"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction
leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and
sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall
like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity.
To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a
merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our
few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into
cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of
subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,--a good way to
continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural
successions they could not but act something remarkable in such
variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves,
make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others,
rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were
content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of
the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return
into their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity
was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet
consistencies, to attend the return of their souls. But all was
vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which
Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is
become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for
balsams."
Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne, and, like all great
poets, was a master of resounding prose. All that he wrote, both in
verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His _Samson Agonistes_
is perhaps the finest example of a play written in English after the
manner of the Greek dramas.
Milton wrote _The Areopagitica_ in defence of the liberty of
publishers and printers of books. And it stands for all time as the
first and greatest argument against interference with the freedom of
the press.
The Areopagitæ were judges at Athens in its more flourishing time, who
sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed sentences which were
delivered in public and commanded universal respect.
I will quote one of the finest passages in this great and splendid
utterance:--
"I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean
themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison,
and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not
absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them
to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they
do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of
that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively,
and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth;
and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
"And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good
almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book
kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye.
Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the
precious life-blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treasured up
on purpose to a life beyond life.
"'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is
no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss
of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the
worse.
"We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise against
the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life
of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it
extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the
execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but
strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason
itself; slays an immortality rather than a life."
This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper book.
A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something horribly
malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse than a
wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.
It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great from
generation to generation, and they are never likely to preserve a
wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such go to light fires and
encompass groceries.
Your loving old
G.P.
8