general confusion, which seems first to have moved the Stationers' Company to protest against the general violation of the laws controlling the press. Milton's tract on Divorce, published, like others of his before, without license or registry, had made a scandal even among those who regarded a breach of the Seventh Commandment as the only effective liniment for the sprains and bruises of matrimony. And indeed Milton had ventured very far in that dangerous direction where liberty is apt to shade imperceptibly into the warmer hues of license, though not so cynically far as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu afterwards went in her proposed septennial rearrangement. The Stationers seized the opportunity to denounce him twice by name, first to a committee of the Commons, and then to a committee of the Lords. Nothing seems to have come of their complaints, and indeed the attention of both houses must have been too much absorbed by more serious warfare to find time for engaging in this Battle of the Books. Nothing came of them, that is to say, on the part of Parliament, but on Milton's came the "Areopagitica.'

We are indebted to the painstaking and fruitful researches of Mr. Masson for a more precise knowledge of the particulars which bring this tract into closer and clearer relations with the personal interests of Milton, and some such nearer concern was always needed as a motive to give his prose, in which, as he says, he worked only with his left hand, its fullest energy and vivacity. Nor is this the case with his prose only. It is true also of his

verse in those passages which are the most characteristically his own. Perhaps he himself was dimly conscious of this, for in his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce "he says that "when points of difficulty are to be discussed, appertaining to the removal of unreasonable wrong and burthen from the perplexed life of our brothers, it is incredible how cold, how dull, and how far from all fellow-feeling we are without the spur of self-concernment." In the " 'Areopagitica," he was not only advocating certain general principles, but pleading his own cause. The largeness of the theme absolves the egotism of the motive, while this again adds fervor to the argument and penetration to the voice of the advocate. The "Areopagitica" is the best known and most generally liked of Milton's prose writings, because it is the only one concerning whose subject the world has more nearly come to an agreement. In all the others except the tract concerning Education, and the “History of Britain" in its first edition, there are embers of controversy which the ashes of two centuries cover but have not cooled.

There is a passage in his "Second Defence " where Milton speaks of the "Areopagitica" as one section of a tripartite scheme which he had thought out "to the promotion of real and substantial liberty." After giving a list of his writings on matters ecclesiastic, he says, "When, therefore, I perceived that there were three species of liberty without which scarcely any life can be completely led, religious, domestic or private, and civil, as I had already written concerning the first, and the

magistrates were strenuously active concerning the third, I took to myself the second or domestic. And, as this seemed tripartite, if marriage, if the education of children were to be as they should, if there should be liberty of philosophizing, I set forth my opinion not only concerning the rightful contracting of marriage, but also the dissolving thereof, if it should be necessary. I then treated more briefly of the education of children in a single small work. . . . And lastly concerning the freeing of the press, lest the judgment of true and false, of what should be published, what suppressed, should be in the power of a few men of little learning and of vulgar judgment, . . . I wrote in the proper style of an oration the 'Areopagitica.

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The sub-title of this work accordingly is speech for the liberty of unlicenced printing," but it is much more than this. It is a plea in behalf of freedom of research in all directions (libertas philosophandi), and there is in it implicitly the doctrine of universal toleration. But Milton's intention had no such scope as that, for it is plain from what he says elsewhere that he would have drawn the line on this side of Popery, of atheism, and most probably of whatever was immediately inconvenient to so firm a believer as he was in the infallibility of John Milton. Such was the irony of Fate that he himself a few years later became a censor of the press. It was perhaps with an eye to this comic property of the whirligig of Time that he wrote the passage just quoted from the "Second Defence," in which it is implied that some things

should be suppressed. But Milton was not inconsistent with himself, however he might be so with the principles advocated in the "Areopagitica," as those who have studied his character know. He is never weary of insisting on the Tacitean distinction between liberty and license, and in his "History of Britain" says admirably well "that liberty hath a sharp and double edge fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men: to bad and dissolute it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands." And if consistency be a jewel, as the proverb affirms, yet it can only show its best lustre in a suitable setting of circumstances. Milton was always a champion of freedom as he understood it, a freedom "not to be won from without, but from within, in the right conduct and administration of life." Toland speaks of him as favoring "the erection of a perfect Democracy," but in truth no man was ever farther from being a democrat in the modern sense than he. The government that he preferred would have been that of a Council chosen by a strictly limited body of constituents and this indirectly, their function being only to choose electors who again should make choice of a smaller body, and so on through "a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactest choice." His scheme aimed at the establishment of something like a Venetian Republic without a Doge, his experience of Cromwell apparently having made any monocratic devices distasteful to him. For the "rude multitude," as he calls it, he had an unqualified contempt, and had no more belief in the divine right

of majorities than in that of tyrants. Undoubtedly when a man of Milton's temperament advocated free speech it was with the unconscious mental reservation that it should be on the right side, or, at any rate, that it should be speech and not jargon.

There is no trustworthy evidence that the "Areopagitica" produced any immediate effect, unless it may have been indirectly by leavening some small fraction of the sluggish lump of what we should now call public opinion. Interests more immediate and pressing must soon have crowded it out of mind, and in a few years the returning flood of royalism covered it, with the other prose works of Milton, in a deepening ooze of oblivion. So utterly must it have been forgotten that in 1693 Charles Blount boldly plagiarized it under the new title of "A Just Vindication of Learning and the Liberty of the Press by Philopatris," in which he had the impudence to quote a passage from the very book he was rifling with the condescending remark "Herein I agree with Mr. Milton," as if it were an exception to his general way of thinking. Whether the tract in this vulgarized form helped forward the cause in behalf of which it was written is matter of conjecture. None of Blount's pamphlets could have had any considerable vent, for when Gildon published "The Miscellaneous Works of Charles Blount, Esq.," it is evident that he merely bound together the several pieces which made up the volume, putting new title-pages to all save one of them, but leaving the old pagination of