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 minutiæ. 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 Æsculapius 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 était
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.
Milton's tract is also interesting for its pen-portraits of some of the
worthies of the Commonwealth, and its indications of his own views on
the politics of his troubled times. Bradshaw is eulogized with great
elegance and equal truth for his manly courage and strict consistency.
"Always equal to himself, and like a consul re-elected for another year,
so that you would say he not only judged the King from his tribunal, but
is judging him all his life." This was matter of notoriety: one may hope
that Milton had equal reason for his praise of Bradshaw's affability,
munificence, and placability. The comparison of Fairfax to the elder
Scipio Africanus is more accurate than is always or often the case with
historical parallels, and by a dexterous turn, surprising if we have
forgotten the scholar in the controversialist, Fairfax's failure in
statesmanship, as Milton deemed it, is not only extenuated, but is made
to usher in the more commanding personality of Cromwell. Cæsar, says
Johnson, had not more elegant flattery than Cromwell received from
Milton: nor Augustus, he might have added, encomiums more heartfelt and
sincere. Milton was one of the innumerable proofs that a man may be very
much of a Republican without being anything of a Liberal. He was as firm
a believer in right divine as any Cavalier, save that in his view such
right was vested in the worthiest; that is, practically, the strongest.
An admirable doctrine for 1653,--how unfit for 1660 remained to be
discovered by him. Under its influence he had successively swallowed
Pride's Purge, the execution of Charles I. by a self-constituted
tribunal, and Cromwell's expulsion of the scanty remnant of what had
once seemed the more than Roman senate of 1641. There is great reason
to believe with Professor Masson that a tract vindicating this violence
was actually taken down from his lips. It is impossible to say that he
was wrong. Cromwell really was standing between England and anarchy. But
Milton might have been expected to manifest some compunction at the
disappointment of his own brilliant hopes, and some alarm at the
condition of the vessel of the State reduced to her last plank.
Authority actually had come into the hands of the kingliest man in
England, valiant and prudent, magnanimous and merciful. But Cromwell's
life was precarious, and what after Cromwell? Was the ancient
constitution, with its halo of antiquity, its settled methods, and its
substantial safeguards, wisely exchanged for one life, already the mark
for a thousand bullets? Milton did not reflect, or he kept his
reflections to himself. The one point on which he does seem nervous is
lest his hero should call himself what he is. The name of Protector even
is a stumbling-block, though one _can_ get over it. "You have, by
assuming a title likest that of Father of your Country, allowed yourself
to be, one cannot say elevated, but rather brought down so many stages
from your real sublimity, and as it were forced into rank for the public
convenience." But there must be no question of a higher title:--
"You have, in your far higher majesty, scorned the title of King.
And surely with justice: for if in your present greatness you were
to be taken with that name which you were able when a private man
to reduce and bring to nothing, it would be almost as if, when by
the help of the true God you had subdued some idolatrous nation,
you were to worship the gods you had yourself overcome."
This warning, occurring in the midst of a magnificent panegyric,
sufficiently vindicates Milton against the charge of servile flattery.
The frank advice which he gives Cromwell on questions of policy is less
conclusive evidence: for, except on the point of disestablishment, it
was such as Cromwell had already given himself. Professor Masson's
excellent summary of it may be further condensed thus--1. Reliance on a
council of well-selected associates. 2. Absolute voluntaryism in
religion. 3. Legislation not to be meddlesome or over-puritanical. 4.
University and scholastic endowments to be made the rewards of approved
merit. 5. Entire liberty of publication at the risk of the publisher. 6.
Constant inclination towards the generous view of things. The advice of
an enthusiastic idealist, Puritan by the accident of his times, but
whose true affinities were with Mill and Shelley and Rousseau.
An interesting question arises in connection with Milton's official
duties: had he any real influence on the counsels of Government? or was
he a mere secretary? It would be pleasing to conceive of him as Vizier
to the only Englishman of the day whose greatness can be compared with
his; to imagine him playing Aristotle to Cromwell's Alexander. We have
seen him freely tendering Cromwell what might have been unpalatable
advice, and learn from Du Moulin's lampoon that he was accused of having
behaved to the Protector with something of dictatorial rudeness. But it
seems impossible to point to any direct influence of his mind in the
administration; and his own department of Foreign Affairs was neither
one which he was peculiarly qualified to direct, nor one in which he was
likely to differ from the ruling powers. "A spirited foreign policy" was
then the motto of all the leading men of England. Before Milton's loss
of sight his duties included attendance upon foreign envoys on State
occasions, of which he must afterwards have been to a considerable
extent relieved. The collection of his official correspondence published
in 1676 is less remarkable for the quantity of work than the quality.
The letters are not very numerous, but are mostly written on occasions
requiring a choice dignity of expression. "The uniformly Miltonic style
of the greater letters," says Professor Masson, "utterly precludes the
idea that Milton was only the translator of drafts furnished him." We
seem to see him sitting down to dictate, weighing out the fine gold of
his Latin sentences to the stately accompaniment, it may be, of his
chamber-organ. War is declared against the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador
is reproved for his protraction of business; the Grand Duke of Tuscany
is warmly thanked for protecting English ships in the harbour of
Leghorn; the French king is admonished to indemnify English merchants
for wrongful seizure; the Protestant Swiss cantons are encouraged to
fight for their religion; the King of Sweden is felicitated on the birth
of a son and heir, and on the Treaty of Roeskilde; the King of Portugal
is pressed to use more diligence in investigating the attempted
assassination of the English minister; an ambassador is accredited to
Russia; Mazarin is congratulated on the capture of Dunkirk. Of all his
letters, none can have stirred Milton's personal feelings so deeply as
the epistle of remonstrance to the Duke of Savoy on the atrocious
massacre of the Vaudois Protestants (1655); but the document is
dignified and measured in tone. His emotion found relief in his greatest
sonnet; blending, as Wordsworth implies, trumpet notes with his habitual
organ-music; the most memorable example in our language of the fire and
passion which may inspire a poetical form which some have deemed only
fit to celebrate a "mistress's eyebrow"[4]:--
"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Forget not: in Thy book record their groans
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learned Thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
This is what Johnson calls "carving heads upon cherry-stones!"
Milton's calamity had, of course, required special assistance. He had
first had Weckherlin as coadjutor, then Philip Meadows, finally Andrew
Marvell. His emoluments had been reduced, in April, 1655, from £288 to
£150 a year, but the diminished allowance was made perpetual instead of
annual, and seems to have been intended as a retiring pension. He
nevertheless continued to work, drawing salary at the rate of £200 a
year, and his pen was never more active than during the last months of
Oliver's Protectorate. He continued to serve under Richard, writing
eleven letters between September, 1658, and February, 1659. With two
letters for the restored Parliament after Richard's abdication, written
in May, 1659, Milton, though his formal supersession was yet to come,
virtually bade adieu to the Civil Service:--
"God doth not need
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best: His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."
The principal domestic events in Milton's life, meanwhile, had been his
marriage with Katherine, daughter of an unidentified Captain Woodcock,
in November, 1656; and the successive loss of her and an infant daughter
in February and March, 1658. It is probable that Milton literally never
saw his wife, whose worth and the consequent happiness of the fifteen
months of their too brief union, are sufficiently attested by his sonnet
on the dream in which he fancied her restored to him, with the striking
conclusion, "Day brought back my night." Of his daughters at the time,
much may be conjectured, but nothing is known; his nephews, whose
education had cost him such anxious care, though not undutiful in their
personal relations with him, were sources of uneasiness from their own
misadventures, and might have been even more so as sinister omens of the
ways in which the rising generation was to walk. The fruits of their
bringing up upon the egregious Lucretius and Manilius were apparently
"Satyr against Hypocrites," _i.e._, Puritans; "Mysteries of Love and
Eloquence;" "Sportive Wit or Muses' Merriment," which last brought the
Council down upon John Phillips as a propagator of immorality. In his
nephews Milton might have seen, though we may be sure he did not see,
how fatally the austerity of the Commonwealth had alienated those who
would soon determine whether the Commonwealth should exist. Unconscious
of the "engine at the door," he could spend happy social hours with
attached friends--Andrew Marvell, his assistant in the secretaryship and
poetical satellite; his old pupil Cyriack Skinner; Lady Ranelagh;
Oldenburg, the Bremen envoy, destined to fame as Secretary of the Royal
Society and the correspondent of Spinoza; and a choice band of
"enthusiastic young men who accounted it a privilege to read to him, or
act as his amanuenses, or hear him talk." A sonnet inscribed to one of
these, Henry Lawrence, gives a pleasing picture of the British Homer in
his Horatian hour:--
"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise."