seemed monstrous to many in Milton's day, but which will command general assent in ours. But to lay it down that "any who has the power" may interpose to correct what he chooses to consider the laches of the lawful magistrate is to hand over the administration of the law to Judge Lynch-rather too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of bringing even a bad king to the block. Milton's sneer at "vulgar and irrational men, contesting for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of iniquity, their gibberish laws," is equivalent to an admission that his party had put itself beyond the pale of the law. The only defence would be to show that it had acted under great and overwhelming necessity; but this he takes for granted, though knowing well that it was denied by more than half the nation. His argument, therefore, is inconclusive, except that portion of it which modern opinion allows to pass without argument. He seems indeed to admit in his "Defensio Secunda" that the tract was written less to vindicate the King's execution than to saddle the protesting Presbyterians with a share of the responsibility. The diction, though robust and spirited, is not his best, and, on the whole, the most admirable feature in his pamphlet is his courage in writing it. He was to speak yet again on this theme as the mouthpiece of the Commonwealth, thus earning honour and reward; it was well to have shown first that he did not need this incentive to expose himself to Royalist vengeance, but had prompting enough in the intensity of his private convictions.

.

"Eikon

He had flung himself into a perilous breach. Basilike "-most timely of manifestoes-had been published only four days before the appearance of "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." Between its literary seduction and the horror generally excited by the King's execution, the tide of public opinion was turning fast. Milton no doubt felt that no claim upon him could be equal to that which the State had a right to prefer. He accepted the office of "Secretary for Foreign Tongues" to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, a delegation from the Council of State of forty-one members, by which the country was at that time governed. Vane, Whitelocke, and Marten were among the members of the committee. The specified duties of the post were the preparation and translation of despatches from and to foreign governments. These were always in Latin,—the Council, says that sturdy Briton, Edward Phillips, "scorning to carry on their affairs in the wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French." But it must have been understood that Milton's pen would also be at the service of the Government outside the narrow range of official correspondence. The salary was handsome for the time-£288, equivalent to about £900 of our money. It was an honourable post, on the manner of whose discharge the credit of England abroad somewhat depended; the foreign chanceries were full of accomplished Latinists, and when Blake's cannon was not to be the mouthpiece, the Commonwealth's message needed a silver trumpet. It was also as likely as any employment to make a scholar a statesman. If in some respects it opposed new obstacles to the

fulfilment of Milton's aspirations as a poet, he might still feel that it would help him to the experience which he had declared to be essential: "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things, not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have within himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." Up to this time Milton's experience of public affairs had been slight; he does not seem to have enjoyed the intimate acquaintance of any man then active in the making of history. In our day he would probably have entered Parliament, but that was impossible under a dispensation which allowed a Parliament to sit till a Protector turned it out of doors. He was, therefore, only acting upon his own theory, and he seems to us to have been acting wisely as well as courageously, when he consented to become a humble but necessary wheel of the machinery of administration, the Orpheus among the Argonauts of the Commonwealth.

M

CHAPTER V.

ILTON was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649. He removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which but a fragment now remains. His first performance was in some measure a false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg, clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded by that body that the English envoy never formally delivered it. An epistle to the Dutch on the murder of the Commonwealth's ambassador, Dorislaus, by refugee Cavaliers, had a better reception; and Milton was soon engaged in drafting, not merely translating, a State paper designed for the press-observations on the peace concluded by Ormond, the Royalist commander in Ireland, with the confederated Catholics in that country, and on the protest against the execution. of Charles I. volunteered by the Presbytery of Belfast. The commentary was published in May, along with the documents. It is a spirited manifesto, cogent in enforcing the necessity of the campaign about to be undertaken by

Cromwell. Ireland had at the moment exactly as many factions as provinces; and never, perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter confusion. Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be "an eagle towering in his pride of place," but he may seem to have degenerated into the "mousing owl" when he pounced upon newswriters and ferreted unlicensed pamphlets for sedition. True, there was nothing in this occupation formally inconsistent with anything he had written in the "Areopagitica"; yet one wishes that the Council of State had provided otherwise for this particular department of the public service. Nothing but a sense of duty can have reconciled him to a task so invidious; and there is some evidence of what might well have been believed without evidence—that he mitigated the severity of the censorship as far as in him lay. He was not to want for better occupation, for the Council of State was about to devolve upon him the charge of answering the great Royalist manifesto, "Eikon Basilike."

The controversy respecting the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" is a remarkable instance of the degree in which literary judgment may be biassed by political prepossession. In the absence of other testimony one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according as his verdict inclined to Charles I. or Bishop Gauden. In fact, it is no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely different kinds of testimony. The external evidence of Charles's authorship is worth nothing. It is almost confined to the assertions, forty years after the publication, of a few