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CHAPTER II,

MILTON'S PROSE WORKS.

MILTON's important prose works were almost all written and published between the meeting of the Long Parliament in November, 1640, and the Restoration. They consist of twenty-five pamphlets, twenty-one in English, and four in Latin, and some minor writings belonging to the last years of his life. The period was the greatest pamphleteering age in English history. While old institutions were being reconstructed, old traditions undermined, and old beliefs remodelled, every man who had, or thought he had, anything of value to contribute to the formation of public opinion or dogmatic belief, turned to pamphlet writing as naturally as at a later age he would have turned to correspondence in the periodical press. And the pamphlets of the period, of which thousands are stored in the British Museum Library, have, for the most part, as little claim as our daily papers to a place in English literature. They are ephemeral publications, hastily and carelessly put together, strongly partizan, and often scurrilously abusive. Milton's pamphlets share to the full all these characteristics except the first; among all these productions of the period they alone have, in any real sense, survived. And, on the whole, they deserve to survive, apart from the personal interest attaching to anything from the pen that wrote Paradise Lost. For, ephemeral as is their immediate purpose, they are pleas for some

thing higher than the temporary cause that they defend. Liberty is their underlying idea; but liberty conceived of not as the absence of law, but as the emancipation from a lower law in order to more perfect obedience to another and better. It was the strength of this conception that drove Milton from the Presbyterian to the Independent Party, and even beyond the moderate Independents into an almost antinomian theological position. Man must obey God, and all that conflicts with that supreme duty is tyranny, unjustifiable, intolerable, in all ways to be protested against and brought to naught. And with all the vigour that comes of clear conviction and strong hope, Milton threw himself, when once his first reluctance had been overcome, into the war of opinions that was raging around him.

His pamphlets fall into three groups, treating of ecclesiastical, domestic, and civil liberty. The ecclesiastical tracts deal chiefly with questions of Church government, and belong for the most part to the earlier years of the period; the second group includes the pamphlets on Divorce, the Tractate on Education, and the Areopagitica, in defence of freedom in the expression of opinion; the pamphlets on civil liberty belong to the years of the Commonwealth, and have less literary value, though greater political interest.

To deal in detail with each of Milton's pamphlets would exceed the scope of this volume, especially as a considerable number of them cannot possibly be regarded as productions of any literary value. A bare outline of the circumstances of their production must suffice as an accompaniment to more detailed notice of a few of the more important.

The first controversy in which Milton became involved was that on Church reform. Early in 1641, Bishop Hall,

who had in the preceding year come forward as the champion of the bishops in a pamphlet, Episcopacy by Divine Right, published a Humble Remonstrance to Parliament against the aims of the Root and Branch party, who had begun to demand the entire abolition of episcopacy in the English Church. A reply to Hall's Remonstrance appeared almost immediately, the work of five authors, whose combined initials furnished the nom-deguerre, Smectymnuus.' The chief parties in the compilation of this Puritan vindication was taken by Thomas Young, Milton's old tutor, now vicar of Stowmarket; and there is some reason to believe that Milton himself had a small share in its production. But his chief contribution to the discussion was issued in June, 1641, in the shape of a bulky pamphlet Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England. Milton's thesis is that the Reformation, after a hopeful beginning, had received a check in its progress. From whom? From three classes of persons, the Antiquitarians, the Libertines (or Opportunists), and the Politicians. And all culminates in the iniquities of the bishops, whom Milton denounces through pages of indignation, scorn, contempt, mingling in a torrent of words that threatens to break through all rules of orderly arrangement. Then, by one of those amazing transitions which characterize most of his prose works, he suddenly turns aside to offering a sublime appeal to God to defend the cause of righteousness,—a passage may serve to show Milton's prose style at its best:

"Oh! Thou, that after the impetuous rage of five bloody inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless

1 Stephen Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, William (w uu) Spurstow.

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revolution of our swift and thick-coming sorrows-when we were quite breathless, of Thy free grace didst motion peace and terms of covenant with us, and, having well nigh freed us from anti-Christian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic Empire to a glorious and enviable height with her daughter islands around her-stay us in this felicity; let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that viper of sedition that for these four-score years hath been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abortive spawn without the danger of this travailing and throbbing Kingdom, that we may still remember in our solemn thanksgivings how for us the northern ocean, even the frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and the very Maw of Hell ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that terrible and damned blast. Oh, how much more glorious will those former deliverances appear when we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest misery past but to have reserved us for greatest happiness to come! Hitherto thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous claim of thy foes; now unite us entirely and appropriate us to Thyself; tie us everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of Thy Eternal Throne. And now we know, O Thou our most certain hope and defence, that Thy enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the Great Whore, and have joined their plots with that sad Intelligencing Tyrant, that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas. But let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought; let them decree and do Thou cancel it; let them embattle themselves and be broken, let them embattle and be broken, for Thou art with us!'

In such passages as these the pamphleteer becomes a prophet. Alas! that the prophet often so forgot his office as to throw mud like the lowest of the pamphleteers!

Almost immediately after the publication of this pam

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phlet, which was issued anonymously, two more by the same author appeared, one Of Prelatical Episcopacy, in reply to Archbishop Ussher's Judgment of Dr. Rainolds touching the Original of Episcopacy, the other Animadversions upon Bishop Hall's Reply to Smectymnuus. Both are occasional and unimportant; perhaps the most interesting and best known passage in the reply to Ussher is Milton's description of the Fathers, Whatsoever Time or the heedless hand of blind Chance hath drawn down from of old to this present in her huge dragnet, whether fish or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, these are the Fathers.' The Animadversions consist of sixty-eight pages of violent and ill-mannered attack upon Hall. After having set at naught every dictate of good taste and controversial fairness, the writer closes with a prayer almost as magnificent as that quoted above! The character of the pamphlet is quite in accord with the proprieties of controversy as then recognized, but no other pamphleteer could spring like Milton in one moment from the vulgar and ridiculous to the devotional and sublime.

Two other pamphlets followed early in the following year-an Apology for Smectymnuus, renewing the attack on Hall, and defending Milton's own position against charges made by him; and The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy, a pamphlet of considerable length, published under Milton's own name, and asserting strongly the presbyterian argument. It is one of the ablest of his prose writings, and is full of valuable autobiographical touches. The following passage, dealing with the writer's plans and ambitions, must be quoted as bearing on the general literary character of the age and his attitude towards it:

"The accomplishment of them (i.e., his literary projects) lies not but in a power above man's to promise; but that