known legends touching the 
 fortunes of the royal houses of the Hellenic race. Now to 
 the English reader of the seventeenth century — and the 
 same holds good to this day— there were only two cycles of 
 persons and events sufficiently known beforehand to admit 
 of being assumed by a poet. He must go either to the 
 Bible, or to the annals of England. Thus far Milton's 
 choice of subject was limited by the consideration of the 
 public for whom he wrote. 
 
 Secondly, he was still farther restricted by a condition 
 which the nature of his own intelligence imposed upon 
 himself. It was necessary for Milton that the events and 
 personages, which were to arouse and detain his interests, 
 should be real events and personages. The mere play of 
 fancy with the pretty aspects of things could not satisfy him; 
 he wanted to feel beneath him a substantial world of reality. 
 He had not the dramatist's imagination which can body 
 forth fictitious characters with such life-like reality that it 
 can, and does itself, believe in their existence. Macaulay 
 has truly said that Milton's genius is lyrical, not dramatic. 
 His lyre will only echo real emotion, and his imagination 
 is only stirred by real circumstances. In his youth he had 
 been within the fascination of the romances of chivalry, as 
 well in their original form, as in the reproductions of 
 Ariosto and Spenser. While under this influence he had 
 thought of seeking his subject among the heroes of these 
 lays of old minstrelsy. And as one of his principles was 
 that his hero must be a national hero, it was of course 
 upon the Arthurian cycle that his aspiration fixed. When 
 he did so, he no doubt believed at least the historical 
 existence of Arthur. As soon, however, as he came to 
 understand the fabulous basis of the Arthurian legend,
 
 176 THIED PERIOD. 1G60— 1674 [chap. 
 
 it became unfitted for his use. In the Trinity College 
 MS. of 1641, Arthur has already disappeared from the list 
 of possible subjects, a list which contains thirty-eight sug- 
 gestions of names from British or Saxon history, such as 
 Vortigern, Edward the Confessor, Harold, Macbeth, &c. 
 While he demanded the basis of reality for his person- 
 ages, he at the same time, with a true instinct, rejected all 
 that fell within the period of well-ascertained history. Ho 
 made the Conquest the lower limit of his choice. In this 
 negative decision against historical romance we recognise 
 Milton's judgment, and his correct estimate of his own 
 powers. Those who have been thought to succeed best in 
 engrafting fiction upon history, Shakspeare or Walter 
 Scott, have been eminently human poets, and have 
 achieved their measure of success by investing some well- 
 known name with the attributes of ordinary humanity 
 such as we all know it. This was precisely what Milton 
 could not have done. He had none of that sympathy with 
 which Shakspeare embraced all natural and common 
 affections of his brother men. Milton, burning as he did 
 with a consuming fire of passion, and yearning for rapt 
 communion with select souls, had withal an aloofness from 
 ordinary men and women, and a proud disdain of common- 
 place joy and sorrow, which has led hasty biographers and 
 critics to represent him as hard, austere, an iron man of 
 iron mould. This want of interest in common life disquali- 
 fied him for the task of revivifying historic scenes. 
 
 Milton's mental constitution, then, demanded in the 
 material upon which it was to work, a combination of 
 qualities such as very few subjects could offer. The 
 events and personages must be real and substantial, for he 
 could not occupy himself seriously with airy nothings and
 
 xiii.] PAEADISB LOST. 177 
 
 creatures of pure fancy. Yet they must not "be such, 
 events and personages as history had pourtrayed to us 
 with well-known characters, and all their virtues, faults, 
 foibles, and peculiarities. And, lastly, it was requisite 
 that they should be the common property and the familiar 
 interest of a wide circle of English readers. 
 
 These being the conditions required in the subject, it is 
 obvious that no choice was left to the poet in the England 
 of the seventeenth century but a biblical subject. And 
 among the many picturesque episodes which the Hebrew 
 Scriptures present, the narrative of the Fall stands out 
 with a character of all-emhracing comprehensiveness which 
 belongs to no other single event in the Jewish annals. 
 The first section of the book of Genesis clothes in a dra- 
 matic form the dogmatic idea from which was developed 
 in the course of ages the whole scheme of Judaico- 
 Christian anthropology. In this world-drama, Heaven 
 above and Hell beneath, the powers of light and those of 
 darkness, are both brought upon the scene in conflict with 
 each other, over the fate of the inhabitants of our globe, 
 a minute ball of matter suspended between two infinities. 
 This gigantic and unmanageable material is so completely 
 mastered by the poet's imagination, that we are made to 
 feel at one and the same time the petty dimensions of our 
 earth in comparison with primordial space and almighty 
 power, and the profound import to us of the issue depend- 
 ing on the conflict. Other poets, of inferior powers, have 
 from time to time attempted, with different degrees of 
 success, some of the minor Scriptural histories ; Bodmer, 
 the Noachian Deluge ; Solomon Gessner, the Death of 
 Abel, &c. And Milton himself, after he had spent his 
 full strength upon his greater theme, recurred in Samson 
 Agonistes to one such episode, which he had deliberately 
 
 N
 
 178 THIRD PERIOD. 1GG0-1G74. [chap. 
 
 set aside before, as not giving verge enough for the sweep 
 of his soaring conception. 
 
 These considerations duly weighed, it will be found 
 that the subject of the Fall of Man was not so much 
 Milton's choice as his necessity. Among all the traditions 
 of the peoples of the earth, there is not extant another 
 story which could have been adequate to his demands. 
 Biographers may have been somewhat misled by his 
 speaking of himself as "long choosing and beginning 
 late." He did not begin till 1658, when he was 
 already fifty, and it has been somewhat hastily inferred 
 that he did not choose till the date at which he began. 
 But, as we have seen, he had already chosen at least as 
 early as 1642, when the plan of a drama on the subject, 
 and under the title, of Paradise Lost was fully developed. 
 In the interval between 1642 and 1658. he changed the 
 form from a drama to an epic, but his choice remained 
 unaltered. And as the address to the sun ( Paradise Lost, 
 iv. 32) was composed at the earlier of these dates, it 
 appears that he had already formulated even the rhythm 
 and cadence of the poem that was to be. Like Words- 
 worth's " "Warrior " — 
 
 He wrought 
 Upon the plan that pleas'd his boyish thought. 
 
 I have said that this subject of the Fall was Milton's 
 necessity, being the only subject which his mind, "in the 
 spacious circuits of her musing," found large enough. 
 But as it was no abrupt or arbitrary choice, so it was not 
 forced upon him from without, by suggestion of friends, or 
 command of a patron. We must again remind ourselves 
 that Milton had a Calvinistic bringing up. And Cal- 
 vinism in pious Puritan souls of that fervent age was not 
 the attenuated creed of the eighteenth century, the Cal- 
 vinism which went not beyond personal gratification of
 
 xiu.] PARADISE LOST. 179 
 
 safety for oneself, and for the rest damnation. When 
 Milton was being reared, Calvinism was not old and effete, 
 a mere doctrine. It was a living system of thought, and 
 one which carried the mind upwards towards the Eternal 
 will, rather than downwards towards my personal security. 
 Keble has said of the old Catholic views, founded on sac- 
 ramental symbolism, that they are more poetical than any 
 other religious conception. But it must be acknowledged 
 that a predestinarian scheme, leading the cogitation up- 
 ward to dwell upon " the heavenly things before the 
 foundation of the world," opens a vista of contemplation 
 and poetical framework, with which none other in the 
 whole cycle of human thought can compare. Not election 
 and reprobation as set out in the petty chicanery of Cal- 
 vin's Institutes, but the prescience of absolute wisdom 
 revolving all the possibilities of time, space, and matter. 
 Poetry has been defined as " the suggestion by the image 
 of noble grounds for noble emotions," and, in this respect, 
 none of the world-epics — there are at most five or six such 
 in existence — can compete with Paradise Lost. The 
 melancholy pathos of Lucretius indeed pierces the heart 
 with a two-edged sword more keen than Milton's, but the 
 compass of Lucretius' horizon is much less, being limited 
 to this earth and its inhabitants. The horizon of Paradise 
 Lost is not narrower than all space, its chronology not 
 shorter than eternity ; the globe of our earth becomes a 
 mere spot in the physical universe, and that universe 
 itself a drop suspended in the infinite empyrean. His 
 aspiration had thus reached " one of the highest arcs that 
 human contemplation circling upwards can make from 
 the glassy sea whereon she stands" (Doctr. and Disc). 
 Like his contemporary Pascal, his mind had beaten her 
 wings against the prison walls of human thought. 
 
 The vastness of the scheme of Paradise Lost may 
 
 n 2
 
 180 TIIIRD PERIOD. 1G60— 1674. [chap. 
 
 become more apparent to us if we remark that, within its 
 embrace, there seems to be equal place for both the 
 systems of physical astronomy which were current in the 
 seventeenth century. In England, about the time Para- 
 dise Lost was being written, the Copernican theory, which 
 placed the sun in the centre of our system, was already 
 the established belief of the few well-informed. The old 
 Ptolemaic or Alphonsine system, which explained the 
 phenomena on the hypothesis of nine (or ten) transparent 
 hollow spheres wheeling round the stationary earth, was 
 still the received astronomy of ordinary people. These 
 two beliefs, the one based on science, though stdl wanting 
 the calculation which Newton was to supply to make it 
 demonstrative, the other supported by the tradition of 
 ages, were, at the time we speak of, in presence of each 
 other in the public mind. They are in presence of each 
 other also in Milton's epic. And the systems confront 
 each other in the poem, in much the same relative posi- 
 tion which they occupied in the mind of the public. The 
 ordinary, habitual mode of speaking of celestial pheno- 
 mena is Ptolemaic (see Paradise Lost, vii. 339 ; iii. 481). 
 The conscious, or doctrinal, exposition of the same pheno- 
 mena is Copernican (see Paradise Lost, viii. 122). Sharp 
 as is the contrast between the two systems, the one being 
 the direct contradictory of the other, they are lodged 
 together, not harmonised, within the vast circuit of the 
 poet's imagination. The precise mechanism of an object 
 so little as is our world in comparison with the immense 
 totality may be justly disregarded. "De minimis non 
 curat poeta." In the universe of being the difference 
 between a heliocentric and a geocentric theory of our 
 solar system is of as small moment, as the reconcilement of 
 fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute is in the
 
 xiii.] PAEADISE LOST. 181 
 
 realm of absolute intelligence. The one is the frivolous 
 pastime of devils ; the other the Great Architect 
 
 Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move 
 His laughter at their quaint opinions wide. 
 
 As one, and the principal, inconsistency in Milton's 
 presentment of his matter has now been mentioned, a 
 general remark may be made upon the conceptual in- 
 congruities in Paradise Lost. The poem abounds in such, 
 and the critics, from Addison downwards, have busied 
 themselves in finding out more and more of them. Mil- 
 ton's geography of the world is as obscure and untenable 
 as that of Herodotus. The notes of time cannot stand 
 together. To give an example : Eve says [Paradise Lost, 
 iv. 449)— 
 
 That day I oft remember, when from sleep 
 I first awak'd. 
 
 But in the chronology of the poem, Adam himself, whose 
 creation preceded that of Eve, was but three days old at 
 the time this reminiscence is repeated to him. The mode 
 in which the Son of God is spoken of is not either con- 
 sistent Athanasianism or consistent Arianism. Above 
 all there is an incessant confusion of material and im- 
 material in the acts ascribed to the angels. Dr. Johnson, 
 who wished for consistency, would have had it preserved 
 " by keeping immateriality out of sight." And a general 
 arraignment has been laid against Milton of a vagueness 
 and looseness of imagery, Avhich contrasts unfavourably 
 with the vivid and precise detail of other poets, of 
 Homer or of Dante, for example. 
 
 Now first, it must be said that Milton is not one of the 
 poets of inaccurate imagination. He could never, like
 
 182 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0— 167i. [chap. 
 
 Scott, have let the precise picture of the swan on " still 
 Saint Mary's lake" slip into the namby-pamby "sweet 
 Saint Mary's lake." "When he intends a picture, he is 
 unmistakably distinct ; his outline is fiiin and hard. 
 But he is not often intending pictures. He is not, like 
 Dante, always seeing — he is mostly thinking in a dream, 
 or as Coleridge best expressed it, he is not a picturesque, 
 but a musical poet. The pictures in Paradise Lost are 
 like the paintings on the walls of some noble hall — only 
 part of the total magnificence. He did not aim at that 
 finish of minute parts in which each bit fits into every 
 other. For it was only by such disregard of minutiae that 
 the theme could be handled at all. The impression of 
 vastness, the sense that everything, as Bishop Butler says, 
 " runs up into infinity," would have been impaired if he 
 had drawn attention to the details of his figures. Had he 
 had upon his canvas only a single human incident, with 
 ordinary human agents, he would have known, as well as 
 other far inferior artists, how to secure perfection of illu- 
 sion by exactness of detail. But he had undertaken to 
 present, not the world of human experience, but a super- 
 natural world, peopled by supernatural beings, God and 
 his Son, angels and archangels, devils ; a world in which 
 Sin and Death may be personified without palpable 
 absurdity. Even his one human pair are exceptional 
 beings, from whom we are prepared not to demand con- 
 formity to the laws of life which now prevail in our 
 world. Had he presented all these spiritual personages 
 in definite form to the eye, the result would have been 
 degradation. We should have had the ridiculous instead 
 of the sublime, as in the scene of the Iliad, where Diomede 
 wounds Aphrodite in the hand, and sends her crying home 
 to her father. Once or twice Milton has ventured too
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 183 
 
 near the limit of material adaptation, trying to explain 
 Itoiv angelic natures subsist, as in the passage [Paradise 
 Lost, v. 405) where Raphael tells Adam that angels eat 
 and digest food like man. Taste here receives a shock, 
 because the incongruity, which before was latent, is forced 
 upon our attention. We are threatened with being trans- 
 ported out of the conventional world of Heaven, Hell, 
 Chaos, and Paradise, to which we had well adapted our- 
 selves, into the real world in which we know that such 
 beings could not breathe and move. 
 
 For the world of Paradise Lost is an ideal, conventional 
 world, quite as much as the world of the Arabian Nights, 
 or the world of the chivalrous romance, or that of the 
 pastoral novel. Wot only dramatic, but all, poetry is 
 founded on illusion. We must, though it be but for the 
 moment, suppose it true. We must be transported out of 
 the actual world into that world in which the given scene 
 is laid. It is chiefly the business of the poet to effect this 
 transportation, but the reader (or hearer) must aid. " Willst 
 du Dichter ganz verstehen, musst in Dichter's Lande 
 gehen." If the reader's imagination is not active enough 
 to assist the poet, he must at least not resist him. When 
 we are once inside the poet's heaven, our critical faculty 
 may justly require that what takes place there shall be 
 consistent with itself, with the laws of that fantastic 
 world. But we may not begin by objecting that it is 
 impossible that such a world should exist. If, in any 
 age, the power of imagination is enfeebled, the reader 
 becomes more unable to make this effort ; he ceases to 
 co-operate with the poet. Much of the criticism on Para- 
 dise Lost which we meet with resolves itself into a refusal 
 on the part of the critic, to make that initial abondonment 
 to the conditions which the poet demands ; a determina-
 
 184 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 tion to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities, domi- 
 nations, principalities, and powers, shall have the same 
 material laws which govern our planetary system. It is 
 not, as we often hear it said, that the critical faculty is 
 unduly developed in the nineteenth century. It is that 
 the imaginative faculty fails us ; and when that is the 
 case, criticism is powerless — it has no fundamental as- 
 sumption upon which its judgments can proceed. 
 
 It is the triumph of Milton's skill to have made his 
 ideal world actual, if not to every English mind's eye, yet 
 to a larger numher of minds than have ever "been reached 
 by any other poetry in our language. Popular (in the 
 common use of the word) Milton has not been, and cannot 
 be. But the world he created has taken possession of 
 the public mind. Huxley complains that the false 
 cosmogony, which will not yield to the conclusions of 
 scientific research, is derived from the seventh book of 
 Paradise Lost, rather than from Genesis. This success 
 Milton owes partly to his selection of his subject, partly 
 to his skill in handling it. In his handling, he presents 
 his spiritual existences with just so much relief as to 
 endow them with life and personality, and not with that 
 visual distinctness which would at once reveal their 
 spectral immateriality, and so give a shock to the illusion. 
 We might almost say of his personages that they are 
 shapes, " if shape it might be called, that shape had 
 none." By his art of suggestion by association, he does 
 all he can to aid us to realise his agents, and at the 
 moment when distinctness would disturb, lie withdraws 
 the object into a mist, and so disguises the incongruities 
 which he could not avoid. The tact that avoids 
 difficulties inherent in the nature of things, is an art 
 which gets the least appreciation either in life or in litcra-
 
 xiii.] PAEADISE LOST. 185 
 
 ture. Bat if we would have some measure of the skill 
 Avhich in Paradise Lost has made impossible beings 
 possible to the imagination, we may find it in contrasting 
 them with the incarnated abstraction and spirit voices, 
 which we encounter at every turn in Shelley, creatures 
 who leave behind them no more distinct impression than 
 that we have been in a dream peopled with ghosts. 
 Shelley, too, 
 
 Voyag'd th' unreal, vast, unbounded deep 
 Of horrible confusion. 
 
 Paradise Lost, x, 470. 
 
 and left it the chaos which he found it. Milton has 
 elicited from similar elements a conception so life-like 
 that his poetical version has inseparably grafted itself upon, 
 if it has not taken the place of, the historical narrative of 
 the original creation. 
 
 So much Milton has effected by his skilful treatment. 
 But the illusion was greatly facilitated by his choice of 
 subject. He had not to create his supernatural personages, 
 they were already there. The Father, and the Son, the 
 Angels, Satan, Baal and Moloch, Adam and Eve, were in 
 full possession of the popular imagination, and more 
 familiar to it than any other set of known names. Nor 
 was the belief accorded to them a half belief, a bare ad- 
 mission of their possible existence, such as prevails at 
 other times or in some countries. In the England of 
 Milton, the angels and devils of the Jewish Scriptures were 
 more real beings, and better vouched, than any historical 
 personages could be. The old chronicles were full of lies, 
 but this was Bible truth. There might very likely have 
 been a Henry VIII. , and he might have been such as he 
 is described, but at any rate he was dead and gone, while
 
 186 THIRD PERIOD. 1G60— 1674. [chap. 
 
 Satan still lived and walked the earth, the identical Satan 
 who had deceived Eve. 
 
 Nor was it only to the poetic public that his personages 
 were real, true, and living beings. The poet himself be- 
 lieved as entirely in their existence as did his readers. I 
 insist upon this point, because one of the first of living 
 critics has declared of Paradise Lost that it is a poem in 
 which every artifice of invention is consciously employed, 
 not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable 
 by any living faith. (Euskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 138). 
 On the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the 
 poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that 
 tlrroughout Paradise Lost, as in Paradise Regained and 
 Samson, Milton felt himself to be standing on the sure 
 ground of fact and reality. It was not in Milton's nature 
 to be a showman, parading before an audience a phantas- 
 magoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets 
 tricked up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are 
 told by Lockhart, that the old man who told the story of 
 Gilpin Horner to Lady Dalkeith bond fide believed the 
 existence of the elf. Lady Dalkeith repeated the tale to 
 Walter Scott, who worked it up with consummate skill 
 into the Lay of the Last Minstrel. This is a case of a 
 really believed legend of diablerie becoming the source of 
 a literary fiction. Scott neither believed in the reality of 
 the goblin page himself, nor expected his readers to believe 
 it. He could not rise beyond the poetry of amusement, 
 and no poetry with only this motive can ever be more than 
 literary art. 
 
 Other than this was Milton's conception of his own 
 function. Of the fashionable verse, such as was written 
 in the Caroline age, or in any age, he disapproved, not only 
 because it was imperfect art, but because it was untrue
 
 xni.] PARADISE LOST. 187 
 
 utterance. Poems that were raised "from the heat of 
 youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at 
 waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the 
 trencher fury of a rhyming parasite," were in his eyes 
 treachery to the poet's high vocation. 
 
 Poetical powers " are the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed 
 ... in every nation, and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, 
 to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and 
 public civility, to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the 
 affections in right tune ; to celebrate in glorious and lofty 
 hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what 
 he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence 
 in bis church ; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, 
 the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly 
 through faith against the enemies of Christ ; to deplore the 
 general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's 
 true worship." 
 
 So he had written in 1642, and this lofty faith in his 
 calling supported him twenty years later, in the arduous 
 labour of his attempt to realise his own ideal. In setting 
 himself down to compose Paradise Lost and Regained, he 
 regarded himself not as an author, but as a medium, 
 the mouthpiece of " that eternal Spirit who can enrich 
 with all utterance and all knowledge : Urania, heavenly 
 muse," visits him nightly, 
 
 And dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires 
 Easy my unpremeditated verse. 
 
 Paradise Lost, ix. 21. 
 
 Urania bestows the flowing words and musical sweetness ; 
 to God's Spirit he looks to 
 
 Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
 Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
 
 1S8 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1674 [ciiap. 
 
 Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
 Of things invisible to mortal sight. 
 
 Paradise Lost, iii. 50. 
 
 The singers with whom he would fain equal himself are 
 not Dante, or Tasso, or, as Dryden would have it, Spenser, 
 hut 
 
 Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, 
 And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old. 
 
 As he is equalled with these in misfortune— loss of sight 
 — he would emulate them in function. Orpheus and 
 Musaeus are the poets he would fain have as the com- 
 panions of his midnight meditation (Penseroso). And 
 the function of the poet is like that of the prophet in the 
 old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter. It is God's 
 truth which passes his lips— lips hallowed by the touch 
 of sacred fire. He is the passive instrument through 
 whom flows the emanation from on high ; his words are 
 not his own, but a suggestion. Even for style Milton is 
 indebted to his "celestial patroness who deigns her 
 nightly visitation unimplor'd." 
 
 Milton was not dependent upon a dubious tradition in 
 the subject he had selected. Man's fall and recovery were 
 recorded in the Scriptures. And the two media of truth, 
 the internal and the external, as deriving from the same 
 source, must needs be in harmony. That the Spirit en- 
 lightens the mind within, in this belief the Puritan saint, 
 the poet, and the prophet, who all met in Milton, were at 
 one. That the Old Testament Scriptures were also a reve- 
 lation from God, was an article of faith which he had never 
 questioned. Nor did he only receive these books as con- 
 veying in substance a divine view of the world's history, 
 lie regarded them as in the letter a transcript of fact.
 
 xiii ] PARADISE LOST. 189 
 
 If the poet-prophet would tell the story of creation or 
 redemption, he was thus restrained not only by the general 
 outline and imagery of the Bible, but by its very words. 
 And here we must note the skill of the poet in surmount- 
 ing an added or artificial difficulty, in the subject he had 
 chosen as combined with his notion of inspiration. He 
 must not deviate in a single syllable from the words of 
 the Hebrew books. He must take up into his poem the 
 whole of the sacred narrative. This he must do, not 
 merely because his readers would expect such literal 
 accuracy from him, but because to himself that narrative 
 was the very truth which he was undertaking to deliver. 
 The additions which his fancy or inspiration might supply 
 must be restrained by this severe law, that they should bo 
 such as to aid the reader's imagination to conceive how 
 the event took place. They must by no means be suffered 
 to alter, disfigure, traduce the substance or the letter of the 
 revelation. This is what Milton has done. He has told 
 the story of creation in the very words of Scripture. 
 The whole of the seventh book, is little more than a 
 paraphrase of a few verses of Genesis. What he has 
 added is so little incongruous with his original, that 
 most English men and women would probably have 
 some difficulty in discriminating in recollection the part 
 they derive from Moses, from that which they have added 
 from the paraphrast. In Genesis it is the serpent who 
 tempts Eve, in virtue of his natural wiliness. In Milton 
 it is Satan who has entered into the body of a serpent, 
 and supplied the intelligence. Here indeed Milton was 
 only adopting a gloss, as ancient at least as the Book of 
 Wisdom (ii. 24). But it is the gloss, and not the text of 
 Moses, which is in possession of our minds, and who has 
 done most to lodge it there, Milton or the commentators 1
 
 190 TIIIRD PERIOD. 1GG0— 1671. [chap. 
 
 Again, it is Milton and not Moses who makes the serpent 
 pluck and eat the first apple from the tree. But Bp. 
 Wilson comments upon the words of Genesis (hi. 6) as 
 though they contained this purely Miltonic circumstance. 
 
 It could hardly but be that one oi two of the incidents 
 which Milton has supplied, the popular imagination has 
 been unable to homologate. Such an incident is the 
 placing of artillery in the wars in heaven. "VVe reject 
 this suggestion, and find it mars probability. But it 
 would not seem so improbable to Mdton's contemporaries, 
 not only because it was an article of the received poetic 
 tradition (see Ronsard G, p. 40), but also because fire-arms 
 had not quite ceased to be regarded as a devilish enginery 
 of a new warfare, unfair in the knightly code of honour, 
 a base substitute of mechanism for individual valour. It 
 was gunpowder and not Don Quixote which had destroyed 
 the age of chivalry. 
 
 Another of Milton's fictions which has been found 
 too grotesque is the change (P. L., x. 508) of the demons 
 into serpents, who hiss their Prince on his return from his 
 embassy. Here it is not, I think, so much the unnatural 
 character of the incident itself, as its gratuitousness 
 which offends. It does not help us to conceive the 
 situation. A suggestion of Chateaubriand may therefore 
 go some way towards reconciling the reader even to this 
 caprice of imagination. It indicates, he says, the degra- 
 dation of Satan, who, from the superb Intelligence of the 
 early scenes of the poem, is become at its close a hideous 
 reptile. He has not triumphed, but has failed, and is 
 degraded into the old dragon, who haunts among the 
 damned. The bruising of his head has already com- 
 menced. 
 
 The bridge, again, which Sin and Death construct
 
 xiii.] TAKADISE KEGAINED. 101 
 
 {Paradise Lost, x. 300), leading from the mouth of hell 
 to the wall of the world, has a chilling effect upon the 
 imagination of a modern reader. It does not assist the 
 conception of the cosmical system which we accept in the 
 earlier books. This clumsy fiction seems more at home 
 in the grotesque and lawless mythology of the Turks, or 
 in the Persian poet Sadi, who is said by Marmontel to 
 have adopted it from the Turk. If Milton's intention 
 were to reproduce Jacob's ladder, he should, like Dante 
 {Farad, xxi. 25), have made it the means of commu- 
 nication between heaven and earth. 
 
 It is possible that Milton himself, after the experiment 
 of Paradise Lost was fully before him, suspected that he 
 had supplemented too much for his purpose ; that his 
 imagery, which was designed to illustrate history, might 
 stand in its light. For in the composition of Paradise 
 Regained (published 1671) he has adopted a much severer 
 style. In this poem he has not only curbed his imagi- 
 nation, but has almost suppressed it. He has amplified, 
 but has hardly introduced any circumstance which is not 
 in the original. Paradise Regained is little more than a 
 paraphrase of the Temptation as found in the synoptical 
 gospels. It is a marvel of ingenuity that more than two 
 thousand lines of blank verse can have been constructed 
 out of some twenty lines of prose, without the addition of 
 any invented incident, or the insertion of any irrelevant 
 digression. In the first three books of Paradise Regained 
 there is not a single simile. Nor yet can it be said that 
 the version of the gospel narrative has the faidt of most 
 paraphrases, viz., that of weakening the effect, and ob- 
 literating the chiselled features of the original. Let a 
 reader take Paradise Regained not as a theme used as a 
 canvas for poetical embroidery, an opportunity for an author
 
 192 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [ciiap. 
 
 to show off his powers of writing, hut as a bond fide attempt 
 to impress upon the mind the story of the Temptation, 
 and he will acknowledge the concealed art of the genuine 
 epic poet, hent before all things upon telling his tale. It 
 will still he capable of being alleged that the story told 
 does not interest ; that the composition is dry, hard, 
 barren ; the style as of set purpose divested of the attri- 
 butes of poetry. It is not necessary indeed that an epic 
 should be in twelve boots; but we do demand in an 
 epic poem multiplicity of character and variety of in- 
 cident. In Paradise Regained there are only two per- 
 sonages, both of whom are supernatural. Indeed, they 
 can scarcely be called personages ; the poet, in his fidelity 
 to the letter, not having thought fit to open up the fertile 
 vein of delineation which was afforded by the human 
 character of Christ. The speakers are no more than the 
 abstract principles of good and evil, two voices who hold 
 a rhetorical disputation through four books and two 
 thousand lines. 
 
 The usual explanation of the frigidity of Paradise Re- 
 gained is the suggestion, which is nearest at hand, viz., 
 that it is the effect of age. Like Ben Jonson's New Inn, 
 it betrays the feebleness of senility, and has one of the 
 most certain marks of that stage of authorship, the 
 attempt to imitate himself in those points in which he 
 was once strong. "When " glad no more, He wears a face 
 of joy, because He has been glad of yore." Or it is an 
 " ceuvre de lassitude," a continuation, with the inevitable 
 defect of continuations, that of preserving the forms and 
 wanting the soul of the original, like the second parts ot 
 Faust, of Don Quixote, and of so many other books. 
 
 Both these explanations of the inferiority of Paradise 
 R< -g< lined have probability. Either of them may be true,
 
 xin.] PARADISE REGAINED. 193 
 
 or both may have concurred to the common effect. In 
 favour of the hypothesis of senility is the fact, recorded 
 by Phillips, that Milton "could not hear with patience 
 any such thing when related to him." The reader will 
 please to note that this is the original statement, which 
 the critics have improved into the statement that he 
 preferred Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost. But 
 his approval of his work, even if it did not amount to 
 preference, looks like the old man's fondness for his 
 youngest and weakest offspring. 
 
 Another view of the matter, however, is at least 
 possible. Milton's theory as to the true mode of 
 handling a biblical subject was, as I have said, to add 
 no more dressing, or adventitious circumstance, than 
 should assist the conception of the sacred verity. After 
 he had executed Paradise Lost, the suspicion arose that 
 he had been too indulgent to his imagination ; that he 
 had created too much. He would make a second experi- 
 ment, in which he would enforce his theory with more 
 vigour. In the composition of Paradise Lost he must 
 have experienced that the constraint he imposed upon 
 himself had generated, as was said of Racine, " a pleni- 
 tude of soul." He might infer that were the compression 
 carried still further, the reaction of the spirit might 1 e 
 still increased. Poetry he had said long before should be 
 " simple, sensuous, impassioned " {Tractate of Education). 
 Nothing enhances passion like simplicity. So in Paradise 
 Regained Milton has carried simplicity of dress to the verge 
 of nakedness. It is probably the most unadorned poem 
 extant in any language. He has pushed severe abstinence 
 to the extreme point, possibly beyond the point, where a 
 reader's power is stimulated by the poet's parsimony. 
 
 It may elucidate the intention of the author of Para- 
 
 o
 
 104 THIRD PERIOD. 1660— 1G74. [chap. 
 
 dise Regained, if we contrast it for a moment with a poem 
 constructed upon the opposite principle, that, viz., of the 
 maximum of adornment. Claudian's Rape of Proserpine 
 (a.d. 400) is one of the most rich and elahorate poems 
 ever written. It has in common with Milton the cir- 
 cumstance that its whole action is contained in a solitary- 
 event, viz., the carrying off of Proserpine from the vale of 
 Henna by Pluto. All the personages, too, are super- 
 human ; and the incident itself supernatural. Claudian's 
 ambition was to overlay his story with the gold and 
 jewellery of expression and invention. [Nothing is 
 named without being carved, decked, and coloured from 
 the inexhaustible resources of the poet's treasury. This is 
 not done with ostentatious pomp, as the hyperbolical 
 heroes of vulgar novelists are painted, but always with 
 taste, which though lavish is discriminating. 
 
 Milton, like Wordsworth, urged his theory of parsi- 
 mony further in practice than he would have done, had 
 he not been possessed by a spirit of protest against pre- 
 vailing error. Milton's own ideal was the chiselled 
 austerity of Greek tragedy. But he was impelled to 
 overdo the system of holding back, by his desire to chal- 
 lenge the evil spirit which was abroad. He woidd sepa- 
 rate himself not only from the Clevelands, the Denhams, 
 and the Drydens, whom he did not account as poets at 
 all, but even from the Spenserians. Thus, instead of 
 severe, he became rigid, and his plainness is not in- 
 frequently jejune. 
 
 " Pomp and ostentation of reading," he had once 
 written, " is admired among the vulgar ; but, in matters 
 of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest." As Words- 
 worth had attempted to regenerate poetry by recurring to 
 nature and to common objects, Milton would revert to
 
 xm.] SAMSON AGONISTES. 195 
 
 the pure Word of God. He would present no human 
 adumbration of goodness, but Christ Himself. He saw 
 that here absolute plainness was best. In the presence 
 of this unique Being silence alone became the poet. This 
 "higher argument" was "sufficient of itself" (Paradise 
 Lost, ix. 42). 
 
 There are some painters whose work appeals only to 
 painters, and not to the public. So the judgment of 
 poets and critics has been more favourable to Paradise 
 Regained than the opinion of the average reader. John- 
 son thinks that "if it had been written, not by Milton, 
 but by some imitators, it would receive universal praise." 
 Wordsworth thought it " the most perfect in execution of 
 anything written by Milton." And Coleridge says of it, 
 " in its kind it is the most perfect poem extant." 
 
 There is a school of critics which maintains that a poem 
 is, like a statue or a picture, a work of pure art, of which 
 beauty is the only characteristic of which the reader 
 shoidd be cognisant. And beauty is wholly ideal, an abso- 
 lute quality, out of relation to person, time, or circum- 
 stance. To such readers Samson Agonistes will seem tame, 
 flat, meaningless, and artificial. From the point of view of 
 the critic of the eighteenth century, it is " a tragedy which 
 only ignorance would admire and bigotry applaud " (Dr. 
 Johnson). If, on the other hand, it be read as a page of 
 cotemporary history, it becomes human, pregnant with real 
 woe, the record of an heroic soul, not baffled by temporary 
 adversity, but totally defeated by an irreversible fate, and 
 unflinchingly accepting the situation, in the firm con- 
 viction of the righteousness of the cause. If fiction is 
 truer than fact, fact is more tragic than fiction. In the 
 course of the long struggle of human liberty against the 
 
 o 2
 
 196 THIRD PERIOD. 16G0-167J.. [chap. 
 
 church, there had been terrible catastrophes. But the St. 
 Bartholomew, the Bevocation of the Edict, the Spanish 
 Inquisition, the rule of Alva in the Low Countries, — these 
 and other days of suffering and rebuke have been left to 
 the dull pen of the annalist, who has variously diluted 
 their story in his literary circumlocution office. The 
 triumphant royalist reaction of 1660, when the old ser- 
 pent bruised the heel of freedom by totally crushing 
 Euritanism, is singular in this, that the agonised cry of 
 the beaten party has been preserved in a cotemporary 
 monument, the intensest utterance of the most intense of 
 English poets — the Samson Agonistes. 
 
 In the covert representation, which we have in this 
 drama, of the actual wreck of Milton, his party, and his 
 cause, is supplied that real basis of truth which was 
 necessary to inspire him to write. It is of little moment 
 that the incidents of Samson's life do not form a strict 
 parallel to those of Milton's life, or to the career of the 
 Euritan cause. The resemblance lies in the sentiment 
 and situation, not in the bare event. The glorious youth 
 of the consecrated deliverer, his signal overthrow of the 
 Ehilistine foe with means so inadequate that the hand of 
 God was manifest in the victory ; his final humiliation, 
 which he owed to his own weakness and disobedience, and 
 the present revelry and feasting of the uncircumcised Philis- 
 tines in the temple of their idol, — all these things together 
 constitute a parable of which no reader of Milton's day 
 could possibly mistake the interpretation. More obscurely 
 adumbrated is the day of vengeance, when virtue should 
 return to the repentant backslider, and the idolatrous 
 crew should bo smitten with a swift destruction in the 
 midst of their insolent revelry. Add to these the two 
 great personal misfortunes of the poet's life, his first
 
 xin.] SAMSON AGONISTES. 197 
 
 marriage with a Philistine -woman, out of sympathy with 
 hirn or his cause, and his blindness ; and the basis of 
 reality becomes so complete, that the nominal personages 
 of the drama almost disappear behind the history which 
 we read through them. 
 
 But while for the biographer of Milton Samson 
 Agonistes is charged with a pathos, which as the ex- 
 pression of real suffering no Active tragedy can equal, it 
 must be felt that as a composition the drama is languid, 
 nerveless, occasionally halting, never brilliant. If the 
 date of the composition of the Samson be 1663, this may- 
 have been the result of weariness after the effort of 
 Paradise Lost. If this drama were composed in 1667, 
 it would be the author's last poetical effort, and the 
 natural explanation would then be that his power over 
 language was failing. The power of metaphor, i. e. of 
 indirect expression, is, according to Aristotle, the cha- 
 racteristic of genius. It springs from vividness of con- 
 ception of the thing spoken of. It is evident that this 
 intense action of the presentative faculty is no longer at 
 the disposal of the writer of Samson. In Paradise Re- 
 gained we are conscious of a purposed restraint of strength. 
 The simplicity of its style is an experiment, an essay of a 
 new theory of poetic words. The simplicity of Samson 
 Agonistes is a flagging of the forces, a drying up of the 
 rich sources from which had once flowed the golden stream 
 of suggestive phrase which makes Paradise Lost a unique 
 monument of the English language. I could almost fancy 
 that the consciousness of decay utters itself in the lines 
 (594)— 
 
 I feel my genial spirits droop, 
 My hopes all flat, nature within me seems 
 In all her functions weary of herself,
 
 198 THIRD PERIOD. 1CG0— 1671. [chap. 
 
 My race of glory run, and race of shame, 
 And I shall shortly bo with them that rest. 
 
 The point of view I have insisted on is that Milton 
 conceives a poet to be one who employs his imagination 
 to make a revelation of truth, truth which the poet him- 
 self entirely believes. One objection to this point of 
 view will at once occur to the reader, the habitual em- 
 ployment in both poems of the fictions of pagan myth- 
 ology. This is an objection as old as Miltonic criticism. 
 The objection came from those readers who had no 
 difficulty in realising the biblical scenes, or in accepting 
 demoniac agency, but who found their imagination re- 
 pelled by the introduction of the gods of Greece or Borne. 
 It is not that the biblical heaven and the Greek Olympus 
 are incongruous, but it is that the unreal is blended with 
 the real, in a way to destroy credibility. 
 
 To this objection the answer has been supplied by De 
 Quincey. To Milton the personages of the heathen 
 Pantheon were not merely familiar fictions, or established 
 poetical properties ; they were evil spirits. That they 
 were so was the creed of the early interpreters. In their 
 demonology, the Hebrew and the Greek poets had a com- 
 mon ground. Up to the advent of Christ, the fallen 
 angels had been permitted to delude mankind. To Milton, 
 as to Jerome, Moloch was Mars, and Chemosh Priapus. 
 Plato knew of hell as Tartarus, and the battle of the 
 giants in Hesiod is no fiction, but an obscured tradition 
 of the war once waged in heaven. What has been ad- 
 verse to Milton's art of illusion is, that the belief that 
 the gods of the heathen world were the rebellious angels 
 has ceased to be part of the common creed of Christendom. 
 Milton was nearly the last of our great writers who was 
 fully possessed of the doctrine. His readers now no
 
 xiii.] PAEADISE LOST. 199 
 
 longer share it with the poet. In Addison's time (1712) 
 some of the imaginary persons in Paradise Lost were 
 beginning to make greater demands upon the faith of 
 readers, than those cool rationalistic times could meet. 
 
 There is an element of decay and death in poems which 
 we vainly style immortal. Some of the sources of 
 Milton's power are already in process of drying up. I do 
 not speak of the ordinary caducity of language, in virtue 
 of which every effusion of the human spirit is lodged in 
 a body of death. Milton suffers little as yet from this 
 cause. There are few lines in his poems which are less 
 intelligible now, than they were at the time they were 
 written. This is partly to be ascribed to his limited 
 vocabulary, Milton, in his verse, using not more than 
 eight thousand words, or about half the number used by 
 Shakespeare. Nay, the position of our earlier writers has 
 been improved by the mere spread of the English language 
 over a wider area. Addison apologised for Paradise Lost 
 falling short of the JEneid, because of the inferiority of 
 the language in which it was written. " So divine a 
 poem in English is like a stately palace built of brick." 
 The defects of English for purposes of rhythm and har- 
 mony are as great now as they ever were, but the space 
 that our speech fills in the world is vastly increased, and 
 this increase of consideration is reflected back upon our 
 older writers. 
 
 But if, as a treasury of poetic speech, Paradise Lost 
 has gained by time, it has lost far more as a storehouse 
 of divine truth. We at this day are better able than 
 ever to appreciate its force of expression, its grace of 
 phrase, its harmony of rhythmical movement, but it is 
 losing its hold over our imagination. Strange to say, this 
 failure of vital power in the constitution of the poem is
 
 200 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674 [chap. 
 
 due to the very selection of subject by which Milton sought 
 to secure perpetuity. Not content with being the poet of 
 men, and with describing human passions and ordinary 
 events, he aspired to present the destiny of the whole race 
 of mankind, to tell the story of creation, and to reveal the 
 councils of heaven and hell. And he would raise this 
 structure upon no unstable base, but upon the sure 
 foundation of the written word. It would have been a 
 thing incredible to Milton that the hold of the Jewish 
 Scriptures over the imagination of English men and 
 women could ever be weakened. This process, however, 
 has already commenced. The demonology of the poem 
 has already, with educated readers, passed from the 
 region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, 
 but with a large number of readers, the angelology can 
 be no more than what the critics call machinery. And 
 it requires a violent effort from any of our day to 
 accommodate their conceptions to the anthropomorphic 
 theology of Paradise Lost. Were the sapping process to 
 continue at the same rate for two more centuries, the 
 possibility of epic illusion would be lost to the whole 
 scheme and economy of the poem. Milton has taken a 
 scheme of life for life itself. Had he, in the choice of 
 subject, remembered the principle of the Aristotelean 
 Poetic (which he otherwise highly prized), that men in 
 action are the poet's proper theme, he would have raised 
 his imaginative fabric on a more permanent foundation ; 
 upon the appetites, passions, and emotions of men, their 
 vices and virtues, their aims and ambitions, which are a 
 far more constant quantity than any theological system. 
 This perhaps was what Goethe meant, when he pro- 
 nounced the subject of Paradise Lost to be " abominable, 
 with a fair outside, but rotten inwardly."
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 201 
 
 Whatever fortune may be in store for Paradise Lost in 
 the time to come, Milton's choice of subject was, at the 
 time he wrote, the only one which offered him the 
 guarantees of reality, authenticity, and divine truth, 
 which he required. We need not therefore search the 
 annals of literature to find the poem which may have 
 given the first suggestion of the fall of man as a subject. 
 This, however, has been done by curious antiquaries, and 
 a list of more than two dozeu authors has been made, 
 from one or other of whom Milton may have taken either 
 the general idea or particular hints for single incidents. 
 Milton, without being a very wide reader, was likely to 
 have seen the Adamus Exul of Grotius (1601), and he 
 certainly had read Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victor y and 
 Triumph (1610). There are traces of verbal reminiscence 
 of Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas. But out of the 
 long catalogue of his predecessors there appear only three, 
 who can claim to have conceived the same theme with 
 anything like the same breadth, or on the same scale as 
 Milton has done. These are the so-called Csedinon, 
 Andrei ni, and Vondel. 
 
 1. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem which passes 
 under the name of Casdnion has this one point of resem- 
 blance to the plot of Paradise Lost, that in it the seduction 
 of Eve is Satan's revenge for his expulsion from heaven. 
 As Francis Junius was much occupied upon this poem of 
 which he published the text in 1655, it is likely enough 
 that he should have talked of it with his friend Milton. 
 
 2. Voltaire related that Milton during his tour in Italy 
 (1638) had seen performed UAdamo, a sacred drama by 
 the Florentine Giovanni Battista Andreini, and that he 
 "took from that ridiculous trifle" the hint of the "noblest 
 product of human imagination." Though Voltaire relates
 
 202 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1674. [chap. 
 
 this as a matter of fact, it is doubtful if it be more than 
 an on dit which he had picked up in London society. 
 Voltaire could not have seen Andreini's drama, for it is 
 not at all a ridiculous trifle. Though much of the 
 dialogue is as insipid as dialogue in operettas usually is, 
 there is great invention in the plot, and animation in the 
 action. Andreini is incessantly offending against taste, 
 and is infected with the vice of the Marinists, tho 
 pursuit of concetti, or far-fetched analogies between things 
 unlike. His infernal personages are grotesque and dis- 
 gusting, rather than terrible; his scenes in heaven childish 
 — at once familiar and fantastic, in the style of the 
 Mysteries of the age before the drama. With all these 
 faults the Adamo is a lively and spirited representation 
 of the Hebrew legend, and not unworthy to have been 
 the antecedent of Paradise Lost. There is no question 
 of plagiarism, for the resemblance is not even that of 
 imitation or parentage, or adoption. The utmost that 
 can be conceded is to concur in Hayley's opinion that, 
 either in representation or in perusal, the Adamo of 
 Andreini had made an impression on the mind of Milton ; 
 had, as Voltaire says, revealed to him the hidden majesty 
 of the subject. There had been at least three editions 
 of the Adamo by 1641, and Milton may have brought 
 one of these with him, among the books which he had 
 shipped from Venice, even, if he had not seen the drama 
 on the Italian stage, or had not, as Todd suggests, met 
 Andreini in person. 
 
 So much appears to me to be certain from the internal 
 evidence of the two compositions as they stand. But 
 there are further some slight corroborative circumstances, 
 (i.) The Trinity College sketch, so often referred to, of 
 Milton's scheme when, it was intended to be dramatic,
 
 xiii.] PARADISE LOST. 203 
 
 keeps much more closely, both in its personages and in 
 its ordering, to Andreini. (ii.) In Phillips's TJieatrum 
 Poetarum, a compilation in which he had his uncle's 
 help, Andreini is mentioned as author " of a fantastic 
 poem entitled Olivastro, which was printed at Bologna, 
 1642." If Andreini was known to Edward Phillips, the 
 inference is that he was known to Milton. 
 
 3. Lastly, though external evidence is here wanting, 
 it cannot be doubted that Milton was acquainted with 
 the Lucifer of the Dutch poet, Joost van den Vondel, 
 which appeared in 1654. This poem is a regular five-act 
 drama in the Dutch language, a lancruaQie which Milton 
 was able to read. In spite of commercial rivalry and 
 naval war there was much intercourse between the two 
 republics, and Amsterdam books came in regular course 
 to London. The Dutch drama turns entirely on the 
 revolt of the angels, and their expulsion from heaven, the 
 fall of man beki!? but a subordinate incident. In Para- 
 dise Lost the relation of the two events is inverted, the 
 fall of the angels being there an episode, not transacted, 
 but told by one of the personages of the epic. It is 
 therefore only in one book of Paradise Lost, the sixtb, that 
 the influence of Vondel can be looked for. There may 
 possibly occur in other parts of our epic single lines 
 of wbich an original may be found in Vondel's drama. 
 Notably such a one is the often-quoted — 
 
 Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. 
 
 Paradise Lost, i. 263. 
 
 which is Vondel's — 
 
 En liever d'eerste Vorst in eenigh lager hof 
 
 Dan in't gezalight lichfc de tweede, of noch een minder ! 
 
 Put it is in the sixth book only in which anything more
 
 204 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1G74. [chap. 
 
 than a verbal similarity is traceable. According to Mr. 
 Gosse, who has given an analysis, with some translated 
 extracts, of Vondel's Lucifer, the resemblances are too 
 close and too numerous to be mere coincidences. Yondel 
 is more human than Milton, just where human attributes 
 are unnatural, so that heaven is made to seem like earth, 
 while in Paradise Lost we always feel that we are in a 
 region aloft. Miltonic presentation has a dignity and 
 elevation, which is not only wanting but is sadly missed 
 in the Dutch drama, even the language of which seems 
 common and familiar. 
 
 The poems now mentioned form, taken together, the 
 antecedents of Paradise Lost. In no one instance, taken 
 singly, is the relation of Milton to a predecessor that of 
 imitation, not even to the extent in which the .ZEneid, for 
 instance, is an imitation of the Iliad and Odj^ssey. The 
 originality of Milton lies not in his subject, but in his 
 manner ; not in his thoughts, but in his mode of thinking. 
 His story and his personages, their acts and words, had 
 been the common property of all poets since the fall of 
 the Roman Empire. Not only the three I have specially 
 named had boldly attempted to set forth a mythical 
 representation of the origin of evil, but many others had 
 fluttered round the same central object of poetic attraction. 
 Many of these productions Milton had read, and they had 
 made their due impression on his mind according to their 
 degree of force. When he began to compose Paradise Lost 
 he had the reading of a life-time behind him. His ima- 
 gination worked upon an accumulated store, to which 
 books, observation, and reflection had contributed in equal 
 proportions. He drew upon this store without conscious 
 distinction of its sources. Not that this was a recollected 
 material, to which the poet had recourse whenever inven-
 
 xiil] PARADISE LOST. 205 
 
 tion failed him ; it was identified with himself. His verse 
 flowed from his own soul, but Lis was a soul which had 
 grown up nourished with the spoil of all the ages. He 
 created his epic, as metaphysicians have said that God 
 created the world, by drawing it out of himself, not by 
 building it up out of elements supplied ab extra. 
 
 The resemblances to earlier poets, Greek, Latin, Italian, 
 which could be pointed out in Paradise Lost, were so 
 numerous that in 16 95, only twenty-one years after 
 Milton's death, an editor, one Patrick Hume, a school- 
 master in the neighbourhood of London, was employed by 
 Tonson to point out the imitations in an annotated edition. 
 From that time downwards, the diligence of our literary 
 antiquaries has been busily employed in the same track of 
 research, and it has been extended to the English poets, a 
 field which was overlooked, or not known to the first 
 collector. The result is a valuable accumulation of parallel 
 passages, which have been swept up into our variorum 
 Miltons, and make Paradise Lost, for English phraseology, 
 what Virgil was for Latin in the middle ages, the centre 
 round which the study moves. The learner, who desires 
 to cultivate his feeling for the fine shades and variations 
 of expression, has here a rich opportunity, and will acknow- 
 ledge with gratitude the laborious services of Newton, 
 Pearce, the Wartons, Todd, Mitford, and other compilers. 
 But these heaped-up citations of parallel passages some- 
 what tend to hide from us the secret of Miltonic language. 
 We are apt to think that the magical effect of Milton's 
 words has been produced by painfully inlaying tesserae 
 of borrowed metaphor — a mosaic of bits culled from exten- 
 sive reading, carried along by a retentive memory, and 
 pieced together so as to produce a new whole, with the 
 exquisite art of a Japanese cabinet-maker. It is some-
 
 206 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674 [chap. 
 
 times admitted that Milton was a plagiary, but it is urged 
 in extenuation that his plagiarisms were always repro- 
 duced in finer forms. 
 
 It is not in the spirit of vindicating Milton, hut as 
 touching the mystery of metrical language, that I dwell a 
 few moments upon this misconception. It is true that 
 Milton has a way of making his own even what ho 
 borrows. While Horace's thefts from Alcaeus or Pindar 
 are palpable, even from the care which he takes to Latinise 
 them, Milton cannot help transfusing his own nature into 
 the words he adopts. But this is far from all. "When 
 Milton's widow was asked "if he did not often read 
 Homer and Virgil, she understood it as an imputation 
 upon him for stealing from those authors, and answered 
 with eagerness, that he stole from nobody but the muse 
 who inspired him." This is more true than she knew. It 
 is true there are many phrases or images in Paradise Lost 
 taken from earlier writers — taken, not stolen, for the 
 borrowing is done openly. When Adam, for instance, begs 
 Raphael to prolong his discourse deep into night, — 
 
 Sleep, listening to thee, will watch ; 
 Or we can bid his absence, till thy song 
 End, and dismiss thee ere the morning shine ; 
 
 we cannot be mistaken in saying that we have here a con- 
 scious reminiscence of the words of Alcinous to Ulysses in 
 the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Such imitation is on 
 the surfaco, and does not touch the core of that mysterious 
 combination of traditive with original elements in diction, 
 which Milton and Virgil, alone of poets known to us, 
 have effected. Here and there, many times, in detached 
 places, Milton has consciously imitated. But, beyond 
 this obvious indebtedness, there runs through the whole 

 
 xiii.] PARADISE LOST. 207 
 
 texture of his verse a suggestion of secondary meaning, a 
 meaning which has heen accreted to the words, by their 
 passage down the consecrated stream of classical poetry. 
 Milton quotes very little for a man of much reading. He 
 says of himself (Judgment of Bucer) that he " never could 
 delight in long citations, much less in whole traductions, 
 whether it be natural disposition or education in me, or 
 that my mother bore me a speaker of what God made 
 mine own, and not a translator." And the observation is 
 as old as Bishop Newton, that " there is scarce any author 
 who has written so much, and upon such various subjects, 
 and yet quotes so little from his cotemporary authors." It is 
 said that " he could repeat Homer almost all without book." 
 But we know that common minds are apt to explain to 
 themselves the working of mental superiority, by exagge- 
 rating the power of memory. Milton's own writings remain 
 a sufficient evidence that his was not a verbal memory. 
 And, psychologically, the power of imagination and the 
 power of verbal memory, are almost always found in 
 inverse proportion. 
 
 Milton's diction is the elaborated outcome of all the best 
 words of all antecedent poetry, not by a process of recol- 
 lected reading and storage, but by the same mental habit 
 by which we learn to speak our mother tongue. Only, in 
 the case of the poet, the vocabulary acquired has a new 
 meaning superadded to the words, from the occasion on 
 which they have been previously employed by others. 
 Words, over and above their dictionary signification, con- 
 note all the feeling which has gathered round them by 
 reason of their employment through a hundred generations 
 of song. In the words of Mr. Myers, " without ceasing 
 to be a logical step in the argument, a phrase becomes a 
 centre of emotional force. The complex associations which
 
 208 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—167'!. [cnAr. 
 
 it evokes, modify tlie associations evoked by other words 
 in the same passage, in a way distinct from logical or 
 grammatical connection." The poet suggests much more 
 than he says, or as Milton himself has phrased it, " more 
 is meant than meets the ear." 
 
 For the purposes of poetry a thought is the representa- 
 tive of many feelings, and a word is the representative of 
 many thoughts. A single word may thus set in motion 
 in us the vibration of a feeling first consigned to letters 
 3000 years ago. For oratory words should be winged, 
 that they may do their work of persuasion. For poetry 
 words should be freighted with associations of feeling, that 
 they may awaken sympathy. It is the suggestive power 
 of words that the poet cares for, rather than their current 
 denotation. How laughable are the attempts of the 
 commentators to interpret a line in Virgil as they would 
 a sentence in Aristotle's Physics ! Milton's secret lies in 
 his mastery over the rich treasure of this inherited vocabu- 
 lary. He wielded it as his own, as a second mother- 
 tongue, the native and habitual idiom, of his thought and 
 feeling, backed by a massive frame of character, and "a 
 power which is got within me to a passion." (Areojm- 
 gitica.) 
 
 "When "Wordsworth came forward at the end of the 
 eighteenth century with his famous reform of the language 
 of English poetry, the Miltonic diction was the current 
 coin paid out by every versifier. "Wordsworth revolted 
 against this dialect as unmeaning, hollow, gaudy, and inane. 
 His reform consisted in dropping the consecrated phraseo- 
 logy altogetber, and reverting to the common language 
 of ordinary life. It was necessary to do this in order to 
 reconnect poetry with the sympathies of men, and make it 
 again a true utterance instead of the ingenious exercise in
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 209 
 
 putting together words, which it had hecorne. In project- 
 ing this abandonment of the received tradition, it may be 
 thought that Wordsworth was condemning the Miltonic 
 system of expression in itself. But this was not so. 
 Milton's language had become in the hands of the imitators 
 of the eighteenth century sound without sense, a husk 
 without the kernel, a body of words without the soul of 
 poetry. Milton had created and wielded an instrument 
 which was beyond the control of any less than himself. 
 He used it as a living language ; the poetasters of the 
 eighteenth century wrote it as a dead language, as boys 
 make Latin verses. Their poetry is to Paradise Lost, as 
 a modern Gothic restoration is to a genuine middle-age 
 church. It was against the feeble race of imitators, and 
 not against the master himself, that the protest of the lake 
 poet was raised. He proposed to do away with the 
 Miltonic vocabulary altogether, not because it was in itself 
 vicious, but because it could now only be employed at 
 secondhand. 
 
 One drawback there was attendant upon the style chosen 
 by Milton, viz. that it narrowly limited the circle of his 
 readers. All words are addressed to those who understand 
 them. The Welsh triads are not for those who have not 
 learnt Welsh ; an English poem is only for those who 
 understand English. But of understanding English there 
 are many degrees ; it requires some education to under- 
 stand literary style at all. A large majority of the natives 
 of any country possess, and use, only a small fraction of 
 their mother tongue. These people may be left out of the 
 discussion. Confining ourselves only to that small part of 
 our millions which we speak of as the educated classes, 
 that is those whose schooling is carried on beyond fourteen 
 years of age, it will be found that only a small fraction of 
 
 p
 
 210 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 the men, and a still smaller fraction of the women, fully 
 apprehend the meaning of words. This is the case with 
 what is written in the ordinary language of hooks. When 
 we pass from a style in which words have only their 
 simple signification, to a style of which the effect depends on 
 the suggestion of collateral association, we leave hehind 
 the majority even of these few. This is what is meant 
 by the standing charge against Milton that he is too 
 learned. 
 
 It is no paradox to say that Milton was not a learned 
 man. Such men there were in his day, Usher, Selden, 
 Voss, in England ; in Holland, Milton's adversary Salmasius, 
 and many more. A learned man was one who could range 
 freely and surely over the whole of classical and patristic 
 remains in the Greek and Latin languages (at least), with 
 the accumulated stores of philological, chronological, 
 historical criticism, necessary for the interpretation of 
 those remains. Milton had neither made these acquisi- 
 tions, nor aimed at them. He even expresses himself, in 
 his vehement way, with contempt of them. " Hollow 
 antiquities sold by the seeming bulk," " marginal stuff- 
 ings," " horse-loads of citations and fathers," are some of 
 his petulant outbursts against the learning that had been 
 played upon his position by his adversaries. He says ex- 
 pressly that he had " not read the Councils, save here and 
 there " (Smertymnuus). His own practice had been 
 " industrious and select reading." He chose to make 
 himself a scholar rather than a learned man. The aim of 
 his studies was to improve faculty, not to acquire know- 
 ledge. " Who would be a poet must himself be a true 
 poem j" his heart should "contain of just, wise, good, the 
 perfect shape." He devoted himself to self-preparation 
 with the assiduity of Petrarch or of Goethe. " In weari-
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 211 
 
 some labour and studious watchings I have tired out 
 almost a whole youth." " Labour and intense study I 
 take to be my portion in this life." He would know, 
 not all, but " what was of use to know," and form himself 
 by assiduous culture. The first Englishman to whom the 
 designation of our series, Men of Letters, is appropriate, 
 Milton was also the noblest example of the type. He 
 cultivated, not letters, but himself, and sought to enter 
 into possession of his own mental kingdom, not that he 
 might reign there, but that he might royally use its re- 
 sources in building up a work, which should bring honour 
 to his country and his native tongue. 
 
 The style of Paradise Lost is then only the natural ex- 
 pression of a soul thus exquisitely nourished upon the best 
 thoughts and finest words of all ages. It is the language 
 of one who lives in the companionship of the great and 
 the wise of past time. It is inevitable that when such a 
 one speaks, his tones, his accent, the melodies of his 
 rhythm, the inner harmonies of his linked thoughts, the 
 grace of his allusive touch, should escape the common ear. 
 To follow Milton one should at least have tasted the 
 same training through which he put himself. " Te quoque 
 dignum finge deo." The many cannot see it, and com- 
 plain that the poet is too learned. They would have 
 Milton talk like Bunyan or William Cobbett, whom they 
 understand. Milton did attempt the demagogue in his 
 pamphlets, only with the result of blemishing his fame and 
 degrading his genius. The best poetry is that which calls 
 upon us to rise to it, not that which writes down to us. 
 
 Milton knew that his was not the road to popularity. 
 He thirsted for renown, but he did not confound renown 
 with vogue. A poet has his choice between the many 
 and the few ; Milton chose the few. " Paucis hujusmodi
 
 212 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1671. [chap. 
 
 lectoribus contentus," is his own inscription in a copy of 
 his pamphlets sent by him to Patrick Young. He derived 
 a stem satisfaction from the reprobation with which the 
 vulgar visited him. His divorce tracts were addressed 
 to men who dared to think, and ran the town " number- 
 ing good intellects." His poems he wished laid up in the 
 Bodleian Library, " where the jabber of common people 
 cannot penetrate, and whence the base throng of readers 
 keep aloof" (Ode to Mouse). If Milton resembled a Eoman 
 republican in the severe and stoic elevation of his cha- 
 racter, he also shared the aristocratic intellectualism of 
 the classical type. He is in marked contrast to the level- 
 ling hatred of excellence, the Christian trades-unionism of 
 the model Catholic of the mould of S. Francois de Sales, 
 whose maxim of life is " marchons avec la troupe de nos 
 freres et compagnons, doucement, paisiblement, et ami- 
 ablement." To Milton the people are — 
 
 But a herd confus'd, 
 
 A miscellaneous rabble, who extol 
 
 Things vulgar. 
 
 Paradise Regained, iii. 49. 
 
 At times his indignation carries him past the cour- 
 tesies of equal speech, to pour out the vials of prophetic 
 rebuke, when he contemplates the hopeless struggle of 
 those who are the salt of the earth, "amidst the throng and 
 noises of vulgar and irrational men " (Tenure of Kings), 
 and he rates them to their face as " owls and cuckoos, 
 asses, apes, and dogs " (Sonnet xn.) ; not because they will 
 not listen to him, but because they " hate learning more 
 than toad or asp " (Sonnet ix.). 
 
 Milton's attitude must be distinguished from patrician 
 pride, or the noli-me-tangere of social exclusiveness. Nor, 
 again, was it, like Callimachus's, the fastidious repulsion
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 213 
 
 of a delicate taste for the hackneyed in literary expression ; 
 it Avas the lofty disdain of aspiring virtue for the sordid 
 and ignoble. 
 
 Various ingredients, constitutional or circumstantial, 
 concurred to produce this repellent or unsympathetic atti- 
 tude in Milton. His dogmatic Calvinism, from the effects 
 of which his mind never recovered — a system which easily 
 disposes to a cynical abasement of our fellow-men — counted 
 for something. Something must be set down to habitual 
 converse with the classics — a converse which tends to im- 
 part to character, as Platner said of Godfrey Hermann, " a 
 certain grandeur and generosity, removed from the spirit 
 of cabal and mean cunning which prevail among men of 
 the world." His blindness threw him out of the com- 
 petition of life, and back upon himself, in a way which 
 was sure to foster egotism. These were constitutional 
 elements of that aloofness from men which characterised 
 all his utterance. These disposing causes became inex- 
 orable fate, when, by the turn of the political wheel of 
 fortune, he found himself alone amid the mindless 
 dissipation and reckless materialism of the Eestoration. 
 He felt himself then at war with human society as 
 constituted around him, and was thus driven to with- 
 draw himself within a poetic world of his own crea- 
 tion. 
 
 In this antagonism of the poet to his age much was 
 lost ; much energy was consumed in what was mere 
 friction. The artist is then most powerful when he finds 
 himself in accord with the age he lives in. The pleni- 
 tude of art is only reached when it marches with the 
 sentiments which possess a community. The defiant 
 attitude easily slides into paradox, and the mind falls in 
 love with its own wilfulness. The exceptional emergence
 
 211 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 of Milton's three poems, Paradise Lost, Regained, and 
 Samson, deeply colours their context. The greatest 
 achievements of art in their kinds have been the capital 
 specimens of a large crop ; as the Iliad and Odyssey are 
 the picked lines out of many rhapsodies, and Shakespeare 
 the king of an army of contemporary dramatists. Milton 
 was a survival, felt himself such, and resented it. 
 
 Unchang'd, 
 
 Though fall'n on evil days, 
 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues ; 
 In darkness, and with dangers compass' d round, 
 And solitude. 
 
 Paradise Lost, vii 24. 
 
 Poetry thus generated we should naturally expect to 
 meet with more admiration than sympathy. And such, 
 on the whole, has been Milton's reception. In 1678, 
 twenty years after the publication of Paradise Lost, Prior 
 spoke of him (Hind transverse^) as " a rough, unhewn 
 fellow, that a man must sweat to read him." And in 
 1842, Hallam had doubts "if Paradise Lost, published 
 eleven years since, would have met with a greater de- 
 mand " than it did at first. It has been much disputed 
 by historians of our Literature what inference is to be 
 drawn from the numbers sold of Paradise Lost at its 
 first publication. Between 1667 and 1678, a space of 
 twenty years, three editions had been printed, making 
 together some 4500 copies. Was this a large or a small 
 circulation 1 Opinions are at variance on the point. 
 Johnson and Hallam thought it a large sale, as books 
 went at that time. Campbell, and the majority of our 
 annalists of books, have considered it as evidence of 
 neglect. Comparison with what is known of other cases 
 of circulation leads to no more certain conclusion. On
 
 xiii.] PARADISE LOST. 215 
 
 the one hand, the public could not take more than three 
 editions — say 3000 copies — of the plays of Shakespeare 
 in sixty years, from 1623 to 1684. If this were a fair 
 measure of possible circulation at the time, we should 
 have to pronounce Milton's sale a great success. On the 
 other hand, Cleveland's poems ran through sixteen or 
 seventeen editions in about thirty years. If this were 
 the average output of a popular book, the inference 
 would be that Paradise Lost was not such a book. 
 
 Whatever conclusion may be the true one from the 
 amount of the public demand, we cannot be wrong in 
 asserting that from the first, and now as then, Paradise 
 Lost has been more admired than read. The poet's wish 
 and expectation that he should find " fit audience, though 
 few," has been fulfilled. Partly this has been due to 
 his limitation, his unsympathetic disposition, the de- 
 ficiency of the human element in his imagination, and 
 his presentation of mythical instead of real beings. But 
 it is also in part a tribute to his excellence, and is to be 
 ascribed to the lofty strain which requires more effort to 
 accompany, than an average reader is able to make, a 
 majestic demeanour which no parodist has been able to 
 degrade, and a wealth of allusion demanding more 
 literature than is possessed by any but the few whose life 
 is lived with the poets. An appreciation of Milton is the 
 last reward of consummated scholarship ; and we may 
 apply to him what Quintilian has said of Cicero, " Ille se 
 profecisse sciat, cui Cicero valde placebit." 
 
 Causes other than the inherent faults of the poem 
 long continued to weigh down the reputation of Paradise 
 Lost. In Great Britain the sense for art, poetry, litera- 
 ture, is confined to a few, while our political life has 
 been diffused and vigorous. Hence all judgment, even
 
 216 THIRD PERIOD. 1660-1674. [chap. 
 
 upon a poet, is biassed "by considerations of party. Be- 
 fore 1688 it was impossible that the poet, who had 
 justified regicide, could have any public beyond the sup- 
 pressed and crouching Nonconformists. The Revolution 
 of 1688 removed this ban, and from that date forward 
 the Liberal party in England adopted Milton as the 
 republican poet. William Hogg, writing in 1690, says 
 of Paradise Lost that " the fame of the poem is spread 
 through the whole of England, but being written in 
 English, it is as yet unknown in foreign lands." This is 
 obvious exaggeration. Lauder, about 1748, gives the 
 date exactly, when he speaks of " that infinite tribute of 
 veneration that has been paid to him these sixty years 
 past." One distinguished exception there was. Dryden, 
 royalist and Catholic though he was, was loyal to his art. 
 Nothing which Dryden ever Avrote is so creditable to his 
 taste, as his being able to see, and daring to confess, in 
 the day of disesteem, that the regicide poet alone deserved 
 the honour which his cotemporaries were for rendering 
 to himself. Dryden's saying, " This man cuts us all out, 
 and the ancients too," is not perfectly well vouched, but 
 it would hardly have been invented, if it had not been 
 known to express his sentiments. And Dryden's sense 
 of Milton's greatness grew with his taste. When, in the 
 preface to his State of Innocence (1674), Dryden praised 
 Paradise Lost, he " knew not half the extent of its ex- 
 cellence," John Dennis says, " as more than twenty years 
 afterwards he confessed to me." Had he known it, he 
 never could have produced his vulgar parody, lite State 
 of Innocence, a piece upon which he received the com- 
 pliments of his cotemporaries, as " having refined the ore 
 of Milton." 
 
 'With the one exception of Dryden, a better critic than
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 217 
 
 poet, Milton's repute was the work of the Whigs. The 
 first edition de luxe of Paradise Lost (1688) was brought 
 out by a subscription got up by the Whig leader, Lord 
 Somers. In this edition Dryden's pinchbeck epigram so 
 often quoted, first appeared — 
 
 Three poets in three distant ages born, &c. 
 
 It was the Whig essayist, Addison, whose papers in the 
 Spectator (1712) did most to make the poem popularly 
 known. In 1737, in the height of the Whig ascendancy, 
 the bust of Milton penetrated Westminster Abbey, though, 
 in the generation before, the Dean of that day had refused 
 to admit an inscription on the monument erected to John 
 Phillips, because the name of Milton occurred in it. 
 
 The zeal of the Liberal party in the propagation of the 
 cult of Milton was of course encountered by an equal 
 passion on the part of the Tory opposition. They were 
 exasperated by the lustre which was reflected upon Re- 
 volution principles by the name of Milton. About the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, when Whig popularity 
 was already beginning to wane, a desperate attempt was 
 made by a rising Tory pamphleteer to crush the new Liberal 
 idol. Dr. Johnson, the most vigorous writer of the day, 
 conspired with one William Lauder, a native of Scotland 
 seeking fortune in London, to stamp out Milton's credit by 
 proving him to be a wholesale plagiarist. Milton's imita- 
 tions — he had gathered pearls wherever they were to be 
 found — were thus to be turned into an indictment against 
 him. One of the beauties of Paradise Lost is, as has been 
 already said, the scholar's flavour of literary reminiscence 
 which hangs about its words and images. This Virgilian 
 art, in which Milton has surpassed his master, was repre- 
 sented by this pair of literary bandits as theft, and held 
 
 Q
 
 218 THIRD PERIOD. 1660—1674. [chap. 
 
 to prove at once moral obliquity and intellectual feeble- 
 ness. This line of criticism was well chosen ; it was, in 
 fact, an appeal to the many from the few. Unluckily for 
 the plot, Lauder was not satisfied with the amount of re- 
 semblance shown by real parallel passages. He ventured 
 upon the bold step of forging verses, closely resembling 
 lines in Paradise Lost, and ascribing these verses to older 
 poets. He even forged verses which he quoted as if from 
 Paradise Lost, and showed them as Milton's plagiarisms 
 from preceding writers. Even these clumsy fictions 
 might have passed without detection at that uncritical 
 period of our literature, and under the shelter of the name 
 of Samuel Johnson. But Lauder's impudence grew with 
 the success of his criticisms, which he brought out as letters, 
 through a series of years, in the Gentleman's Magazine. 
 There was a translation of Paradise Lost into Latin 
 hexameters, which had been made in 1690 by William 
 Hogg. Lauder inserted lines, taken from this translation, 
 into passages taken from Massenius, Staphorstius, Taub- 
 mannus, neo-Latin poets, whom Milton had, or might have 
 read, and presented these passages as thefts by Milton. 
 
 Low as learning had sunk in England in 1750, Hogg's 
 Latin Paradisus amissus was just the book, which tutors of 
 colleges who could teach Latin verses had often in their 
 hands. Mr. Bowie, a tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, 
 immediately recognised an old acquaintance in one or two 
 of the interpolated lines. This put him upon the scent, 
 he submitted Lauder's passages to a closer investigation, and 
 the whole fraud was exposed. Johnson, who was not 
 concerned in the cheat, and was only guilty of indolence 
 and party spirit, saved himself by sacrificing his comrade. 
 He afterwards took ample revenge for the mortification of 
 this exposure, in his Lives of the Poets, in which he em-
 
 xin.] PARADISE LOST. 219 
 
 ployed all his vigorous powers and consummate skill to 
 write down Milton. He undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow 
 at the poet's reputation, and succeeded in damaging it for 
 at least two generations of readers. He did for Milton 
 what Aristophanes did for Socrates, effaced the real man 
 and replaced him by a distorted and degrading caricature. 
 
 It was again a clergyman to whom Milton owed his 
 vindication from Lauder's onslaught. John Douglas, 
 afterwards bishop of Salisbury, brought Bowie's materials 
 before the public. But the high Anglican section of 
 English life has never thoroughly accepted Milton. R. S. 
 Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, himself a poet of real feel- 
 ing, gave expression, in rabid abuse of Milton, to the 
 antipathy which more judicious churchmen suppress. 
 Even the calm and gentle author of the Christian Year, 
 wide heart ill-sorted with a narrow creed, deliberately 
 framed a theory of Poetic for the express purpose, as it 
 would seem, of excluding the author of Paradise Lost 
 from the first class of poets. 
 
 But a work such as Milton has constructed, at once 
 intense and elaborate, firmly knit and broadly laid, can 
 afford to wait. Time is all in its favour, and against its 
 detractors. The Church never forgives, and faction does 
 not die out. But Milton has been, for two centuries, get- 
 ting beyond the reach of party feeling, whether of friends 
 or foes. In each national aggregate an instinct is always 
 at work, an instinct not equal to exact discrimination of 
 lesser degrees of merit, but surely finding out the chief 
 forces which have found expression in the native tongue. 
 This instinct is not an active faculty, and so exposed to the 
 influences which warp the will, it is a passive deposition 
 from unconscious impression. Our appreciation of our 
 poet is not to be measured by our choosing him for our
 
 220 THIRD PEEIOD. 1660—1674. [en. xui. 
 
 favourite closet companion, or reading him often. As 
 Voltaire wittily said of Dante, " Sa reputation s'affirmera 
 toujours, parce qu'on ne le lit guere." We shall prefer 
 to read the fashionable novelist of each season as it passes, 
 but we shall choose to be represented at the international 
 congress of world poets by Shakespeare and Milton; 
 Shakespeare first, and next Milton. 
 
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 old romance to every class of readers." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 The W'orks Of Virgil. Rendered into English Prose, with 
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 Lonsdale, M.A., and Samuel Lee, M.A. pp. 228. 
 " A more complete edition of Virgil in English it is scarcely possible 
 to conceive than the scholarly work before us." — Globe. 
 
 The W^Orks Of Horace. Rendered into English Prose, with 
 Introductions, Running Analysis, Notes, and Index. By James 
 Lonsdale, M.A., and Samuel Lee, M.A. 
 
 The Standard says, " To classical and Jion-classical readers it 
 will be invaluable." 
 
 Milton's Poetical Works. — Edited, with Introductions, by 
 Professor Masson. 
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