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into the field, and to try to say a few words about the new interest in a great name which Mr. Masson has awakened. We have referred to the change which the English Revolution effected in Milton's career; and we will endeavor to carry the thought further and to suppose that he had disregarded the call of duty which came to him while in Italy, and had made literature and especially poetry the sole work of his life. What poem, what "strains of an unknown strength," such as he promises in the "Epitaphium Damonis" if life should be spared him, and which should be read by the dwellers beside the English rivers, could even Milton have produced if his literary ambition had been the sole object of his life? In his "Defensio Secunda," he says:

When I was preparing to pass over into Sicily and Greece, the melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in England made me alter my purpose; for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement abroad while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home. ... I returned to my native country when Charles was renewing the Episcopal War with the Scots, and the necessity of his affairs obliged him to convene a Parliament. I hired a spacious house in the city for myself and my books; where I again with rapture renewed my literary pursuits, and where I calmly awaited the issue of the contest. I saw that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that the foundation was laying for the deliverance of man from the yoke of slavery and superstition; that the principles of our religion which were the first objects of our care would exert a salutary the republic; and as I had from my youth studied the distinctions between religious and civil rights, I perceived that if ever I wished to be of use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the Church, and to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger. I therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was engaged and to transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to this one important object.

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To be deaf to this high calling, to be unprepared to respond to it, was not possible to a spirit like that of Milton. He who had from his youth studied "the distinctions between religious and civil rights was already equipped for the fight in which he determined to engage. A life withdrawn from the public life of his country at such a time, and selfishly devoted to literary aims however high and praiseworthy in themselves, could not have issued in the production of "Paradise Lost," could at best but have produced an idle song even out of the legen

dary stories of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and have added to the many forgotten epics of second-rate poets, whose utterances have no connection with the spirit of their own or any other age. From the beginning of the Long Parliament until the Restoration, Milton's pen was busy with the topics of the day or with the preparation of State papers and popular vindications of the acts of the great statesmen and soldiers of the Commonwealth. An occasional sonnet, worthy of its origin from the stirred affections or noble admirations of its author, broke now and then from the heart of the poet. The pen was fertile in a series of contributions to the controversies of the time. His earliest publications were concerning reformation, prelatical episcopacy, and It has been ecclesiastical government. objected to many of these writings that they were disfigured by coarse personalities and undignified terms of abuse. But it is not by these portions of them that Milton's pamphlets ought to be judged. They contain passages of the noblest eloquence which must forever be the comfort and encouragement of those who set pure religion above every attempt to degrade and enslave it.

Anti-sacerdotalism is the

key-note of Milton's first effort to warn and arm his fellow-citizens against the things that have hindered the cause of reformation in religion. Speaking of the acts of the priest party, he says: "They began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul - yea, the very shape of God himself - into an exterior and bodily form, urgently pre tending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence, and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold and gew-gaws fetched from

Aaron's old wardrobe or the flamens' vestry; then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downward; and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labor of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling car cass to plod on in the old road and drudg ing trade of conformity."

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The second book of the "Treatise of phlets appeared, or even to give the Reformation" in England concludes with names of those who engaged in them. a passage which is too well known to ren- The fight was sometimes a savage one, der it necessary to quote it here. It is and the "Animadversions "" are in some the promise of an offering of "high strains places rough, and even scurrilous, to a in new and lofty measures, to sing and degree which would not now be tolerated. celebrate the reign of Christ when he shall Our present object is to show that while judge the kingdoms of the world, and dis- engaged in them Milton never forgot the tribute national honors and rewards to higher purposes of his life and study, and religious and just commonwealths." It also that from the earliest period of his is, in fact, a high strain" of inspired public efforts, he laid hold on first prinpoetry, and with a hundred others abound- ciples which could have but one outcome ing in all of Milton's political writings, - namely, the attainment of the highest shows that the poet never wholly put off ground, or, as we should say now, the his singing robes, though the utterances most advanced ground, on which politiwere not clothed in verse, and were but cal and ecclesiastical liberty can rest. the ornaments and exuberances of a con- Consider the extract about ordination, troversial writer earnestly engaged in the and the essence of the ministerial funcpressing questions of the hour. The year tion. We can add nothing to-day to the 1641 saw the publication of the tracts force of such a statement. With his already referred to, and of two other very thoughts so based on eternal principles, important ones "The Reason of Church what could the doctrines of the Churches Government urged against Prelaty," and be to Milton, even at the beginning of his "Animadversions upon the Remon- career as a public writer? Episcopacy strants' Defence against Smectymnuus." was being weighed in the scales of disThe former of these contains Milton's cussion, and Milton had long ago judged high estimate of the office of the poet, and it. When Episcopacy had fallen, came his "covenant with the knowing reader, the attempt to put Presbytery in its place. by labor and intense study, which I take Milton's fourth pamphlet, as Mr. Masto be my portion in this life, joined with son points out, is in favor of Presbyteri the strong propensity of nature, to leave anism, but rather from the necessity of something so written to after times as the argument than from anything else. they should not willingly let it die." And if we ask what are the permanent portions of these early prose works which can interest us to-day, and whether anything can be drawn from them which shall suit our purposes in present controversies, we shall have no difficulty in finding such things in abundance. The ritualism of Laud is still active in our religious world; and the quotation made above from the tract on reformation needs no modifica- But was there not an element in the tion to adapt it to the present time. Take question which for the time shut out the also this passage, selected at random from possibility of any other form? We mean the "Animadversions: " "It is the call-uniformity" in religion; and in delibering of God that makes a minister, and his own painful study and diligence that manures and improves his ministerial gifts. In the primitive times many, before ever they had received ordination from the apostles, had done the Church noble service. It is but an orderly form of receiving a man already fitted, and committing to him a particular charge; the employ ment of preaching is as holy and far more excellent; the care also and judgment to be used in the winning of souls is an ability above that which is required in ordination." It is impossible in a brief review to set forth the particular controversies of the years in which these pam

declares the question respecting Church GovAt the very outset of his pamphlet Milton ernment to be whether it ought to be presbyterial or prelatical; nay, shortly afterwards he has a sentence which shows that at this time there was little dream either in his mind, or in that of the people around him, of the possi bility of any form of Church Government that should not be definable as one or the other of these two (vol. ii., p. 376).

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ating on behalf of a national establishment, this element ruled in the minds of nearly all men. How earnestly the relig ious men who sat in the Long Parliament regarded "uniformity as essential to national religion, we all know; and how much was expected from the Westminster Assembly of Divines we can learn more readily from Professor Masson's second volume than we could possibly learn elsewhere. If uniformity in relig ion was necessary, and was to be secured, Presbyterianism seemed the likeliest form it could take. A most interesting list of all the persons who were chosen to sit in the Westminster Assembly will be found

on pages 515 to 524 of Masson, Vol. II. | conditions that Independency seemed the preIn view of Milton's ultimate choice of tender and upstart, while Presbyterianism the principle of Independency, we will seemed the rightful heir. This arose partly pursue this question, with Mr. Masson's from the fact that Presbyterianism had mass assistance, a little more fully. and respectability in her favor, was at home on the spot, and had her titles ready; whereas Independency had been a wanderer on the Continent and in the Colonies, had contracted an uncouth and sunburnt look, had been preceded by ugly reports of her behavior in foreign parts, had changed her name several times, and was not at once prepared with her pedigree and vouchers. Partly, however, it arose from the omnipotence at that moment of Scottish example and advice in England. Anyhow, for the moment, Independency was her chance of obtaining a hearing. Nevertheat a disadvantage. She seemed even to doubt less, she was to be heard, and fully, in the course of time. Not a form of Independency, not a variety in her development that has been described in the preceding narrative, from Brown's original English Separatism, on through Robinson's Congregationalism or Semi-Separatism antagonizing Smyth's exand so to the Consolidated Robinsonian Intreme Separatism and Se-Baptism in Holland, dependency of the New England Church, with its outjets in Mrs. Hutchinson's Antinomianism and Roger Williams's absolute Individualism, but were to have their appearances or equivalents in the coming controversy in England, and to play into the current of English life (vol. ii., pp. 602-3).

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After describing the falling off or withdrawing of the bishops and other adherents of Episcopacy from the Assembly, Professor Masson says: "In respect of theological doctrine, for example, the Assembly, as it was then left, was perfectly unanimous. They were almost to a man Calvinists or Anti-Arminians, pledged by their antecedents to such a revision of the Articles as should make the national creed more distinctly Calvinistic than before. . . . On the question of Church government the Assembly knew itself from the first to be divided into parties." This division became of the utmost importance, for on the result of the struggle between Presbyterianism and Independency depended the fate of England. Mr. Masson's section entitled, "Presbyterianism and Independency in July, 1643; their prospects in the Westminster As sembly," throws so much interest on this topic that we make no excuse for transcribing a portion of it:

I regard the arrival of Roger Williams in London about midsummer, 1643, as the importation into England of the very quintessence or last distillation of that notion of Church In- This extract is enough for our present dependency which England had originated, but purpose, which is to show that very unHolland and America had worked out. Our expected "developments" besides those history of Independency in all its forms on to suggested in our extract were to come this quintessence or last distillation of it in the into play. That Milton should break with mind of a fervid Welsh New-Englander, who the Assembly might be expected; but might now be seen, alone or in young Vane's company, hanging about the lobbies of the what actually did occur was a personal Houses of Parliament and the Westminster matter which is the most extraordinary Assembly, has not been without preconceived circumstance in the whole of Milton's and deliberate purpose. For, in most of our life. An unhappy marriage was the occaexisting studies and accounts of England's sion of Milton's personal conflict with the great Revolution in the middle of the seven- ecclesiastical leaders of the time. When teenth century, I know not a blunder more he became a "divorcer " the whole weight fatal, more full of causes of misapprehension of the religious indignation of England and unfair judgment, than that which consists was against him, and he was driven into in treating Independency as a sudden new phenomenon of 1643, or thereabouts, when the Independency by a kind of moral necesWestminster Assembly met. Not so, as we sity, -a power sufficient for the purpose, For sixty years before 1643 In- even supposing that the progress of his dependency had been a traditional form of inquiries and the turn of his mind had Anti-Prelacy in the English popular mind, not been leading him in the same direccompeting with the somewhat older Anti-Pre- tion. The disturbance in Milton's imag latic theory of Presbyterianism, and though inary career of pure contemplation and not possessing the same respectability of num- literary labor by political affairs is not a bers and of social weight, yet lodged inexpuggreater "interference in his life than nably in native depths, and intense with mem- that which his marriage and its conseories of pain and wrong. It did happen, in 1643, when Prelacy was removed from the quences produced. The elevated tone nation, and the question was what was to be we might almost say superhuman or ansubstituted, that this native tradition of In- gelic character - of Milton's ideas in dependency found itself dashed against the regard to the relations of the sexes, and other tradition of Presbyterianism, in such his grand doctrine of "the sublime notion

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always with a recollection that his championship of the common cause was qualified by a peculiar private crotchet. He figured in the list of the chiefs of Independency, if I may so express it, with an asterisk prefixed to his name. That asterisk was his Divorce Doctrine." He was an Independent, with the added peculiarity of being the head of the Sect of Miltonists or Divorcers (vol. iii., p. 434).

and high mystery" of personal purity- what Cromwell was in the broader and harder for the vindication whereof he deserves field of Army action, and what the younger eternal honor - were put to a severe trial Vane was, in Cromwell's absence, in the House in his own unfortunate experience. In of Commons. While Cromwell was away in the army, or occasionally when he appeared his thirty-fifth year, nine years after the in the House, and his presence was felt there in production of "Comus," he went into Oxfordshire to visit the Powells, old rest of a Presbyterian motion, there was no some new Independent motion, or some arfriends of his family, but strong Royalists, man, outside of Parliament, who observed him and he returned to London with a bride more sympathetically than Milton, or would of seventeen the girl Mary Powell, of have been more ready to second him with whom we really know nothing personal tongue or with pen. Both were ranked among as to her character or abilities, but about the Independents, as Vane also was, but this whom much may be inferred from the was less because they were partisans of any conduct of her husband and from unmis- particular form of Church Government, than takable allusions in his writings. Probecause they were agreed that, whatever form fessor Masson has given us the details there must be the largest possible liberty under of Church Government should be established, with care and delicacy, and has brought it for nonconforming consciences. If this was out all the references which Milton's writ- Independency, it was a kind of large lay Inings can be made to yield on the subject dependency; and of Independency in this whether in prose or verse. Enough to sense Milton was, undoubtedly, the literary say here, that Milton's ideas of the marchief. Only when he was thought of by the ried state did not find themselves fulfilled Independents as one of their champions, it was in his experience, and that he did find the materials out of which to lay down new claims for personal liberty which found vent in his pamphlets on the subject of divorce. By these publications he broke altogether with the Presbyterian party; and at the same time, and during the publication of the divorce tracts, he defied the ordinances of Parliament and the principles of the Assembly by the publication of the most magnificent of his After Naseby there was a lull in the prose works, the "Areopagitica, or speech strife; and this seems to have been acfor the liberty of unlicensed printing." companied by a revival of interest in genIn six years from the time of his return eral literature. Milton took occasion of to England, Milton had placed himself this to put before the world those higher ahead of Assemblies and Parliaments, claims to distinction which were never and of the public opinion of his country. absent from his mind, and to show his By the close of the year 1645 he had countrymen that he was something more fought the battles of liberty in religion, in than a writer of pamphlets and a controdomestic life, and in public speaking and versialist. Mr. Masson gives a very inprinting, and had gained a victory in teresting account of Humphrey Moseley, every field as complete as that which the bookseller, whose judgment and taste Cromwell gained in the same year at in pure literature seem to have been of Naseby over Episcopacy and absolute an unusual kind. Moseley looked out monarchy. As Cromwell stood first in for the best poetry that could be found, the rising republic as the representative and after publishing an edition of Waller's of statesmanship and military glory, Mil-poems, considered perhaps as the best ton stood by his side as the representative of civil, social, and religious liberty. The effects of the publication of the Areopagitica" are described by Masson in his third volume, and we borrow from it a passage which sums up Milton's position at the time of which we have just been speaking:

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On the whole, then, Milton's position among his countrymen from the beginning of 1645 onwards may be defined most accurately by conceiving him to have been, in the special field of letters or pamphleteering, very much

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lyrical verses of the time, he applied to
Milton for his unpublished verses to be
included in a volume with "Comus," which
had been published by Lawes in 1637, and
"Lycidas," which had appeared with other
poetical pieces in a memorial volume
printed at Cambridge in 1637-8.
result of this application was the appear-
ance in 1645 of "The Poems of Mr. John
Milton, both English and Latin, compos'd
at several times." Mr. Masson's remarks
on this volume, which had the following
Latin motto on the title-page, -

Baccare frontem Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro (VIRGIL, Eclog. vii.),

will give our readers great pleasure.

Has the reader noticed the motto on the title-page from Virgil's seventh Eclogue? It is peculiarly significant of the mood in which the volume was published. Milton, who has called himself Thyrsis in the Epitaphium Damonis, here adopts in the happiest manner the words of the young poet-shepherd Thyrsis-in Virgil's pastoral. Thyrsis there, contending with Corydon for the prize in poetry, begs from his brother shepherds, if not the ivy of perfectly approved excellence, at least

This ordinance was directed against the Independents by the efforts of "a sudden influx of Presbyterians." It denounces death for heresies of doctrine concerning the persons in the Godhead, or the canon of Scripture; and imprisonment for minor errors, such as "that man is bound to believe no more than by his reason he can comprehend," "that the baptizing of infants is unlawful," etc. "Imagine," says Professor Masson, "that going forth just as the second civil war had begun, as the will and ordinance of Parliament! One wonders that the concordat between the Parliament and the army, arranged some green thing round the brow, by Cromwell and the other army chiefs in Lest ill tongues hurt the poet yet to be. the preceding November, was not snapped Could anything more gracefully express Mil- on the instant. One wonders that the ton's intention in the volume? This collection of his poems, written between his sixteenth army did not wheel in mass round Westyear and his thirty-eighth, was a smaller collec-minster, haul the legislating idiots from tion by much, he seems to own, than he had once hoped to have ready by that point in his manhood; but it might at least correct the impression of him common among those who knew him only as a prose pamphleteer. Something green round his brow for the present, were it only the sweet field spikenard, would attest that he had given his youth to Poesy, and would re-announce, amid the clamor of evil tongues which his polemical writings had raised, that he meant to return to Poesy before all was done, and to die, when he did die, a great Poet of England (vol. iii., p. 453).

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The story of the portrait of Milton engraved for this edition of his poems by William Marshall, and of the trick played upon the engraver by Milton in revenge for the badness of the likeness, is a very amusing one, and is pleasantly told in pp. 456-9 of Vol. III. It is curious to find the author of "11 Penseroso" engaged in a "practical joke."

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The interval of "pure literature was not a long one. A mightier wave of the Great Rebellion was rising with the conflicts between the Presbyterians and the Independents, and between the Parliament and the army, which was to end in sweeping away the monarch and the monarchy, and to lay them in the dust with the bishops and the Church. The history of the last two years and a half of the reign of Charles I. occupies the fourth book of Vol. III. of Masson's "History," and extends over nearly two hundred and forty pages. There are many things in this period which we should like particularly to notice; but one of the points most interesting to us is the Ordinance of Parliament of the 2nd of May, 1648, "For the preventing of the growth and spreading of Heresy and Blasphemy."

their seats, and then undertake in their own name both the war and the general business of the nation. The behavior of the army, however, was more patient and wise (vol. iii., p. 601).

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The ordinance might have been directed against Milton himself from what we know of his opinions subsequently published; and it shows in its impotent rage and intolerance that the Independents were already associated with heresy and free opinions by their opponents, who, on their part, must have begun to feel the breaking down of orthodox authority. Milton, at all events, was not afraid of the imputation of heresy, and was probably making an approach to those principles of toleration which he published twenty-five years later in his tract "Of true religion, heresy, etc." Indeed, both along the religious and along the political track, he was advancing with the times to an apprehension of the requirements and conditions of true liberty.

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Milton's supreme political utterance is "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; and its importance, so far as we know, has not hitherto been fully recognized. Professor Masson says of it:

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Milton was the first Englishman of mark, out of Parliament, that signified his unqualified adhesion to the Republic. This he did on the 13th of February, 1648-9, by publishing that pamphlet on which we saw him engaged in his house in High Holborn during the king's trial. The new pamphlet, like most of its preexactly a fortnight after the king's death, and decessors, was unlicensed. It was published exactly a week after the Republic had been declared. The "Eikon Basilike," the supreme publication on the other side, had preceded it by four days. "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" is not equal in richness of lit

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