THE

PROSE WORKS,

OF

JOHN MILTON;

=

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY REVIEW,

BY

ROBERT FLETCHER.

LONDON:

WILLIAM BALL, PATERNOSTER ROW.

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY JOHN CHILDS AND SON.

MDCCCXXXVIII.

INTRODUCTORY REVIEW.

THE name of Milton is his monument. It is venerable, national, and sacred; and yet, with whatever glory invested, it is inscribed, and not unworthily, upon this volume.

To her great poet England has done justice. His renown equals his transcendent merits. His name is a synonyme for vastness of attainment, sublimity of conception, and splendour of expression. A people profess to be his readers. His poetry is in all hands. It is in truth a fountain of living waters in the very heart of civilization. Its tendency is even more magnificent than its composition. Combining all that is lovely in religion, with all that in reason is grand and beautiful, it creates, while it gratifies, and at the same time purifies, those tastes and powers that refine and exalt humanity. It is almost of itself, not less by the invigorating nature of its moral than of its intellectual qualities, sufficient to perpetuate the stability of an empire. Constituting a most glorious portion of our best inheritance, his poetical writings are, emphatically, national works; and as such, long may they be revered and esteemed amongst us! "They are of power," to use his own words, " to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility." They will be lost, only with our language:—the tide of his song will cease to flow, only with that of time. Having won, he wears, the brightest laurels; and by the acclamations of ages, rather than the testimony of individuals, his seat is with Homer and Shakespeare on the poetic mount. To apply again his own language to his own achievements, he has sung his "elaborate song ;"-he has performed the covenant of his youth,

to offer at high strains in new and lofty measures;"-his devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit," who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases," has been heard and answered!

"Oh! what great men hast thou not produced, England! my country!" might we exclaim with one of the first of modern poets and philosophers, when contemplating these and similar works. And a thorough Englishman this great poet was! Prelates, and tithes, and kings, were not the burthen of his song, and therefore the poetry can be praised even by those whose souls are wrapped up in these things. While he soared away "in the high reason of his fancies," and meddled not with the practical affairs of life, his enemies can be complimentary, and undertake to bow him into immortality. They would fain suppress all other monuments of this Englishman :-it remains for us to appreciate them. Let us never think of John Milton as a poet merely, however in that capacity he may have adorned our language, and benefited, by ennobling, his species. He was a citizen also, with whom patriotism was as heroical a passion, prompting him to do his country service, as was that " inward prompting" of poesy, by which he did his country honour. He was alive to all that was due from man to man in all the relations of life. He was invested

with a power to mould the mind of a nation, and to lead the people into " the glorious ways of truth, and prosperous virtue." The poet has long eclipsed the man;-he has been imprisoned even in the temple of the muses; and the very splendour of the bard seems to be our title to pass an act of oblivion" on the share he bore in the events and discussions of the momentous times in which he lived. Ought not rather his wide renown, in this capacity, to lead us to the contemplation and study of the whole of his character and his works? Sworn by a father, who knew what persecution was, at the first altar to freedom erected in this land; he, a student of the finest temperament, bent on grasping all sciences and professing none, and burning with intense ambition for distinction-forsook his harp," and the quiet and still air of delightful studies;" and devoted the energies of earliest and maturest manhood, to be aiding in the grandest crisis of the first of human causes and he became the most conspicuous literary actor in the dreadful yet glorious drama of the Great Rebellion. He beheld tyranny and intolerance trampling upon the most sacred prerogatives of God and man, and he was compelled by the nobility of his nature, by the obligations of virtue, by the loud summons of beleagured truth, in short, by his patriotism as well as his piety, to lay down the lyre, whose earliest tones are yet so fascinating; to" doff his garland and singing robes," and to adventure within the circle. of peril and glory: and, buckling on the controversial panoply, he threw it off, only when the various works of this volume, surpassed by none in any sort of eloquence, became the record and trophy of his achievements, and the worthy forerunners of those poems, which a whole people "will not willingly let die."

The summit of fame is occupied by the poet, but the base of the vast elevation may justly be said to rest on these Prose Works; and we invite his admirers to descend from the former, and survey the region that lies round about the latter, a less explored, but not less magnificent, domain.

The recovery of a good book is a sure and certain resurrection. The envious deluge of oblivion cannot long settle over such works as these. The rainbow springs up, and we see it on the tempestuous aspect of these times, a sign of the storm, and a signal of peace! We are not now employed on ruins. John Milton's works have been long buried, but they are not consumed ;-long neglected, but they are not injured. Many of them certainly have to do with the interests of time, but all of them are impregnated with thoughts which, springing from the depths, shall partake of the immortality of the spirit, and outlive the world in which they were uttered. Though temporal they are not temporary. There is a breadth and grandeur of aim in them, which embraces the well-being of man both here and hereafter, and renders them interminably precious. "Books," says their author, "are not absolutely dead things,"-" they contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are,"-" the precious life-blood of a master-spirit embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life."-" They preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." It is astonishing that these books should not in our time have been appreciated by the people, and it is greatly to be regretted, not merely for the sake of their author, but for the general interests of truth, and the cultivation of learning, eloquence, and taste amongst us, that they should be so little read. Had they been lost, had his enemies succeeded in their diabolical project of mutilating, or of annihilating the chief of them,-had other priests than those " in the neighbourhood of Leeds," met in other places, over sacerdotal beer, to "sacrifice them to the flames,"* how we should have lamented over our irreparable loss! Having his poems, we should have learned that they sprung up out of the ashes of controversy; we should then " imitate the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris!" We should have remembered the era in which he lived, and we should have felt our loss as deeply as we sympathized with his party, * See Richard Baron's note, in this edition, to his preface to the Iconoclastes.

who with such strong hands and dauntless hearts, wrought out for us our political salvation. Possessing them, we might have said, that we should have known more of one of the greatest of men, and have been admitted into the presence-chamber of his every-day soul.— We should have had his opinions on the cardinal points of human and divine controversy, and have heard him, who in immortal accents dictated the "Paradise Lost," debate, and reason, and argue, as an orator, and a politician! Believing, with Coleridge, that poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language, and that no man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher-we should certainly, reasoning from verse to prose, à priori, have said, that such a mind as Milton's, so sober and yet so fiery, so full and yet so strong, so replete with wisdom and so stored with learning, with such a mastery in the execution of all its movements, must, if roused and excited, and roused and excited it would undoubtedly be by any theme or cause in which the rights of man or the honour of God were concerned, have been equally splendid in any undertaking; and that even in the very different forms of prose and verse, or controversy and poetry, his efforts would be distinguished by the identical attributes of power and beauty;-that the image and superscription upon each would be the same;—that with very little variation where it was possible, (for no one understood decorum better than Milton,) the very same terms in which a critic of his poetry would speak of that, especially of his didactic poetry, would be applicable to his prose; that probably the mannerism of the one would mark the other, and that there would be so striking a resemblance and analogy between them, that you might safely assert that the author of the one must be the author of the other. We should learn from one of his exquisite sonnets, that the utter loss of sight followed, and that he knew that it would follow, his exertions in composing a " Defence of the People of England" against Salmasius.

How anxious should we have been to have examined and pored over that production, which the world had obtained from the magnanimous poet at such a price! If such had been our anticipations and regrets, what would be our rapture, to have rescued a fragment from grasp of time, and have unrolled it?

the

That were indeed a bursting forth

Of genius from the dust!

In the teeth of these imaginary regrets, the fact is indisputable, that these works of John Milton (and in this respect they share the same fate with those of Jeremy Taylor and others of the same age, and of equal merit) are by the vast majority of his countrymen. comparatively neglected that tens of thousands of readers, and diligent ones too, in modern novelties, have never heard of Milton as aught else than as one of the powers of song. How is it that the world will do justice, (nominally at least,) to the minstrel, and not to the man,—thrill with his poetry, and neglect his prose? Is it sheer ignorance, or is it neglect? If the latter, there is not an equal instance of unworthy neglect on record. It is ultimately traceable to the elevated character of the writings themselves. John Milton was a teacher, and this world does not like to be taught. His " fit audience," in the world, will always be "few." The world's taste is but the handmaid and servant of a sterner and stronger power, whose empire lies in the passions of the depraved heart; which, while unrenewed, never can and never will cease to treat both the highest poetry and the divinest philosophy with mingled hatred and contempt. The world will still slay the prophet, and then piously build his sepulchre. Whether they who profess to be the patrons