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published his Areopagitica, a noble paper in favor of Unlicensed Printing, and boldly directed against the Presbyterian party, then in power, which had continued and even increased the restraints upon the press. No stouter appeal for the freedom of the press was ever heard, even in America. But in the main, his prose pen was employed against the crown and the Church, while they still existed; against the king's memory, after the unfortunate monarch had fallen, and in favor of the parliament and all its acts. Milton was no trimmer; he gave forth no uncertain sound; he was partisan to the extreme, and left himself no loop-hole of retreat in the change that was to come.

A famous book appeared in 1649, not long after Charles's execution, proclaimed to have been written by King Charles while in prison, and entitled Eikon Basilike, or The Kingly Image, being the portraiture of his majesty in his solitude and suffering. It was supposed that it might influence the people in favor of royalty, and so Milton was employed to answer it in a bitter invective, an unnecessary and heartless attack upon the dead king, entitled Eikonoklastes, or The Image-breaker. The Eikon was probably in part written by the king, and in part by Bishop Gauden, who indeed claimed its authorship after the Restoration.

Salmasius having defended Charles in a work of dignified and moderate tone, Milton answered in his first Defensio pro Populo Anglicano; in which he traverses the whole ground of popular rights and kingly prerogative, in a masterly and eloquent manner. This was followed by a second Defensio. For the two he received £1,000, and by his own account accelerated the disease of the eyes which ended in complete blindness.

No pen in England worked more powerfully than his in behalf of the parliament and the protectorate, or to stay the flood tide of loyalty, which bore upon its sweeping heart the restoration of the second Charles. He wrote the last foreign

despatches of Richard Cromwell, the weak successor of the powerful Oliver; but nothing could now avail to check the return of monarchy. The people were tired of turmoil and sick of blood; they wanted rest, at any cost. The powerful hand of Cromwell was removed, and astute Monk used his army to secure his reward. The army, concurring with the popular sentiment, restored the Stuarts. The conduct of the English people in bringing Charles back stamped Cromwell as a usurper, and they have steadily ignored in their list of governors-called monarchs-the man through whose efforts much of their liberty had been achieved; but history asserts itself, and the benefits of the "Great Rebellion" are gratefully acknowledged by the people, whether the protectorate appears in the court list or not.

Charles II. came

THE EFFECT OF THE RESTORATION. back to such an overwhelming reception, that he said, in his witty way, it must have been his own fault to stay away so long from a people who were so glad to see him when he did come. This restoration forced Milton into concealment his public day was over, and yet his remaining history is particularly interesting. Inheriting weak eyes from his mother, he had overtasked their powers, especially in writing the Defensiones, and had become entirely blind. Although his person was included in the general amnesty, his polemical works were burned by the hangman; and the pen that had so powerfully battled for a party, now returned to the service of its first love, poetry. His loss of power and place was the world's gain. In his forced seclusion, he produced the greatest of English poems religious, romantic, and heroic.

ESTIMATE OF HIS PROSE. · Before considering his poems, we may briefly state some estimate of his prose works. They comprise much that is excellent, are full of learning, and contain passages of rarest rhetoric. He said himself, that in

prose he had only "the use of his left hand;" but it was the left hand of a Milton. To the English scholar they are chiefly of historical value: many of them are written in Latin, and lose much of their terseness in a translation which retains classical peculiarities of form and phrase.

His History of England from the Earliest Times is not profound, nor philosophical; he followed standard chronicle authorities, but made few, if any, original investigations, and gives us little philosophy. His tractate on Education contains peculiar views of a curriculum of study, but is charmingly written. He also wrote a treatise on Logic. Little known to the great world outside of his poems, there is one prose work, discovered only in 1823, which has been less read, but which contains the articles of his Christian belief. It is a tractate on Christian doctrine: no one now doubts its genuineness; and it proves him to have been a Unitarian, or High Arian, by his own confession. This was somewhat startling to the great orthodox world, who had taken many of their conceptions of supernatural things from Milton's Paradise Lost; and yet a careful study of that poem will disclose similar tendencies in the poet's mind. He was a Puritan whose theology was progressive until it issued in complete isolation he left the Presbyterian ranks for the Independents, and then, startled by the rise and number of sects, he retired within himself and stood almost alone, too proud to be instructed, and dissatisfied with the doctrines and excesses of his earlier colleagues.

In 1653 he lost his wife, Mary Powell, who left him three daughters. He supplied her place in 1656, by marrying Catherine Woodstock, to whom he was greatly attached, and who also died fifteen months after. Eight years afterward he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him.

The Blind Poet.

Paradise Lost.

Milton and Dante..

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ILTON'S blindness, his loneliness, and his loss of power, threw him upon himself. His imagination, concentrated by these disasters and troubles, was to see higher things in a clear, celestial light: there was nothing to distract his attention, and he began that achievement which he had long before contemplated—a great religious epic, in which the heroes should be celestial beings and our sinless first parents, and the scenes Heaven, Hell, and the Paradise of a yet untainted Earth. His first idea was to write an epic on King Arthur and his knights: it is well for the world that he changed his intention, and took as a grander subject the loss of Paradise, full as it is of individual interest to mankind.

In a consideration of his poetry, we must now first recur to those pieces which he had written at an earlier day. Before settling in London, he had, as we have seen, travelled fifteen months on the Continent, and had been particularly interested by his residence in Italy, where he visited the blind Galileo. The poems which most clearly show the still powerful influence of Italy in all European literature, and upon him especially, are the Arcades, Comus, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, each beautiful and finished, and although Italian in

their taste, yet full of true philosophy couched in charming

verse.

The Arcades, (Arcadians,) composed in 1684, is a pastoral masque, enacted before the Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield, by some noble persons of her family. The Allegro is the song of Mirth, the nymph who brings with her

Jest and youthful jollity,

Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks and wreathed smiles,

Sport that wrinkled Care derides,

And Laughter holding both his sides,

The poem is like the nymph whom he addresses,

Buxom, blithe, and debonaire.

The Penseroso is a tribute to tender melancholy, and is designed as a pendant to the Allegro:

Pensive nun devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train.

We fall in love with each goddess in turn, and find comfort for our varying moods from "grave to gay."

Burke said he was certain Milton composed the Penseroso in the aisle of a cloister, or in an ivy-grown abbey.

Comus is a noble poem, philosophic and tender, but neither pastoral nor dramatic, except in form; it presents the power of chastity in disarming Circe, Comus, and all the libidinous sirens. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were written at Horton, about 1633.

Lycidas, written in 1637, is a tender monody on the loss of a friend named King, in the Irish Channel, in that year, and is a classical pastoral, tricked off in Italian garb. What it loses in adherence to classic models and Italian taste, is more

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