series of attacks upon episcopacy. These are written in a bitter
spirit of abusive hostility, for which we seek an insufficient apology
in his exclusive converse with a party which held bishops in
abhorrence, and in the low personal respectability of a large portion
of the episcopal bench.
At Whitsuntide, in the year 1643, having reached his thirty-fifth
year, he married Mary Powell, a young lady of good extraction in the
county of Oxford. In 1644 he wrote his "Areopagitica, a speech for the
liberty of unlicensed printing." This we are to consider in the light
of an oral pleading, or regular oration, for he tells us expressly
[Def. 2] that he wrote it "ad justae orationis modum." It is the finest
specimen extant of generous scorn. And very remarkable it is, that
Milton, who broke the ground on this great theme, has exhausted the
arguments which bear upon it. He opened the subject: he closed it. And
were there no other monument of his patriotism and his genius, for
this alone he would deserve to be held in perpetual veneration. In the
following year, 1645, was published the first collection of his early
poems; with his sanction, undoubtedly, but probably not upon his
suggestion. The times were too full of anxiety to allow of much
encouragement to polite literature; at no period were there fewer
readers of poetry. And for himself in particular, with the exception
of a few sonnets, it is probable that he composed as little as others
read, for the next ten years; so great were his political exertions.
[Illustration: Oliver Cromwell visits Milton.]
In 1649, soon after King Charles was put to death, the Council of
State resolved to use the Latin tongue in their international
concerns, instead of French. The office of Latin Secretary, therefore,
was created, and bestowed upon Milton. His hours from henceforth must
have been pretty well occupied by official labors. He was one of the
most prominent men in his party, a close friend to Cromwell, who
frequently visited him; and his advice was sought on all questions of
importance. Yet at this time he undertook a service to the state, more
invidious, and perhaps more perilous, than any in which his politics
ever involved him. On the very day of the king's execution, and even
below the scaffold, had been sold the earliest copies of a work
admirably fitted to shake the new government, and for the sensation
which it produced at the time, and the lasting controversy which it
has engendered, one of the most remarkable known in literary history.
This was the "Eikon Basilike, or Royal Image," professing to be a
series of meditations drawn up by the late king, on the leading events
from the very beginning of the national troubles. Appearing at this
critical moment, and co-operating with the strong reaction of the
public mind, already effected in the king's favor by his violent
death, this book produced an impression absolutely unparalleled in any
age. Fifty thousand copies, it is asserted, were sold within one year;
and a posthumous power was thus given to the king's name by one
little book, which exceeded, in alarm to his enemies, all that his
armies could accomplish in his lifetime. No remedy could meet the evil
in degree. As the only one that seemed fitted to it in kind, Milton
drew up a running commentary upon each separate head of the original;
and as that had been entitled the king's image, he gave to his own the
title of "Eikonoclastes, or Image-breaker," "the famous surname of
many Greek emperors, who broke all superstitious images in pieces."
This work was drawn up with the usual polemic ability of Milton; but
by its very plan and purpose it threw upon him difficulties which no
ability could meet. It had that inevitable disadvantage which belongs
to all ministerial and secondary works: the order and choice of topics
being all determined by the "Eikon," Milton, for the first time, wore
an air of constraint and servility, following a leader and obeying his
motions, as an engraver is controlled by the designer, or a translator
by the original. It is plain, from the pains he took to exonerate
himself from such a reproach, that he felt his task to be an invidious
one. The majesty of grief, expressing itself with Christian meekness,
and appealing as it were, from the grave to the consciences of men,
could not be violated without a recoil of angry feeling, ruinous to
the effect of any logic or rhetoric the most persuasive. The
affliction of a great prince, his solitude, his rigorous imprisonment,
his constancy to some purposes which were not selfish, his dignity of
demeanor in the midst of his heavy trials, and his truly Christian
fortitude in his final sufferings--these formed a rhetoric which made
its way to all hearts. Against such influences the eloquence of Greece
would have been vain. The nation was spellbound; and a majority of its
population neither could nor would be disenchanted.
Milton was ere long called to plead the same great cause of liberty
upon an ampler stage, and before a more equitable audience; to plead
not on behalf of his party against the Presbyterians and Royalists,
but on behalf of his country against the insults of a hired Frenchman,
and at the bar of the whole Christian world. Charles II. had resolved
to state his father's case to all Europe. This was natural, for very
few people on the continent knew what cause had brought his father to
the block, or why he himself was a vagrant exile from his throne. For
his advocate he selected Claudius Salmasius, and that was most
injudicious. Salmasius betrayed in his work entire ignorance of
everything, whether historical or constitutional, which belonged to
the case.
Having such an antagonist, inferior to him in all possible
qualifications, whether of nature, of art, of situation, it may be
supposed that Milton's triumph was absolute. He was now thoroughly
indemnified for the poor success of his "Eikonoclastes." In that
instance he had the mortification of knowing that all England read and
wept over the king's book, while his own reply was scarcely heard of.
But here the tables were turned; the very friends of Salmasius
complained that while his defence was rarely inquired after, the
answer to it, "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano," was the subject of
conversation from one end of Europe to the other. It was burned
publicly at Paris and Toulouse; and, by way of special annoyance to
Salmasius, who lived in Holland, was translated into Dutch.
In 1651 Milton's first wife died, after she had given him three
daughters. In that year he had already lost the use of one eye, and
was warned by the physicians that if he persisted in his task of
replying to Salmasius he would probably lose the other. The warning
was soon accomplished, according to the common account, in 1654; but
upon collating his letter to Phalaris the Athenian, with his own
pathetic statement in the "Defensio Secunda," we are disposed to date
it from 1652. In 1655 he resigned his office of secretary, in which he
had latterly been obliged to use an assistant.
Some time before this period he had married his second wife, Catherine
Woodcock, to whom it is supposed that he was very tenderly attached.
In 1657 she died in child-birth, together with her child, an event
which he has recorded in a very beautiful sonnet. This loss, added to
his blindness, must have made his home, for some years, desolate and
comfortless. Distress, indeed, was now gathering rapidly upon him. The
death of Cromwell, in the following year, and the imbecile character
of his eldest son, held out an invitation to the aspiring intriguers
of the day, which they were not slow to improve. It soon became too
evident to Milton's discernment that all things were hurrying forward
to restoration of the ejected family. Sensible of the risk, therefore,
and without much hope, but obeying the summons of his conscience, he
wrote a short tract on the ready and easy way to establish a free
commonwealth, concluding with these noble words: "Thus much I should
perhaps have said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to
trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, Oh
earth! earth! earth! to tell the very soil itself what her perverse
inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoken should happen
[which Thou suffer not, who didst create free, nor Thou next who didst
redeem us from being servants of men] to be the last words of our
expiring liberty."
What he feared was soon realized. In the spring of 1660 the
Restoration was accomplished amid the tumultuous rejoicings of the
people. It was certain that the vengeance of government would lose no
time in marking its victims; and some of them in anticipation had
already fled. Milton wisely withdrew from the first fury of the
persecution which now descended on his party. He secreted himself in
London, and when he returned to the public eye in the winter, found
himself no farther punished than by a general disqualification for the
public service, and the disgrace of a public burning inflicted on his
"Eikonoclastes," and his "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano."
Apparently it was not long after this time that he married his third
wife, Elizabeth Minshul, a lady of good family in Cheshire. In what
year he began the composition of his "Paradise Lost" is not certainly
known; some have supposed in 1658. There is better ground for fixing
the period of its close. During the plague of 1665 he retired to
Chalfont, and at that time Elwood, the Quaker, read the poem in a
finished state. The general interruption of business in London,
occasioned by the plague, and prolonged by the great fire in 1666,
explain why the publication was delayed for nearly two years. The
contract with the publisher is dated April 26, 1667, and in the course
of that year the "Paradise Lost" was published. Originally it was
printed in ten books; in the second and subsequent editions, the
seventh and tenth books were each divided into two. Milton received
only L5 in the first instance on the publication of the book. His
farther profits were regulated by the sale of the first three
editions. Each was to consist of fifteen hundred copies, and on the
second and third, respectively, reaching a sale of thirteen hundred,
he was to receive a farther sum of L5 for each, making a total of L15.
The receipt for the second sum of L5 is dated April 26, 1669.
In 1670 Milton published his "History of Britain," from the fabulous
period of the Norman Conquest. And in the same year he published in
one volume "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes." It has been
currently asserted that Milton preferred the "Paradise Regained" to
"Paradise Lost." This is not true; but he may have been justly
offended by the false principles on which some of his friends
maintained a reasonable opinion. The "Paradise Regained" is inferior
by the necessity of its subject and design. In the "Paradise Lost"
Milton had a field properly adapted to a poet's purposes; a few hints
in Scripture were expanded. Nothing was altered, nothing absolutely
added; but that which was told in the Scriptures in sum, or in its
last results, was developed into its whole succession of parts. Thus,
for instance, "There was war in heaven," furnished the matter for a
whole book. Now for the latter poem, which part of our Saviour's life
was it best to select as that in which paradise was regained? He might
have taken the crucifixion, and here he had a much wider field than in
the temptation; but then he was subject to this dilemma: if he
modified, or in any way altered, the full details of the four
evangelists, he shocked the religious sense of all Christians; yet,
the purposes of a poet would often require that he should so modify
them. With a fine sense of this difficulty, he chose the narrow basis
of the temptation in the wilderness, because there the whole had been
wrapped up in the Scriptures in a few brief abstractions. Thus "he
showed him all the kingdoms of the earth," is expanded, without
offence to the nicest religious scruple, into that matchless
succession of pictures, which bring before us the learned glories of
Athens, Rome in her civil grandeur, and the barbaric splendor of
Parthia. The actors being only two, the action of "Paradise Regained"
is unavoidably limited. But in respect of composition, it is, perhaps,
more elaborately finished than "Paradise Lost."
His subsequent works are not important enough to merit a separate
notice. His end was now approaching. In the summer of 1674 he was
still cheerful, and in the possession of his intellectual faculties.
But the vigor of his bodily constitution had been silently giving way,
through a long course of years, to the ravages of gout. It was at
length thoroughly undermined; and about November 10, 1674, he died
with tranquillity so profound that his attendants were unable to
determine the exact moment of his decease. He was buried, with unusual
marks of honor, in the chancel of St. Giles at Cripplegate.
JOHN BUNYAN
By JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
(1628-1688)
"Wouldst see
A man i' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?"
[Illustration: John Bunyan.]
Who has not read "Pilgrim's Progress?" Who has not, in childhood,
followed the wandering Christian on his way to the Celestial City? Who
has not laid at night his young head on the pillow, to paint on the
walls of darkness pictures of the Wicket Gate and the Archers, the
Hill of Difficulty, the Lions and Giants, Doubting Castle and Vanity
Fair, the sunny Delectable Mountains and the Shepherds, the Black
River and the wonderful glory beyond it; and at last fallen asleep, to
dream over the strange story, to hear the sweet welcomings of the
sisters at the House Beautiful, and the song of birds from the window
of that "upper chamber which opened toward the sunrising?" And who,
looking back to the green spots in his childish experiences, does not
bless the good Tinker of Elstow?
And who, that has reperused the story of the Pilgrim at a maturer age,
and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the
soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or
grateful encouragement? Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of
taste and feeling who does not with Cowper,
"Even in transitory life's late day,
Revere the man whose Pilgrim marks the road
And guides the Progress of the soul to God!"
We have just been reading, with no slight degree of interest, that
simple but wonderful piece of autobiography entitled "Grace Abounding
to the Chief of Sinners," from the pen of the author of "Pilgrim's
Progress." It is the record of a journey more terrible than that of
the ideal Pilgrim; "truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward
struggling of a spirit from the blackness of despair and blasphemy,
into the high, pure air of Hope and Faith. More earnest words were
never written. It is the entire unveiling of a human heart, the
tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of its sin. The voice which
speaks to us from these old pages seems not so much that of a denizen
of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the last solemn
confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as the
contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the
Spectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead
to self gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only
desirous to convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the
lesson of his inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and
dangers; and to give glory to Him who had mercifully led him through
all, and enabled him, like his own Pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley
of the Shallow of Death, the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the
terrors of Doubting Castle, and to reach the land of Beulah, where the
air was sweet and pleasant, and the birds sang and the flowers sprang
up around him, and the Shining Ones walked in the brightness of the
not distant heaven. In the introductory pages he says: "I could have
dipped into a style higher than this in which I have discoursed, and
could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do; but
I dared not. God did not play in tempting me; neither did I play when
I sunk, as it were, into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took
hold on me; wherefore, I may not play in relating of them, but be
plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was."
This book, as well as "Pilgrim's Progress," was written in Bedford
prison, and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of
his "children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by
his ministry." In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken
from them and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the
lions of the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of
Shemer and Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of
leopards, would look after them with fatherly care and desires for
their everlasting welfare. "If," said he, "you have sinned against
light; if you are tempted to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair;
if you think God fights against you, or if heaven is hidden from your
eyes, remember it was so with your father. But out of all the Lord
delivered me."
He gives no dates; he affords scarcely a clew to his localities; of
the man, as he worked and ate and drank and lodged, of his neighbors
and contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we
have only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It
is the story of his inward life only that he relates. What had time
and place to do with one who trembled always with the awful
consciousness of an immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately
the shadows of hell and the splendors of heaven? We gather, indeed,
from his record that he was not an idle on-looker in the time of
England's great struggle for freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament
in his young years, among the praying sworders and psalm-singing
pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts whom he has immortalized in his
allegory; but the only allusion which he makes to this portion of his
experience is by way of illustration of the goodness of God in
preserving him on occasions of peril.
He was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in 1628; and, to use his own
words, his "father's house was of that rank which is the meanest and
most despised of all the families of the land." His father was a
tinker, and the son followed the same calling, which necessarily
brought him into association with the lowest and most depraved classes
of English society. The estimation in which the tinker and his
occupation were held in the seventeenth century, may be learned from
the quaint and humorous description of Sir Thomas Overbury. "The
tinker," saith he, "is a movable, for he hath no abiding in one place;
he seems to be devout, for his life is a continual pilgrimage, and
sometimes, in humility, goes bare-foot, therein making necessity a
virtue; he is a gallant, for he carries all his wealth upon his back;
or a philosopher, for he bears all his substance with him. He is
always furnished with a song, to which his hammer, keeping tune,
proves that he was the first founder of the kettle drum; where the
best ale is, there stands his music most upon crotchets. The companion
of his travel is some foul, sunburnt quean, that, since the terrible
statute, has recanted gypsyism, and is turned pedlaress. So marches he
all over England, with his bag and baggage; his conversation is
irreprovable, for he is always mending. He observes truly the
statutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg. He is so strong an
enemy of idleness, that in mending one hole he would rather make three
than want work; and when he hath done, he throws the wallet of his
faults behind him. His tongue is very voluble, which, with canting,
proves him a linguist. He is entertained in every place, yet enters no
farther than the door, to avoid suspicion. To conclude, if he escape
Tyburn and Banbury, he dies a beggar."
Truly, but a poor beginning for a pious life was the youth of John
Bunyan. As might have been expected, he was a wild, reckless, swearing
boy, as his father doubtless was before him. "It was my delight," says
he, "to be taken captive by the devil. I had few equals, both for
cursing and swearing, lying and blaspheming." Yet, in his ignorance
and darkness, his powerful imagination early lent terror to the
reproaches of conscience. He was scared, even in childhood, with
dreams of hell and apparitions of devils. Troubled with fears of
eternal fire and the malignant demons who fed it in the regions of
despair, he says that he often wished either that there was no hell,
or that he had been born a devil himself, that he might be a tormentor
rather than one of the tormented.
At an early age he appears to have married. His wife was as poor as
himself, for he tells us that they had not so much as a dish or spoon
between them; but she brought with her two books on religious
subjects, the reading of which seems to have had no slight degree of
influence on his mind. He went to church regularly, adored the priest
and all things pertaining to his office, being, as he says, "overrun
with superstition." On one occasion a sermon was preached against the
breach of the Sabbath by sports or labor, which struck him at the
moment as especially designed for himself; but by the time he had
finished his dinner he was prepared to "shake it out of his mind, and
return to his sports and gaming."
One day, while standing in the street, cursing and blaspheming, he met
with a reproof which startled him. The woman of the house in front of
which the wicked young tinker was standing, herself, as he remarks, "a
very loose, ungodly wretch," protested that his horrible profanity
made her tremble; that he was the ungodliest fellow for swearing she
had ever heard, and able to spoil all the youth of the town who came
in his company. Struck by this wholly unexpected rebuke, he at once
abandoned the practice of swearing; although previously he tells us
that "he had never known how to speak, unless he put an oath before
and another behind."
His account of his entering upon the solemn duties of a preacher of
the gospel is at once curious and instructive. He deals honestly with
himself, exposing all his various moods, weaknesses, doubts, and
temptations. "I preached," he Says, "what I felt; for the terrors of
the law and the guilt of transgression lay heavy on my conscience. I
have been as one sent to them from the dead. I went, myself in chains,
to preach to them in chains, and carried that fire in my conscience
which I persuaded them to beware of." At times, when he stood up to
preach, blasphemies and evil doubts rushed into his mind, and he felt
a strong desire to utter them aloud to his congregation; and at other
seasons, when he was about to apply to the sinner some searching and
fearful text of scripture, he was tempted to withhold it, on the
ground that it condemned himself also; but, withstanding the
suggestion of the tempter, to use his own simile, he bowed himself,
like Samson, to condemn sin wherever he found it, though he brought
guilt and condemnation upon himself thereby, choosing rather to die
with the Philistines than to deny the truth.
Foreseeing the consequences of exposing himself to the operation of
the penal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply
afflicted at the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his
wife and children might be exposed by his death or imprisonment.
Nothing can be more touching than his simple and earnest words on this
point. They show how warm and deep were his human affections, and what
a tender and loving heart he laid as a sacrifice on the altar of duty.