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 £500, 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 mediæval 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, hyæna!" 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--£288,
equivalent to about £900 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.