to be wondered at, for even democracies are a great while in finding out that everything may be left to the instincts of a free people save those instincts themselves, and that these, docile if guided gently, grow mutinous under unskilful driving. Parliament was trying no new experiment, for the press, as if it were an animal likely to run mad and bite somebody at any moment, had been muzzled since Queen Mary's day, but they were trying over again, as men are wont, an experiment that had always failed, and in the nature of things always must fail.

Unwise repression made evasion only the more actively ingenious, and gave it that color of righteousness which is the most dangerous consequence of ill-considered legislation. Counsel was darkened by a swarm of pamphlets surreptitiously brooded in cellars and cocklofts. Fancy sees their authors fluttering round the New Light on dingy quarto wings and learning that Truth incautiously approached can singe as well as shine. Every doctrine inconceivable by instructed men was preached, and the ghost of every dead and buried heresy did squeak and gibber in the London streets. The right of private misjudgment had been exercised so fantastically on the Scriptures that thoughtful persons were beginning to surmise whether there were not enough explosive material between their covers to shatter any system of government or of society that ever was or will be contrived by man. All this was the natural result of circumstances wholly novel, of a universal ferment of thought or

of its many plausible substitutes, enthusiasm, fanaticism, monomania, and every form of mental and moral bewilderment suddenly loosed from the unconscious restraints of traditional order. Those who watched the strange intellectual and ethicopolitical upheaval in New England fifty years ago will be at no loss for parallels to these phenomena. It was a state of things that should have been left to subside, as it had arisen, through natural causes; but the powers that be always think themselves wiser than the laws of Nature or the axioms of experience.

Two formalities were necessary for the lawful publication of any printed sheet. These were the long-established entry at Stationers' Hall and the license required by the new Ordinance. Men in a hurry to save the world before night, dissident as they might be in other respects, were agreed in resenting these impediments and delays, and this the more, doubtless, because of the fees they exacted. Milton, who had nothing in common with such men except the belief in a divine mission, had in publishing his controversial tracts quietly ignored both the rights of the Stationers and the injunctions of the Ordinance. As respects the Stationers' Company, he should have complied with the law, since entry in their register was the only security for copyright, and he believed, as he tells us in his "Iconoclastes," that "every author should have the property in his work reserved to him after death as well as living." It was the infringement of their copyrights by piratical printers during the

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

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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." 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

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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 con-
tracting 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 learn-
ing and of vulgar judgment, . . I wrote in the
proper style of an oration the 'Areopagitica.

The sub-title of this work accordingly is "a 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