The very type and emblem of the free spirit of Italy, crushed but not conquered, then inhabited Florence in the person of "the starry Galileo," lately released from confinement at Arcetri, and allowed to dwell in the city under such severe restraint of the Inquisition that no Protestant should have been able to gain access to him. It may not have been until Milton's second visit in March, 1639, when Galileo had returned to his villa, that the English stranger stood unseen before him. The meeting between the two great blind men of their century is one of the most picturesque in history; it would have been more pathetic still if Galileo could have known that his name would be written in "Paradise Lost," or Milton could have foreseen that within thirteen years he too would see only with the inner eye, but that the calamity which disabled the astronomer would restore inspiration to the poet. How deeply he was impressed appears, not merely from the famous comparison of Satan's shield to the moon enlarged in "the Tuscan artist's optic glass," but by the ventilation in the fourth and eighth books of "Paradise Lost," of the points at issue between Ptolemy and Copernicus:—

"Whether the sun predominant in heaven Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun, He from the east his flaming road begin, Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she paces even, And bears thee soft with the smooth air along."

It would be interesting to know if Milton's Florentine acquaintance included that romantic adventurer, Robert Dudley, strange prototype of Shelley in face and fortune, whom Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Dean Bargrave encountered at Florence, but whom Milton does not mention. The next stage in his pilgrimage was the Eternal City, by this time resigned to live upon its past. The revenues of which Protestant revolt had deprived it were compensated by the voluntary contributions of the lovers of antiquity and art; and it had become under Paul V. one of the centres of European finance. Recent Popes had added splendid architectural embellishments, and the tendency to secular display was well represented by Urban VIII., a great gatherer and a great dispenser of wealth, an accomplished amateur in many arts, and surrounded by a tribe of nephews, inordinately enriched by their indulgent uncle. Milton arrived early in October. The most vivid trace of his visit is his presence at a magnificent concert given by Cardinal Barberini, who, "himself waiting at the doors, and seeking me out in so great a crowd, nay, almost laying hold of me by the hand, admitted me within in a truly most honourable manner." There he heard the singer, Leonora Baroni, to whom he inscribed three Latin epigrams, omitted from the fifty-six compositions in honour of her published in the following year. But we may see her as he saw her in the frontispiece, reproduced in Ademollo's monograph upon her. The face is full of sensibility, but not handsome. She lived to be a great lady, and if any one spoke of her artist days she would say, Chi le ricercava queste memorie? Next to hers, the name most entwined with Milton's Roman residence is that of Lucas Holstenius, a librarian of the Vatican. Milton can have had little respect for a man who had changed his religion to become the dependant of Cardinal Barberini, but Holstenius's obliging reception of him extorted his gratitude, expressed in an eloquent letter. Of the venerable ruins and masterpieces of ancient and modern art which have inspired so many immortal compositions, Milton tells us nothing, and but one allusion to them is discoverable in his writings. The study of antiquity, as distinguished from that of classical authors, was not yet a living element in European culture: there is also truth in Coleridge's observation that music always had a greater attraction for Milton than plastic art.

After two months' stay in Rome, Milton proceeded to Naples, whence, after two months' residence, he was recalled by tidings of the impending troubles at home, just as he was about to extend his travels to Sicily and Greece. The only name associated with his at Naples is that of the Marquis Manso, then passing his seventy-ninth year with the halo of reverence due to a veteran who fifty years ago had soothed and shielded Tasso, and since had protected Marini. He now entertained Milton with equal kindness, little dreaming that in return for hospitality he was receiving immortality. Milton celebrated his desert as the friend of poets, in a Latin poem of singular elegance, praying for a like guardian of his own fame, in lines which should never be absent from the memory of his biographers. He also unfolded the project which he then cherished of an epic on King Arthur, and assured Manso that Britain was not wholly barbarous, for the Druids were really very considerable poets. He is silent on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Manso requited the eulogium with an epigram and two richly-wrought cups, and told Milton that he would have shown him more observance still if he could have abstained from religious controversy. Milton had not acted on Sir Henry Wootton's advice to him, il volto sciolto, i pensieri stretti. "I had made this resolution with myself," he says, "not of my own accord to introduce conversation about religion; but, if interrogated respecting the faith, whatsoever I should suffer, to dissemble nothing." To this resolution he adhered, he says, during his second two months' visit to Rome, notwithstanding threats of Jesuit molestation, which probably were not serious. At Florence his friends received him with no less warmth than if they had been his countrymen, and with them he spent another two months. His way to Venice lay through Bologna and Ferrara, and if his sonnets in the Italian language were written in Italy, and all addressed to the same person, it was probably at Bologna, since the lady is spoken of as an inhabitant of "Reno's grassy vale," and the Reno is a river between Bologna and Ferrara. But there are many difficulties in the way of this theory, and, on the whole, it seems most reasonable to conclude that the sonnets were composed in England, and that their autobiographical character is at least doubtful. That nominally inscribed to Diodati, however, would well suit Leonora Baroni. Diodati had been buried in Blackfriars on August 27, 1638, but Milton certainly did not learn the fact until after his visit to Naples, and possibly not until he came to pass some time at Geneva with Diodati's uncle. He had come to Geneva from Venice, where he had made some stay, shipping off to England a cargo of books collected in Italy, among which were many of "immortal notes and Tuscan air." These, we may assume, he found awaiting him when he again set foot on his native soil, about the end of July, 1639.

Milton's conduct on his return justifies Wordsworth's commendation:—

"Thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

Full, as his notebooks of the period attest, of magnificent aspiration for "flights above the Aonian mount," he yet quietly sat down to educate his nephews, and lament his friend. His brother-in-law Phillips had been dead eight years, leaving two boys, Edward and John, now about nine and eight respectively. Mrs. Phillips's second marriage had added two daughters to the family, and from whatever cause, it was thought best that the education of the sons should be conducted by their uncle. So it came to pass that "he took him a lodging in St. Bride's Churchyard, at the house of one Russel, a tailor;" Christopher Milton continuing to live with his father.

We may well believe that when the first cares of resettlement were over, Milton found no more urgent duty than the bestowal of a funeral tribute upon his friend Diodati. The "Epitaphium Damonis" is the finest of his Latin poems, marvellously picturesque in expression, and inspired by true manly grief. In Diodati he had lost perhaps the only friend whom, in the most sacred sense of the term, he had ever possessed; lost him when far away and unsuspicious of the already accomplished stroke; lost him when returning to his side with aspirations to be imparted, and intellectual treasures to be shared. Bis ille miser qui serus amavit. All this is expressed with earnest emotion in truth and tenderness, surpassing "Lycidas," though void of the varied music and exquisite felicities which could not well be present in the conventionalized idiom of a modern Latin poet. The most pathetic passage is that in which he contrasts the general complacency of animals in their kind with man's dependence for sympathy on a single breast; the most biographically interesting where he speaks of his plans for an epic on the story of Arthur, which he seems about to undertake in earnest. But the impulses from without which generally directed the course of this seemingly autocratic, but really susceptible, nature, urged him in quite a different direction: for some time yet he was to live, not make a poem.

The tidings which, arriving at Naples about Christmas, 1638, prevailed upon Milton to abandon his projected visit to Sicily and Greece, were no doubt those of the revolt of Scotland, and Charles's resolution to quell it by force of arms. Ere he had yet quitted Italy, the King's impotence had been sufficiently demonstrated, and about a month ere he stood on English soil the royal army had "disbanded like the break-up of a school." Milton may possibly have regretted his hasty return, but before many months had passed it was plain that the revolution was only beginning. Charles's ineffable infatuation brought on a second Scottish war, ten times more ridiculously disastrous than the first, and its result left him no alternative but the convocation (November, 1640) of the Long Parliament, which sent Laud to the Tower and Strafford to the block, cleared away servile judges and corrupt ministers, and made the persecuted Puritans persecutors in their turn. Not a member of this grave assemblage, perhaps, but would have laughed if told that not its least memorable feat was to have prevented a young schoolmaster from writing an epic.

Milton had by this time found the lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard insufficient for him, and had taken a house in Aldersgate Street, beyond the City wall, and suburban enough to allow him a garden. "This street," writes Howell, in 1657, "resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses." He did not at this time contemplate mixing actively in political or religious controversy.

"I looked about to see if I could get any place that would hold myself and my books, and so I took a house of sufficient size in the city; and there with no small delight I resumed my intermitted studies; cheerfully leaving the event of public affairs, first to God, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task."

But this was before the convocation of the Long Parliament. When it had met,

"Perceiving that the true way to liberty followed on from these beginnings, inasmuch also as I had so prepared myself from my youth that, above all things, I could not be ignorant what is of Divine and what of human right, I resolved, though I was then meditating certain other matters, to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry."

Milton's note-books, to be referred to in another place, prove that he did not even then cease to meditate themes for poetry, but practically he for eighteen years ceased to be a poet.

There is no doubt something grating and unwelcome in the descent of the scholar from regions of serene culture to fierce political and religious broils. But to regret with Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned aside from poetry to controversy is to regret that "Paradise Lost" should exist. Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent to the public weal, and if Milton had been capable of forgetting the citizen in the man of letters we may be sure that "a little grain of conscience" would ere long have "made him sour." It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with Pattison of "the prostitution of genius to political party." Milton is as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor. He himself tells us that controversy is highly repugnant to him.

"I trust to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies, to come in to the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk."

But he felt that if he allowed such motives to prevail with him, it would be said to him:

"Timorous and ungrateful, the Church of God is now again at the foot of her insulting enemies, and thou bewailest, What matters it for thee or thy bewailing? When time was, thou would'st not find a syllable of all that thou hast read or studied to utter on her behalf. Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired thoughts, but of the sweat of other men. Thou hast the diligence, the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were to be adorned or beautified; but when the cause of God and His Church was to be pleaded, for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast, God listened if He could hear thy voice among His zealous servants, but thou wert dumb as a beast; from henceforward be that which thine own brutish silence hath made thee."

A man with "Paradise Lost" in him must needs so think and act, and, much as it would have been to have had another "Comus" or "Lycidas," were not even such well exchanged for a hymn like this, the high-water mark of English impassioned prose ere Milton's mantle fell upon Ruskin?

"Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unapproachable. Parent of angels and men! next, Thee I implore, Omnipotent King, Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature Thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting Love! And Thou, the third subsistence of Divine Infinitude, illuminating Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! one Tri-personal godhead! look upon this Thy poor and almost spent and expiring Church, leave her not thus a prey to these importunate wolves, that wait and think long till they devour Thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into Thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of Thy servants. O let them not bring about their damned designs that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of Thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken monarchy, that now lies labouring under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreaded calamities.

"O Thou, that, after the impetuous rage of five bloody inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick-coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless of Thy free grace didst motion peace and terms of covenant with us; and, having first well-nigh freed us from anti-Christian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic Empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter-islands about her; stay us in this felicity, let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that viper of sedition, that for these fourscore years hath been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abortive spawn without the danger of this travailing and throbbing kingdom: that we may still remember in our solemn thanksgivings, how, for us, the northern ocean, even to the frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and the very maw of Hell ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned blast.

"O how much more glorious will those former deliverances appear, when we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest miseries past, but to have reserved us for greatest happiness to come? Hitherto Thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous claim of Thy foes, now unite us entirely and appropriate us to Thyself, tie us everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of Thy eternal throne.

"And now we know, O Thou, our most certain hope and defence, that Thine enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the great whore, and have joined their plots with that sad, intelligencing tyrant that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas: but let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought; let them decree, and do Thou cancel it; let them gather themselves, and be scattered; let them embattle themselves, and be broken; let them embattle, and be broken, for Thou art with us.

"Then amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate Thy Divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when Thou, the Eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shall put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming Thy universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion, and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of principalities, legions, and thrones into their glorious titles, and in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss, in over-measure for ever.

"But they contrary, that by the impairing and diminution of the true faith, the distresses and servitude of their country, aspire to high dignity, rule and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life (which God grant them), shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of Hell, where, under the despiteful control, the trample and spurn of all the other damned, that in the anguish of their torture, shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot, and down-trodden vassals of perdition."

The five pamphlets in which Milton enunciated his views on Church Government fall into two well-marked chronological divisions. Three—"Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England," "Of Prelatical Episcopacy," "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus"—which appeared almost simultaneously, belong to the middle of 1641, when the question of episcopacy was fiercely agitated. Two—"The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy," and "The Apology for Smectymnuus,"[1] belong to the early part of 1642, when the bishops had just been excluded from the House of Lords. To be just to Milton we must put ourselves in his position. At the present day forms of church government are usually debated on the ground of expediency, and even those to whom they seem important cannot regard them as they were regarded by Milton's contemporaries. Many may protest against Episcopacy receiving especial recognition from the State, but no one dreams of abolishing it, or of endowing another form of ecclesiastical administration in its room. It is no longer contended that the national religion should be changed, the contention is that no religion should be national, but that all should be placed on an impartial footing. But Milton at this time desired a theocracy, and nothing doubted that he could produce a pattern agreeable in every respect to the Divine will if only Prelacy could be hurled after Popery. The controversy, therefore, assumed far grander proportions than would be possible in our day, when it is three-fourths a protest against the airs of superiority which the alleged successors of the Apostles think it becoming to assume towards teachers whose education and circumstances approach more closely than their own to the Apostolic model. What would seem exaggerated now was then perfectly in place. Milton, in his own estimation, had a theme for which the cloven tongues of Pentecost were none too fiery, or the tongues of angels too melodious. As bursts of impassioned prose-poetry the finest passages in these writings have never been surpassed, nor ever will be equalled so long as short sentences prevail, and the interminable period must not unfold itself in heights and hollows like the incoming tide of ocean, nor peal forth melodious thunder like a mighty organ. But, considered as argumentative compositions, they are exceedingly weak. No masculine head could be affected by them; but a manly heart may easily imbibe the generous contagion of their noble enthusiastic idealism. No man with a single fibre of ideality or enthusiasm can help confessing that Milton has risen to a transcendent height, and he may imagine that it has been attained by the ladder of reason rather than the pinion of poetry. Such an one may easily find reasons for agreeing with Milton in many inspired outbursts of eloquence simulating the logic that is in fact lacking to them. The following splendid passage, for instance, and there are very many like it, merely proves that a seat in the House of Lords is not essential to the episcopal office, which no one ever denied. It would have considerable force if the question involved the nineteenth century one of the Pope's temporal sovereignty:—

"Certainly there is no employment more honourable, more worthy to take up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of heavenly truth from God to man, and by the faithful work of holy doctrine to procreate a number of faithful men, making a kind of creation like to God's by infusing his spirit and likeness into them, to their salvation, as God did into him; arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge and good works. Can a man thus employed find himself discontented or dishonoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and jail deliveries? or because he may not as a judge sit out the wrangling noise of litigious courts to shrive the purses of unconfessing and unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be discouraged though men call him not lord, whereas the due performance of his office would gain him, even from lords and princes, the voluntary title of father?"

When it was said of Robespierre, cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit tout ce qu'il dit, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief place in the State. It might have been said of Milton in the literal sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pass on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on education and on the freedom of the press.

Milton's tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was the fruit of an impulse from without. "Though it be one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for want of which this nation perishes, I had not at this time been induced but by your earnest entreaties and serious conjurements." The efficient cause thus referred to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the succeeding century. The son of a Polish exile of German extraction, Hartlib had settled in England about 1627. He found the country behindhand both economically and socially, and with benign fervour applied himself to its regeneration. Agriculture was his principal hobby, and he effected much towards its improvement in England, rather however by editing the unpublished treatises of Weston and Child than by any direct contributions of his own. Next among the undertakings to which he devoted himself were two of no less moment than the union of British and foreign Protestants, and the reform of English education by the introduction of the methods of Comenius. This Moravian pastor, the Pestalozzi of his age, had first of men grasped the idea that the ordinary school methods were better adapted to instil a knowledge of words than a knowledge of things. He was, in a word, the inventor of object lessons. He also strove to organize education as a connected whole from the infant school to the last touch of polish from foreign travel. Milton alludes almost scornfully to Comenius in his preface to Hartlib, but his tract is nevertheless imbued with the Moravian's principles. His aim, like Comenius's, is to provide for the instruction of all, "before the years of puberty, in all things belonging to the present and future life." His view is as strictly utilitarian as Comenius's. "Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." Of the study of language as intellectual discipline he says nothing, and his whole course of instruction is governed by the desire of imparting useful knowledge. Whatever we may think of the system of teaching which in our day allows a youth to leave school disgracefully ignorant of physical and political geography, of history and foreign languages, it cannot be denied that Milton goes into the opposite extreme, and would overload the young mind with more information than it could possibly digest. His scheme is further vitiated by a fault which we should not have looked for in him, indiscriminate reverence for the classical writers, extending to subjects in which they were but children compared with the moderns. It moves something more than a smile to find ingenuous youth referred to Pliny and Solinus for instruction in physical science; and one wonders what the agricultural Hartlib thought of the proposed course of "Cato, Varro, and Columella," whose precepts are adapted for the climate of Italy. Another error, obvious to any dunce, was concealed from Milton by his own intellectual greatness. He legislates for a college of Miltons. He never suspects that the course he is prescribing would be beyond the abilities of nine hundred and ninety-nine scholars in a thousand, and that the thousandth would die of it. If a difficulty occurs he contemptuously puts it aside. He has not provided for Italian, but can it not "be easily learned at any odd hour"? "Ere this time the Hebrew tongue" (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), "might have been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and the Syrian dialect." This sublime confidence in the resources of the human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement. As an ode or poem on education, Milton's tract, doubtless, has delivered many a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man's aims are so high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited and stimulated by reading it. As a practical treatise it is only valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth, whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up steadily throughout the whole course. Neglect of this precept is the principal reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, and assiduously taught, leave school with hardly any knowledge of languages. Milton's scheme is also remarkable for its bold dealing with day schools and universities, which it would have entirely superseded.

The next publication of Milton's is another instance of the dependence of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him. We owe the "Areopagitica," not to the lonely overflowings of his soul, or even to the disinterested observation of public affairs, but to the real jeopardy he had incurred by his neglect to get his books licensed. The Long Parliament had found itself, in 1643, with respect to the Press, very much in the position of Lord Canning's government in India at the time of the Mutiny. It marks the progress of public opinion that, whereas the Indian Government only ventured to take power to prevent inopportune publication with many apologies, and as a temporary measure, the Parliament assumed it as self-evident that "forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books" had no right to exist, and should be nipped in the bud by the appointment of licensers. Twelve London ministers, therefore, were nominated to license books in divinity, which was equivalent to enacting that nothing contrary to Presbyterian orthodoxy should be published in England.[2] Other departments, not forgetting poetry and fiction, were similarly provided for. The ordinance is dated June 14, 1643. Milton had always contemned the licensing regulations previously existing, and within a month his brain was busy with speculations which no reverend licenser could have been expected to confirm with an imprimatur. About August 1st the "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" appeared, with no recognition of or from a licenser; and the second edition, published in the following February, equally infringed the Parliamentary ordinance. No notice appears to have been taken until the election of a new Master of the Stationers' Company, about the middle of 1644. The Company had an interest in the enforcement of the ordinance, which was aimed at piracy as well as sedition and heresy; and whether for this reason, or at the instigation of Milton's adversaries, they (August 24th) petitioned Parliament to call him to account. The matter was referred to a committee, but more urgent business thrust it out of sight. Milton, nevertheless, had received his marching orders, and on November 24, 1644, appeared "Areopagitica; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing": itself unlicensed.

The "Areopagitica" is by far the best known of Milton's prose writings, being the only one whose topic is not obsolete. It is also composed with more care and art than the others. Elsewhere he seeks to overwhelm, but here to persuade. He could without insincerity profess veneration for the Lords and Commons to whom his discourse is addressed, and he spares no pains to give them a favourable opinion both of his dutifulness and his reasonableness. More than anywhere else he affects the character of a practical man, pressing home arguments addressed to the understanding rather than to the pure reason. He points out sensibly, and for him calmly, that the censorship is a Papal invention, contrary to the precedents of antiquity; that while it cannot prevent the circulation of bad books, it is a grievous hindrance to good ones; that it destroys the sense of independence and responsibility essential to a manly and fruitful literature. We hear less than might have been expected about first principles, of the sacredness of conscience, of the obligation on every man to manifest the truth as it is within him. He does not dispute that the magistrate may suppress opinions esteemed dangerous to society after they have been published; what he maintains is that publication must not be prevented by a board of licensers. He strikes at the censor, not at the Attorney-General. This judicious caution cramped Milton's eloquence; for while the "Areopagitica" is the best example he has given us of his ability as an advocate, the diction is less magnificent than usual. Yet nothing penned by him in prose is better known than the passage beginning, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation;" and none of his writings contain so many seminal sentences, pithy embodiments of vital truths. "Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth." "A dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing. For God more esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person than the restraint of ten vicious." "Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." "A man maybe a heretic in the truth." Towards the end the argument takes a wider sweep, and Milton, again the poet and the seer, hails with exultation the approach of the time he thinks he discerns when all the Lord's people shall be prophets. "Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching reformation." He clearly indicates that he regards the licensing ordinance as not really the offspring of an honest though mistaken concern for religion and morality, but as a device of Presbyterianism to restrain this outpouring of the spirit and silence Independents as well as Royalists. Presbyterianism had indeed been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and Milton's pamphlet was the handwriting on the wall. The fine gold must have become very dim ere a Puritan pen could bring itself to indite that scathing satire on the "factor to whose care and credit the wealthy man may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres; resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys into his custody; and, indeed, makes the very person of that man his religion—esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendation of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him, his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted; and after the malmsey or some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted than He whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." This is a startling passage. We should have pronounced hitherto that Milton's one hopeless, congenital, irremediable want, alike in literature and in life, was humour. And now, surely as ever Saul was among the prophets, behold Milton among the wits.



CHAPTER IV.

Ranging with Milton's spirit over the "fresh woods and pastures new," foreshadowed in the closing verse of "Lycidas," we have left his mortal part in its suburban dwelling in Aldersgate Street, which he seems to have first inhabited shortly before the convocation of the Long Parliament in November, 1640. His visible occupations are study and the instruction of his nephews; by and by he becomes involved in the revolutionary tempest that rages around; and, while living like a pedagogue, is writing like a prophet. He is none the less cherishing lofty projects for epic and drama; and we also learn from Phillips that his society included "some young sparks," and may assume that he then, as afterwards—

"Disapproved that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains."

There is eloquent testimony of his interest in public affairs in his subscription of four pounds, a large sum in those days, for the relief of the homeless Protestants of Ulster. The progress of events must have filled him with exultation, and when at length civil war broke out in September, 1642, Parliament had no more zealous champion. His zeal, however, did not carry him into the ranks, for which some biographers blame him. But if he thought that he could serve his cause better with a pamphlet than with a musket, surely he had good reason for what he thought. It should seem, moreover, that if Milton detested the enemy's principles, he respected his pikes and guns:—

WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY [NOVEMBER, 1642.]

Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms, Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, If deed of honour did thee ever please, Guard them, and him within protect from harms. He can requite thee, for he knows the charms That call fame on such gentle acts as these, And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas, Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms. Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower: The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground; and the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.

If this strain seems deficient in the fierceness befitting a besieged patriot, let it be remembered that Milton's doors were literally defenceless, being outside the rampart of the City.

We now approach the most curious episode of Milton's life, and the most irreconcilable with the conventional opinion of him. Up to this time this heroic existence must have seemed dull to many, for it has been a life without love. He has indeed, in his beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale (about 1632), professed himself a follower of Love: but if so, he has hitherto followed at a most respectful distance. Yet he had not erred, when in the Italian sonnet, so finely rendered in Professor Masson's biography, he declared the heart his vulnerable point:—

"Young, gentle-natured, and a simple wooer, Since from myself I stand in doubt to fly, Lady, to thee my heart's poor gift would I Offer devoutly; and by tokens sure I know it faithful, fearless, constant, pure, In its conceptions graceful, good, and high. When the world roars, and flames the startled sky; In its own adamant it rests secure; As free from chance and malice ever found, And fears and hopes that vulgar minds confuse, As it is loyal to each manly thing And to the sounding lyre and to the Muse. Only in that part is it not so sound Where Love hath set in it his cureless sting."

It is highly probable that the very reaction from party strife turned the young man's fancies to thoughts of love in the spring of 1643. Escorted, we must fear, by a chorus of mocking cuckoos, Milton, about May 21st, rode into the country on a mysterious errand. It is a ghoulish and ogreish idea, but it really seems as if the elder Milton quartered his progeny upon his debtors, as the ichneumon fly quarters hers upon caterpillars. Milton had, at all events for the last sixteen years, been regularly drawing interest from an Oxfordshire squire, Richard Powell of Forest Hill, who owed him L500, which must have been originally advanced by the elder Milton. The Civil War had no doubt interfered with Mr. Powell's ability to pay interest, but, on the other hand, must have equally impaired Milton's ability to exact it; for the Powells were Cavaliers, and the Parliament's writ would run but lamely in loyal Oxfordshire. Whether Milton went down on this eventful Whitsuntide in the capacity of a creditor cannot now be known; and a like uncertainty envelops the precise manner of the metamorphosis of Mary Powell into Mary Milton. The maiden of seventeen may have charmed him by her contrast to the damsels of the metropolis, she may have shielded him from some peril, such as might easily beset him within five miles of the Royalist headquarters, she may have won his heart while pleading for her harassed father; he may have fancied hers a mind he could mould to perfect symmetry and deck with every accomplishment, as the Gods fashioned and decorated Pandora. Milton also seems to imply that his, or his bride's, better judgment was partly overcome by "the persuasion of friends, that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all." It is possible, too, that he had long been intimate with his debtor's family, and that Mary had previously made an impression upon him. If not, his was the most preposterously precipitate of poets' marriages; for a month after leaving home he presented a mistress to his astounded nephews and housekeeper. The newly-wedded pair were accompanied or quickly followed by a bevy of the bride's friends and relatives, who danced and sang and feasted for a week in the quiet Puritan house, then departed—and after a few weeks Milton finds himself moved to compose his tract on the "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce."

How many weeks? The story seemed a straightforward one until Professor Masson remarked what had before escaped attention. According to Phillips, an inmate of the house at the period—"By that time she had for a month, or thereabouts, led a philosophical life (after having been used to a great house, and much company and joviality), her friends, possibly incited by her own desire, made earnest suit by letter to have her company the remaining part of the summer, which was granted, on condition of her return at the time appointed, Michaelmas or thereabout. Michaelmas being come, and no news of his wife's return, he sent for her by letter, and receiving no answer sent several other letters, which were also unanswered, so that at last he dispatched down a foot-messenger; but the messenger came back without an answer. He thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse, and accordingly wrote two treatises," &c. Here we are distinctly assured that Mary Milton's desertion of her husband, about Michaelmas, was the occasion of his treatise on divorce. It follows that Milton's tract must have been written after Michaelmas. But the copy in the British Museum belonged to the bookseller Thomason, who always inscribed the date of publication on every tract in his collection, when it was known to him, and his date, as Professor Masson discovered, is August 1. Must we believe that Phillips's account is a misrepresentation? Must we, in Pattison's words, "suppose that Milton was occupying himself with a vehement and impassioned argument in favour of divorce for incompatibility of temper, during the honeymoon"? It would certainly seem so, and if Milton is to be vindicated it can only be by attention to traits in his character, invisible on its surface, but plainly discoverable in his actions.

The grandeur of Milton's poetry, and the dignity and austerity of his private life, naturally incline us to regard him as a man of iron will, living by rule and reason, and exempt from the sway of passionate impulse. The incident of his marriage, and not this incident alone, refutes this conception of his character; his nature was as lyrical and mobile as a poet's should be. We have seen "Comus" and "Lycidas" arise at another's bidding, we shall see a casual remark beget "Paradise Regained." He never attempts to utter his deepest religious convictions until caught by the contagious enthusiasm of a revolution. If any incident in his life could ever have compelled him to speak or die it must have been the humiliating issue of his matrimonial adventure. To be cast off after a month's trial like an unsatisfactory servant, to forfeit the hope of sympathy and companionship which had allured him into the married state, to forfeit it, unless the law could be altered, for ever! The feelings of any sensitive man must find some sort of expression in such an emergency. At another period what Milton learned in suffering would no doubt have been taught in song. But pamphlets were then the order of the day, and Milton's "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," in its first edition, is as much the outpouring of an overburdened heart as any poem could have been. It bears every mark of a hasty composition, such as may well have been written and printed within the last days of July, following Mary Milton's departure. It is short. It deals with the most obvious aspects of the question. It is meagre in references and citations; two authors only are somewhat vaguely alleged, Grotius and Beza. It does not contain the least allusion to his domestic circumstances, nor anything unless the thesis itself, that could hinder his wife's return. Everything betokens that it was composed in the bitterness of wounded feeling upon the incompatibility becoming manifest; but that he had not yet arrived at the point of demanding the application of his general principle to his own special case. That point would be reached when Mary Milton deliberately refused to return, and the chronology of the greatly enlarged second edition, published in the following February, entirely confirms Phillips's account. In one point only he must be wrong. Mary Milton's return to her father's house cannot have been a voluntary concession on Milton's part, but must have been wrung from him after bitter contentions. Could we look into the household during those weeks of wretchedness, we should probably find Milton exceedingly deficient in consideration for the inexperienced girl of half his age, brought from a gay circle of friends and kindred to a grave, studious house. But it could not well have been otherwise. Milton was constitutionally unfit "to soothe and fondle," and his theories cannot have contributed to correct his practice. His "He for God only, she for God in him," condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and her Maker. In his Tractate on Education there is not a word on the education of girls, and yet he wanted an intellectual female companion. Where should the woman be found at once submissive enough and learned enough to meet such inconsistent exigencies? It might have been said to him as afterwards to Byron: "You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph."

If Milton's first tract on divorce had not been a mere impromptu, extorted by the misery of finding "an image of earth and phlegm" in her "with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome society," he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and elaborate. The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at Westminster. The second edition is far more satisfactory as regards that class of arguments which alone were likely to impress the men of his generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of divines. In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture and reason, and repudiation of the mediaeval canon law. It is not here, nevertheless, that Milton is most at home. The strength of his position is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality or mere expediency. "His ideal of true and perfect marriage," says Mr. Ernest Myers, "appeared to him so sacred that he could not admit that considerations of expediency might justify the law in maintaining sacred any meaner kind, or at least any kind in which the vital element of spiritual harmony was not." Here he is impregnable and above criticism, but his handling of the more sublunary departments of the subject must be unsatisfactory to legislators, who have usually deemed his sublime idealism fitter for the societies of the blest than for the imperfect communities of mankind. When his "doctrine and discipline" shall have been sanctioned by lawgivers, we may be sure that the world is already much better, or much worse.

As the girl-wife vanishes from Milton's household her place is taken by the venerable figure of his father. The aged man had removed with his son Christopher to Reading, probably before August, 1641, when the birth of a child of his name—Christopher's offspring as it should seem—appears in the Reading register. Christopher was to exemplify the law of reversion to a primitive type. Though not yet a Roman Catholic like his grandfather, he had retrograded into Royalism, without becoming on that account estranged from his elder brother. The surrender of Reading to the Parliamentary forces in April, 1643, involved his "dissettlement," and the migration of his father to the house of John, with whom he was moreover better in accord in religion and politics. Little external change resulted, "the old gentleman," says Phillips, "being wholly retired to his rest and devotion, with the least trouble imaginable." About the same time the household received other additions in the shape of pupils, admitted, Phillips is careful to assure us, by way of favour, as M. Jourdain selected stuffs for his friends. Milton's pamphlet was perhaps not yet published, or not generally known to be his, or his friends were indifferent to public sentiment. Opinion was unquestionably against Milton, nor can he have profited much by the support, however practical, of a certain Mrs. Attaway, who thought that "she, for her part, would look more into it, for she had an unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the language of Canaan," and by and by actually did what Milton only talked of doing. We have already seen that he had incurred danger of prosecution from the Stationers' Company, and in July, 1644, he was denounced by name from the pulpit by a divine of much note, Herbert Palmer, author of a book long attributed to Bacon. But, if criticised, he was read. By 1645 his Divorce tract was in the third edition, and he had added three more pamphlets—one to prove that the revered Martin Bucer had agreed with him; two, the "Tetrachordon" and "Colasterion," directed against his principal opponents, Palmer, Featley, Caryl, Prynne, and an anonymous pamphleteer, who seems to have been a somewhat contemptible person, a serving-man turned attorney, but whose production contains some not unwelcome hints on the personal aspects of Milton's controversy. "We believe you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as to you, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law as well as you." Milton's later tracts are not specially interesting, except for the reiteration of his fine and bold idealism on the institution of marriage, qualified only by his no less strenuous insistance on the subjection of woman. He allows, however, that "it is no small glory to man that a creature so like him should be made subject to him," and that "particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield; for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female."

Milton's seminary, meanwhile, was prospering to such a degree as to compel him to take a more commodious house. Was it necessity or enthusiasm that kept him to a task so little compatible with the repose he must have needed even for such intellectual exercise as the "Areopagitica," much more for the high designs he had not ceased to meditate in verse? Enthusiasm, one would certainly say, only that it is impossible to tell to what extent his father's income, chiefly derived from money out at interest, may have been impaired by the confusion of the times. Whether he had done rightly or wrongly in taking the duties of a preceptor upon himself, his nephew's account attests the self-sacrificing zeal with which he discharged them: we groan as we read of hours which should have been devoted to lonely musing or noble composition passed in "increasing as it were by proxy" his knowledge of "Frontinus his Stratagems, with the two egregious poets Lucretius and Manilius." He might also have been better employed than in dictating "A tractate he thought fit to collect from the ablest of divines who have written on that subject of atheism, Amesius, Wollebius," &c. Here should be comfort for those who fear with Pattison that Milton's addiction to politics deprived us of unnumbered "Comuses." The excerpter of Amesius and Wollebius, as we have so often insisted, needed great stimulus for great achievements. Such stimulus would probably have come superabundantly if he could at this time have had his way, for the most moral of men was bent on assuming a direct antagonism to conventional morality. He had maintained that marriage ought to be dissolved for mere incompatibility; his case must have seemed much stronger now that incompatibility had produced desertion. He was not the man to shrink from acting on his opinion when the fit season seemed to him to have arrived; and in the summer of 1645 he was openly paying his addresses to "a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, one of Dr. Davis's daughters." Considering the consequences to the female partner to the contract, it is clear that Miss Davis could not be expected to entertain Milton's proposals unless her affection for him was very strong indeed. It is equally clear that he cannot be acquitted of selfishness in urging his suit unless he was quite sure of this, and his own heart also was deeply interested. An event was about to occur which seems to prove that these conditions were wanting.

Nearly two years have passed since we have heard of Mary Milton, who has been living with her parents in Oxfordshire. Her position as a nominal wife must have been most uncomfortable, but there is no indication of any effort on her part to alter it, until the Civil War was virtually terminated by the Battle of Naseby, June, 1645. Obstinate malignants had then nothing to expect but fine and forfeiture, and their son-in-law's Puritanism may have presented itself to the Powells in the light of a merciful dispensation. Rumours of Milton's suit to Miss Davis may also have reached them; and they would know that an illegal tie would be as fatal to all hopes of reconciliation as a legal one. So, one day in July or August, 1645, Milton, paying his usual call on a kinsman named Blackborough,[3] not otherwise mentioned in his life, who lived in St. Martin's-le-Grand Lane, where the General Post Office now stands, "was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him." There are two similar scenes in his writings, of which this may have formed the groundwork, Dalila's visit to her betrayed husband in "Samson Agonistes," and Eve's repentance in the tenth book of "Paradise Lost." Samson replies, "Out, out, hyaena!" Eve's "lowly plight"

"in Adam wrought Commiseration;... As one disarmed, his anger all he lost, And thus with peaceful words upraised her soon."

Phillips appears to intimate that the penitent's reception began like Dalila's and ended like Eve's. "He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion, and a firm league of peace for the future." With a man of his magnanimous temper, conscious no doubt that he had himself been far from blameless, such a result was to be expected. But it was certainly well that he had made no deeper impression than he seems to have done upon "the handsome and witty gentlewoman." One would like to know whether she and Mistress Milton ever met, and what they said to and thought of each other. For the present, Mary Milton dwelt with Christopher's mother-in-law, and about September joined her husband in the more commodious house in the Barbican whither he was migrating at the time of the reconciliation. It stood till 1864, when it was destroyed by a railway company.

Soon after removing to the Barbican, Milton set his Muse's house in order, by publishing such poems, English and Latin, as he deemed worthy of presentation. It is a remarkable proof both of his habitual cunctativeness and his dependence on the suggestions of others, that he should so long have allowed such pieces to remain uncollected, and should only have collected them at all at the solicitation of the publisher, Humphrey Moseley. The transaction is most honourable to the latter. "It is not any private respect of gain," he affirms; "for the slightest pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of learnedest men, but it is the love I bear to our own language.... I know not thy palate, how it relishes such dainties, nor how harmonious thy soul is: perhaps more trivial airs may please better.... Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing forth into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote." The volume was published on Jan. 2, 1646. It is divided into two parts, with separate title-pages, the first containing the English poems, the second the Latin. They were probably sold separately. The frontispiece, engraved by Marshall, is unfortunately a sour and silly countenance, passing as Milton's, but against which he protests in four lines of Greek appended, which the worthy Marshall seems to have engraved without understanding them. The British Museum copy in the King's Library contains an additional MS. poem of considerable merit, in a hand which some have thought like Milton's, but few now believe it to have been either written or transcribed by him. It is dated 1647, but for which circumstance one might indulge the fancy that the copy had been a gift from him to some Italian friend, for the binding is Italian, and the book must have seen Italy.

Milton was now to learn what he afterwards taught, that "they also serve who only stand and wait." He had challenged obloquy in vindication of what he deemed right: the cross actually laid upon him was to fill his house with inimical and uncongenial dependants on his bounty and protection. The overthrow of the Royalist cause was utterly ruinous to the Powells. All went to wreck on the surrender of Oxford in June, 1646. The family estate was only saved from sequestration by a friendly neighbour taking possession of it under cover of his rights as creditor; the family mansion was occupied by the Parliamentarians, and the household stuff sold to the harpies that followed in their train; the "malignant's" timber went to rebuild the good town of Banbury. It was impossible for the Powells to remain in Oxfordshire, and Milton opened his doors to them as freely as though there had never been any estrangement. Father, mother, several sons and daughters came to dwell in a house already full of pupils, with what inconvenience from want of room and disquiet from clashing opinions may be conjectured. "Those whom the mere necessity of neighbourhood, or something else of a useless kind," he says to Dati, "has closely conjoined with me, whether by accident or the tie of law, they are the persons who sit daily in my company, weary me, nay, by heaven, almost plague me to death whenever they are jointly in the humour for it." Milton's readiness to receive the mother, deemed the chief instigator of her daughter's "frowardness," may have been partly due to the situation of the latter, who gave him a daughter on July 29, 1646. In January, 1647, Mr. Powell died, leaving his affairs in dire confusion. Two months afterwards Milton's father followed him at the age of eighty-four, partly cognisant, we will hope, of the gift he had bestowed on his country in his son. It was probably owing to the consequent improvement in Milton's circumstances that he about this time gave up his pupils, except his nephews, and removed to a smaller house in High Holborn, not since identified; the Powells also removing to another dwelling. "No one," he says of himself at this period, "ever saw me going about, no one ever saw me asking anything among my friends, or stationed at the doors of the Court with a petitioner's face. I kept myself almost entirely at home, managing on my own resources, though in this civil tumult they were often in great part kept from me, and contriving, though burdened with taxes in the main rather oppressive, to lead my frugal life." The traces of his literary activity at this time are few—preparations for a history of England, published long afterwards, an ode, a sonnet, correspondence with Dati, some not very successful versions of the Psalms. He seems to have been partly engaged in preparing the treatise on Christian Doctrine, which was fortunately reserved for a serener day. In undertaking it at this period he was missing a great opportunity. He might have been the apostle of toleration in England, as Roger Williams had been in America. The moment was most favourable. Presbyterianism had got itself established, but could not pretend to represent the majority of the nation. It had been branded by Milton himself in the memorable line: "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." The Independents were for toleration, the Episcopalians had been for the time humbled by adversity, the best minds in the nation, including Cromwell, were Seekers or Latitude men, or sceptics. Here was invitation enough for a work as much greater than the "Areopagitica" as the principle of freedom of thought is greater than the most august particular application of it. Milton might have added the better half of Locke's fame to his own, and compelled the French philosophers to sit at the feet of a Bible-loving Englishman. But unfortunately no external impulse stirred him to action, as in the case of the "Areopagitica." Presbyterians growled at him occasionally; they did not fine or imprison him, or put him out of the synagogue. Thus his pen slumbered, and we are in danger of forgetting that he was, in the ordinary sense of that much-abused term, no Puritan, but a most free and independent thinker, the vast sweep of whose thought happened to coincide for a while with the narrow orbit of so-called Puritanism.

Impulse to work of another sort was at hand. On January 30, 1649, Charles the First's head rolled on the scaffold. On February 13th was published a pamphlet from Milton's hand, which cannot have been begun before the King's trial, another proof of his feverish impetuosity when possessed by an overmastering idea. The title propounds two theses with very different titles to acceptance. "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death: if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it." That kings have no more immunity than others from the consequences of evil doing is a proposition which seemed monstrous to many in Milton's day, but which will command general assent in ours. But to lay it down that "any who has the power" may interpose to correct what he chooses to consider the laches of the lawful magistrate is to hand over the administration of the law to Judge Lynch—rather too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of bringing even a bad king to the block. Milton's sneer at "vulgar and irrational men, contesting for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of iniquity, their gibberish laws," is equivalent to an admission that his party had put itself beyond the pale of the law. The only defence would be to show that it had acted under great and overwhelming necessity; but this he takes for granted, though knowing well that it was denied by more than half the nation. His argument, therefore, is inconclusive, except that portion of it which modern opinion allows to pass without argument. He seems indeed to admit in his "Defensio Secunda" that the tract was written less to vindicate the King's execution than to saddle the protesting Presbyterians with a share of the responsibility. The diction, though robust and spirited, is not his best, and, on the whole, the most admirable feature in his pamphlet is his courage in writing it. He was to speak yet again on this theme as the mouthpiece of the Commonwealth, thus earning honour and reward; it was well to have shown first that he did not need this incentive to expose himself to Royalist vengeance, but had prompting enough in the intensity of his private convictions.

He had flung himself into a perilous breach. "Eikon Basilike"—most timely of manifestoes—had been published only four days before the appearance of "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." Between its literary seduction and the horror generally excited by the King's execution, the tide of public opinion was turning fast. Milton no doubt felt that no claim upon him could be equal to that which the State had a right to prefer. He accepted the office of "Secretary for Foreign Tongues" to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, a delegation from the Council of State of forty-one members, by which the country was at that time governed. Vane, Whitelocke, and Marten were among the members of the committee. The specified duties of the post were the preparation and translation of despatches from and to foreign governments. These were always in Latin,—the Council, says that sturdy Briton, Edward Phillips, "scorning to carry on their affairs in the wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French." But it must have been understood that Milton's pen would also be at the service of the Government outside the narrow range of official correspondence. The salary was handsome for the time—L288, equivalent to about L900 of our money. It was an honourable post, on the manner of whose discharge the credit of England abroad somewhat depended; the foreign chanceries were full of accomplished Latinists, and when Blake's cannon was not to be the mouthpiece, the Commonwealth's message needed a silver trumpet. It was also as likely as any employment to make a scholar a statesman. If in some respects it opposed new obstacles to the fulfilment of Milton's aspirations as a poet, he might still feel that it would help him to the experience which he had declared to be essential: "He who would not be frustrate 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 within himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." Up to this time Milton's experience of public affairs had been slight; he does not seem to have enjoyed the intimate acquaintance of any man then active in the making of history. In our day he would probably have entered Parliament, but that was impossible under a dispensation which allowed a Parliament to sit till a Protector turned it out of doors. He was, therefore, only acting upon his own theory, and he seems to us to have been acting wisely as well as courageously, when he consented to become a humble but necessary wheel of the machinery of administration, the Orpheus among the Argonauts of the Commonwealth.



CHAPTER V.

Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649. He removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which but a fragment now remains. His first performance was in some measure a false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg, clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded by that body that the English envoy never formally delivered it. An epistle to the Dutch on the murder of the Commonwealth's ambassador, Dorislaus, by refugee Cavaliers, had a better reception; and Milton was soon engaged in drafting, not merely translating, a State paper designed for the press—observations on the peace concluded by Ormond, the Royalist commander in Ireland, with the confederated Catholics in that country, and on the protest against the execution of Charles I. volunteered by the Presbytery of Belfast. The commentary was published in May, along with the documents. It is a spirited manifesto, cogent in enforcing the necessity of the campaign about to be undertaken by Cromwell. Ireland had at the moment exactly as many factions as provinces; and never, perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter confusion. Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be "an eagle towering in his pride of place," but he may seem to have degenerated into the "mousing owl" when he pounced upon newswriters and ferreted unlicensed pamphlets for sedition. True, there was nothing in this occupation formally inconsistent with anything he had written in the "Areopagitica"; yet one wishes that the Council of State had provided otherwise for this particular department of the public service. Nothing but a sense of duty can have reconciled him to a task so invidious; and there is some evidence of what might well have been believed without evidence—that he mitigated the severity of the censorship as far as in him lay. He was not to want for better occupation, for the Council of State was about to devolve upon him the charge of answering the great Royalist manifesto, "Eikon Basilike."

The controversy respecting the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" is a remarkable instance of the degree in which literary judgment may be biassed by political prepossession. In the absence of other testimony one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according as his verdict inclined to Charles I. or Bishop Gauden. In fact, it is no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely different kinds of testimony. The external evidence of Charles's authorship is worth nothing. It is almost confined to the assertions, forty years after the publication, of a few aged Cavaliers, who were all morally certain that Charles wrote the book, and to whom a fiction supplying the accidental lack of external testimony would have seemed laudable and pious. The only wonder is that such legends are not far more numerous. On the other hand, the internal evidence seems at first sight to make for the king. The style is not dissimilar to that of the reputed royal author; the sentiments are such as would have well become him; the assumed character is supported throughout with consistency; and there are none of the slips which a fabricator might have been thought hardly able to avoid. The supposed personator of the King was unquestionably an unprincipled time-server. Is it not an axiom that a worthy book can only proceed from a worthy mind?

"If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble!"

Against such considerations we have to set the stubborn facts that Bishop Gauden did actually claim the authorship that he preferred his claim to the very persons who had the strongest interest in exploding it; that he invoked the testimony of those who must have known the truth, and could most easily have crushed the lie; that he convinced not only Clarendon, but Charles's own children, and received a substantial reward. In the face of these undeniable facts, the numerous circumstances used with skill and ingenuity by Dr. Wordsworth to invalidate his claim, are of little weight. The stronger the apparent objections, the more certain that the proofs in Gauden's hands must have been overwhelming, and the greater the presumption that he was merely urging what had always been known to several persons about the late king. When, with this conviction, we recur to the "Eikon," and examine it in connection with Gauden's acknowledged writings, the internal testimony against him no longer seems so absolutely conclusive. Gauden's style is by no means so bad as Hume represents it. Many remarkable parallels between it and the diction of the "Eikon" have been pointed out by Todd, and the most searching modern investigator, Doble. We may also discover one marked intellectual resemblance. Nothing is more characteristic in the "Eikon" than its indirectness. The writer is full of qualifications, limitations, allowances; he fences and guards himself, and seems always on the point of taking back what he has said, but never does; and veers and tacks, tacks and veers, until he has worked himself into port. The like peculiarity is very observable in Gauden, especially in his once-popular "Companion to the Altar." There is also a strong internal argument against Charles's authorship in the preponderance of the theological element. That this should occupy an important place in the writings of a martyr for the Church of England was certainly to be expected, but the theology of the "Eikon" has an unmistakably professional flavour. Let any man read it with an unbiassed mind, and then say whether he has been listening to a king or to a chaplain. "One of us," pithily comments Archbishop Herring. "I write rather like a divine than a prince," the assumed author acknowledges, or is made to acknowledge. When to these considerations is added that any scrap of the "Eikon" in the King's handwriting would have been treasured as an inestimable relic, and that no scrap was ever produced, there can be little question as to the verdict of criticism. For all practical purposes, nevertheless, the "Eikon" in Milton's time was the King's book, for everybody thought it so. Milton hints some vague suspicions, but refrains from impugning it seriously, and indeed the defenders of its authenticity will be quite justified in asserting that if Gauden had been dumb, Criticism would have been blind.

According to Selden's biographer, Cromwell was at first anxious that the "Eikon" should be answered by that consummate jurist, and it was only on his declining the task that it came into Milton's hands. That he also would have declined it but for his official position may be inferred from his own words: "I take it on me as a work assigned, rather than by me chosen or affected." His distaste may further be gauged by his tardiness; while "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" had been written in little more than a week, his "Eikonoklastes," a reply to a book published in February, did not appear until October 6th. His reluctance may be partly explained by his feeling that "to descant on the misfortunes of a person fallen from so high a dignity, who hath also paid his final debt both to nature and his faults, is neither of itself a thing commendable, nor the intention of this discourse." The intention it may not have been, but it was necessarily the performance. The scheme of the "Eikon" required the respondent to take up the case article by article, a thing impossible to be done without abundant "descant" of the kind which Milton deprecates. He is compelled to fight the adversary on the latter's chosen ground, and the eloquence which might have swept all before it in a discussion of general principles is frittered away in tiresome wrangling over a multitude of minutiae. His vigorous blows avail but little against the impalpable ideal with which he is contending; his arguments might frequently convince a court of justice, but could do nothing to dispel the sorcery which enthralled the popular imagination. Milton's "Eikonoklastes" had only three editions, including a translation, within the year; the "Eikon Basilike" is said to have had fifty.

Milton's reputation as a political controversialist, however, was not to rest upon "Eikonoklastes," or to be determined by a merely English public. The Royalists had felt the necessity of appealing to the general verdict of Europe, and had entrusted their cause to the most eminent classical scholar of the age. To us the idea of commissioning a political manifesto from a philologist seems eccentric; but erudition and the erudite were never so highly prized as in the seventeenth century. Men's minds were still enchained by authority, and the precedents of Agis, or Brutus, or Nehemiah, weighed like dicta of Solomon or Justinian. The man of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew learning was, therefore, a person of much greater consequence than he is now, and so much the more if he enjoyed a high reputation and wrote good Latin. All these qualifications were combined in Claudius Salmasius, a Frenchman, who had laid scholars under an eternal obligation by his discovery of the Palatine MS. of the Anthology at Heidelberg, and who, having embraced Protestantism from conviction, lived in splendid style at Leyden, where the mere light of his countenance—for he did not teach—was valued by the University at three thousand livres a year. It seems marvellous that a man should become dictator of the republic of letters by editing "Solinus" and "The Augustan History," however ably; but an achievement like this, not a "Paradise Lost" or a "Werther" was the sic itur ad astra of the time. On the strength of such Salmasius had pronounced ex cathedra on a multiplicity of topics, from episcopacy to hair-powder, and there was no bishop and no perfumer between the Black Sea and the Irish who would not rather have the scholar for him than against him. A man, too, to be named with respect; no mere annotator, but a most sagacious critic; peevish, it might be, but had he not seven grievous disorders at once? One who had shown such independence and integrity in various transactions of his life, that we may be very sure that Charles II.'s hundred Jacobuses, if ever given or even promised, were the very least of the inducements that called him into the field against the executioners of Charles I.

Whether, however, the hundred Jacobuses were forthcoming or not, Salmasius's undertaking was none the less a commission from Charles II., and the circumstance put him into a false position, and increased the difficulty of his task. Human feeling is not easily reconciled to the execution of a bad magistrate, unless he has also been a bad man. Charles I. was by no means a bad man, only a mistaken one. He had been guilty of many usurpations and much perfidy: but he had honestly believed his usurpations within the limits of his prerogative; and his breaches of faith were committed against insurgents whom he regarded as seamen look upon pirates, or shepherds upon wolves. Salmasius, however, pleading by commission from Charles's son, can urge no such mitigating plea. He is compelled to maintain the inviolability even of wicked sovereigns, and spends two-thirds of his treatise in supporting a proposition to state which is to refute it in the nineteenth century. In the latter part he is on stronger ground. Charles had unquestionably been tried and condemned by a tribunal destitute of legal authority, and executed contrary to the wish and will of the great majority of his subjects. But this was a theme for an Englishman to handle. Salmasius cannot think himself into it, nor had he sufficient imagination to be inspired by Charles as Burke (who, nevertheless, has borrowed from him) was to be inspired by Marie Antoinette.

His book—entitled "Defensio Regia pro Carolo I."—appeared in October or November, 1649. On January 8, 1650, it was ordered by the Council of State "that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the Book of Salmasius, and when he hath done it bring it to the Council." There were many reasons why he should be entrusted with this commission, and only one why he should not; but one which would have seemed conclusive to most men. His sight had long been failing. He had already lost the use of one eye, and was warned that if he imposed this additional strain upon his sight, that of the other would follow. He had seen the greatest astronomer of the age condemned to inactivity and helplessness, and could measure his own by the misery of Galileo. He calmly accepted his duty along with its penalty, without complaint or reluctance. If he could have performed his task in the spirit with which he undertook it, he would have produced a work more sublime than "Paradise Lost."

This, of course, was not possible. The efficiency of a controversialist in the seventeenth century was almost estimated in the ratio of his scurrility, especially when he wrote Latin. From this point of view Milton had got his opponent at a tremendous disadvantage. With the best will in the world, Salmasius had come short in personal abuse, for, as the initiator of the dispute, he had no personal antagonist. In denouncing the general herd of regicides and parricides he had hurt nobody in particular, while concentrating all Milton's lightnings on his own unlucky head. They seared and scathed a literary dictator whom jealous enemies had long sighed to behold insulted and humiliated, while surprise equalled delight at seeing the blow dealt from a quarter so utterly unexpected. There is no comparison between the invective of Milton and of Salmasius; not so much from Milton's superiority as a controversialist, though this is very evident, as because he writes under the inspiration of a true passion. His scorn of the presumptuous intermeddler who has dared to libel the people of England is ten thousand times more real than Salmasius's official indignation at the execution of Charles. His contempt for Salmasius's pedantry is quite genuine; and he revels in ecstasies of savage glee when taunting the apologist of tyranny with his own notorious subjection to a tyrannical wife. But the reviler in Milton is too far ahead of the reasoner. He seems to set more store by his personalities than by his principles. On the question of the legality of Charles's execution he has indeed little argument to offer; and his views on the wider question of the general responsibility of kings, sound and noble in themselves, suffer from the mass of irrelevant quotation with which it was in that age necessary to prop them up. The great success of his reply ("Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio") arose mainly from the general satisfaction that Salmasius should at length have met with his match. The book, published in or about March, 1651, instantly won over European public opinion, so far as the question was a literary one. Every distinguished foreigner then resident in London, Milton says, either called upon him to congratulate him, or took the opportunity of a casual meeting. By May, says Heinsius, five editions were printed or printing in Holland, and two translations. "I had expected nothing of such quality from the Englishman," writes Vossius. The Diet of Ratisbon ordered "that all the books of Miltonius should be searched for and confiscated." Parisian magistrates burned it on their own responsibility. Salmasius himself was then at Stockholm, where Queen Christina, who did not, like Catherine II., recognize the necessity of "standing by her order," could not help letting him see that she regarded Milton as the victor. Vexation, some thought, contributed as much as climate to determine his return to Holland. He died in September, 1653, at Spa, as, remote from books, but making his memory his library, he was penning his answer. This unfinished production, edited by his son, appeared after the Restoration, when the very embers of the controversy had grown cold, and the palm of literary victory had been irrevocably adjudged to Milton.

Milton could hear the plaudits, he could not see the wreaths. The total loss of his sight may be dated from March, 1652, a year after the publication of his reply. It was then necessary to provide him with an assistant—that no change should have been made in his position or salary shows either the value attached to his services or the feeling that special consideration was due to one who had voluntarily given his eyes for his country. "The choice lay before me," he writes, "between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight; in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from heaven." In September, 1654, he described the symptoms of his infirmity to his friend, the Greek Philaras, who had flattered him with hopes of cure from the dexterity of the French oculist Thevenot. He tells him how his sight began to fail about ten years before; how in the morning he felt his eyes shrinking from the effort to read anything; how the light of a candle appeared like a spectrum of various colours; how, little by little, darkness crept over the left eye; and objects beheld by the right seemed to waver to and fro; how this was accompanied by a kind of dizziness and heaviness which weighed upon him throughout the afternoon. "Yet the darkness which is perpetually before me seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish, and such that, when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small chink, a certain little trifle of light." Elsewhere he says that his eyes are not disfigured:

"Clear To outward view of blemish or of spot."

These symptoms have been pronounced to resemble those of glaucoma. Milton himself, in "Paradise Lost," hesitates between amaurosis ("drop serene") and cataract ("suffusion"). Nothing is said of his having been recommended to use glasses or other precautionary contrivances. Cheselden was not yet, and the oculist's art was probably not well understood. The sufferer himself, while not repining or despairing of medical assistance, evidently has little hope from it. "Whatever ray of hope may be for me from your famous physician, all the same, as in a case quite incurable, I prepare and compose myself accordingly. My darkness hitherto, by the singular kindness of God, amid rest and studies, and the voices and greetings of friends, has been much easier to bear than that deathly one. But if, as is written, 'Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,' what should prevent me from resting in the belief that eyesight lies not in eyes alone, but enough for all purposes in God's leading and providence? Verily, while only He looks out for me, and provides for me, as He doth; teaching me and leading me forth with His hand through my whole life, I shall willingly, since it hath seemed good to Him, have given my eyes their long holiday. And to you I now bid farewell, with a mind not less brave and steadfast than if I were Lynceus himself for keenness of sight." Religion and philosophy, of which no brighter example was ever given, did not, in this sore trial, disdain the support of a manly pride:—

"What supports me, dost thou ask? The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied In liberty's defence, my noble task, O! which all Europe rings from side to side; This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask, Content though blind, had I no better guide."

Noble words, and Milton might well triumph in his victory in the field of intellectual combat. But if his pamphlet could have put Charles the First's head on again, then, and then only, could it have been of real political service to his party.

Milton's loss of sight was accompanied by domestic sorrow, though perhaps not felt with special acuteness. Since the birth of his eldest daughter in 1646, his wife had given him three more children—a daughter, born in October, 1648; a son, born in March, 1650, who died shortly afterwards; and another daughter, born in May, 1652. The birth of this child may have been connected with the death of the mother in the same or the following month. The household had apparently been peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was given her to understand. She must have become considerably emancipated from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, much as one pities her probably wasted life, her disappearance from the scene, if tragic in her ignorance to the last of the destiny that might have been hers, is not unaccompanied with a sense of relief. Great, nevertheless, must have been the blind poet's embarrassment as the father of three little daughters. Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the evil yet to come. He was then living in Petty France, Westminster, having been obliged, either by the necessities of his health or of the public service, to give up his apartments in Whitehall. The house stood till 1877, a forlorn tenement in these latter years; far different, probably, when the neighbourhood was fashionable and the back windows looked on St. James's Park. It is associated with other celebrated names, having been owned by Bentham and occupied by Hazlitt.

The controversy with Salmasius had an epilogue, chiefly memorable in so far as it occasioned Milton to indulge in autobiography, and to record his estimate of some of the heroes of the Commonwealth. Among various replies to his "Defensio," not deserving of notice here, appeared one of especial acrimony, "Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum," published about August, 1652. It was a prodigy of scurrilous invective, bettering the bad example which Milton had set (but which hundreds in that age had set him) of ridiculing Salmasius's foibles when he should have been answering his arguments. Having been in Italy, he was taxed with Italian vices: he would have been accused of cannibalism had his path lain towards the Caribee Islands. A fulsome dedication to Salmasius tended to fix the suspicion of authorship upon Alexander Morus, a Frenchman of Scotch extraction, Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, and pastor of the Walloon Church, then an inmate of Salmasius's house, who actually had written the dedication and corrected the proof. The real author, however, was Peter Du Moulin, ex-rector of Wheldrake, in Yorkshire. The dedicatory ink was hardly dry ere Morus was involved in a desperate quarrel with Salmasius through the latter's imperious wife, who accused Morus of having been over-attentive to her English waiting-maid, whose patronymic is lost to history under the Latinized form of Bontia. Failing to make Morus marry the damsel, she sought to deprive him of his ecclesiastical and professorial dignities. The correspondence of Heinsius and Vossius shows what intense amusement the affair occasioned to such among the scholars of the period as were unkindly affected towards Salmasius. Morus was ultimately acquitted, but his position in Holland had become uncomfortable, and he was glad to accept an invitation from the congregation at Charenton, celebrated for its lunatics. Understanding, meanwhile, that Milton was preparing a reply, and being naturally unwilling to brave invective in the cause of a book which he had not written, and of a patron who had cast him off, he protested his innocence of the authorship, and sought to ward off the coming storm by every means short of disclosing the writer. Milton, however, esteeming his Latin of much more importance than Morus's character, and justly considering with Voltaire, "que cet Habacuc etait capable de tout," persisted in exhibiting himself as the blind Cyclop dealing blows amiss. His reply appeared in May, 1654, and a rejoinder by Morus produced a final retort in August, 1655. Both are full of personalities, including a spirited description of the scratching of Morus's face by the injured Bontia. These may sink into oblivion, while we may be grateful for the occasion which led Milton to express himself with such fortitude and dignity on his affliction and its alleviations:—"Let the calumniators of God's judgments cease to revile me, and to forge their superstitious dreams about me. Let them be assured that I neither regret my lot nor am ashamed of it, that I remain unmoved and fixed in my opinion, that I neither believe nor feel myself an object of God's anger, but actually experience and acknowledge His fatherly mercy and kindness to me in all matters of greatest moment—especially in that I am able, through His consolation and His strengthening of my spirit, to acquiesce in His divine will, thinking oftener of what He has bestowed upon me than of what He has withheld: finally, that I would not exchange the consciousness of what I have done with that of any deed of theirs, however righteous, or part with my always pleasant and tranquil recollection of the same." He adds that his friends cherish him, study his wants, favour him with their society more assiduously even than before, and that the Commonwealth treats him with as much honour as if, according to the customs of the Athenians of old, it had decreed him public support for his life in the Prytaneum.