No More Learning

He accepted the common disdainful
estimate of the ancients; the very peculiar, but by no means
wholly disdainful, estimate of the Hebrews; and he tried to blend
both with something of the sensuous passion of the Middle Ages
and the renascence, stripping from this the transcendental element
which had been infused in the Middle Ages by Mariolatry and
chivalry, in the renascence by a sort of poetical convention.
An Aspasia-Hypatia-Lucretia-Griselda, with any naughtiness in
the first left out and certain points in Solomon's pattern woman
added, might have met Milton's views. But this blend has not
been commonly quoted in the marriage market. His friend
Marvell, in a passage of rare poetic beauty, described his love
as begotten by Despair upon Impossibility. Milton's seems to
have been begotten upon another kind of Impossibility by Un-
reasonable Expectation. The exact circumstances of his first
marriage we shall never know; those of his second take it out
of argument; his third seems to have been simply the investing
of a gouvernante with permanent rank extraordinary and pleni-
potentiary. But passage after passage in his works remains to
speak; and the terrible anecdote of his obliging his daughters,
and elaborately teaching them, to read to him languages which
they did not understand, remains for comment. The taste of the
seventeenth century in torture was not only, as was said of the
knowledge of Sam Weller in another matter, 'extensive and
peculiar,' but, as was said of the emperor Frederick II in the
same, 'humorous and lingering. ' But it rarely can have gone
further than this.
Once more, the remarkable blends of Milton's character which
are important to the comprehension of his work require notice.
His immediate conduct seems to have been perfectly correct-he
repeatedly solicited her to return, until (according to a perhaps not
quite trustworthy account) his requests were not only disregarded
but rejected with contempt! But, thenceforward, he allowed his
self-centredness, his curious anarchism and his entirely unpractical
temper to carry him off in a quite different direction. Indis-
solubility of marriage, except for positive unfaithfulness, was
inconvenient to John Milton; John Milton was not a person
? It may be observed that these overtures, if made, dispose almost finally of what
has been called by an advocate of Milton the horrible' suggestion, based on a written
date, that the first divorce pamphlet was actually composed before Mary left him. In
that case, he would have been an utter hypocrite in his requests to her to come
back; and it has been said that hypocrisy and Milton are simply two 'incompossible'
ideas, to use Sir W. Hamilton's useful word.
6


## p. 103 (#119) ############################################

The Divorce Tracts
103
to console himself illicitly; therefore, indissolubility of marriage
;
must go. The series of divorce pamphlets, accordingly, followed;
and, having proved to his own satisfaction that he was entitled
to marry again, he sought the hand of a certain Miss Davis,
whom some have identified (quite gratuitously) with the 'virtuous
young lady' of Sonnet IX. She, at any rate, had virtue and com-
mon sense enough to decline an arrangement of elective affinity.
In any one else than Milton, the proposal would have argued
little virtue; in any virtuous person, it could but argue no
common sense. And, indeed, the absence of that contemned
property is conspicuous everywhere in these unfortunate trans-
actions. Milton was not only in the straight vernacular) making
an utter fool of himself-aggravating the ridicule of a situation
the distress of which arises in part from the very fact that it
is ridiculous—but, just after he had come forward as a public
man, he was playing into the hands of his enemies, and
scandalising his friends. There was no point on which the
more moderate and clear-sighted of the puritan party can have
been more sensitive than this. The very word 'divorce'-thanks
to Henry VIII and some of the German reforming princes—made
the ears of better protestants burn; and, from the days of
the lampoons on Luther's marriage to those of the Family of
Love, licensed libertinage had been one of the reproaches most
constantly cast in the teeth of 'hot gospellers. ' Next to nothing
seems to be known of Miss Davis except that she had good looks
(as we could guess) and good wits (which is evident). But it was
certainly thanks to her, and to time's revenges, that the situation
(after Milton had made himself at once a stumbling-block and a
laughing-stock for two years) was at last saved, before anything
irreparable had happened. The ruin of the royal cause carried
the Powell family with it; and, with more common sense than
magnanimity, they resolved to throw themselves on Milton's mercy,
A sort of ambush was laid--and reason coincides with romance in
suggesting that the famous forgiveness scene of Paradise Lost had
been actually rehearsed on this occasion. At any rate, Milton
who, on his side, had very much more magnanimity than common
sense-took his wife back in the summer of 1645; and, when Oxford
fell, a year later, received her whole family into his new house in
Barbican. Of the rest, we know nothing except the birth of three
children-daughters—who appear later. At the birth of a fourth,
1 Miltonist' was actually used in print as a synonym for an opponent of the
sacredness of marriage.


## p. 104 (#120) ############################################

104
Milton
in 1652, Mary died, not yet twenty-seven. Otherwise, there is no
record of her married life. Milton is not in the least likely to
have visited her early fractiousness by any petty persecution : he
is as little likely to have ‘killed her with kindness. ' The whole
thing was a mistake--a common one, no doubt; but, somehow,
the pity of it remains rather specially.
What Milton thought or felt on the death of his first wife we
have no means of knowing. He did not write a sonnet on it, as
he did on that of his second ; and, so far as memory serves, there
is not any passage in his entire work which can be taken as even
glancing at it. But the year in which it occurred was a black
one for him in another way. He had now, for a full decade,
occupied himself in violent and constant pamphleteering, writing
nothing else but a few sonnets and some psalm-paraphrases. He
had, indeed, published his early Poems in 1645, but he had added
nothing to them; and, in 1649, he had undertaken the duties of
Latin secretary to the new parliamentary committee for foreign
affairs with a salary of £288. 138. 6d. , worth between three and
four times the amount today. We know a little of his private
affairs during this decade, besides the marriage troubles. His
wife's father had died in 1646, and a complicated series of trans-
actions in relation to the marriage settlements, and to old loans,
left Milton in possession of property at Wheatley, between Oxford
and Thame, worth, with charges off it, perhaps £50 a year. His
own father died shortly afterwards; and, late in 1647, Milton gave
up his pupils and moved to Holborn, with Lincoln's inn fields
behind him. On his appointment, he had, for a time (some two
years), rooms at Whitehall; but, in 1651, he moved to 'Petty
France'-later, York street. The house, till some thirty years
ago, was well known, and, after his time, it belonged to Bentham
and was occupied by Hazlitt.
Although Milton's regular official duties of translation and
writing seem to have been rather multifarious than hard, they
were, in themselves, not good for a man with very weak eyesight;
and his unfortunate aptitude for pamphleteering marked him out
for overtime work, which was still worse. The last stroke was
believed by himself, as a famous boast records, to have been
given by his reply to Salmasius's Defensio Regia (see post). This
appeared in the spring of 1651, and, a year later, he was totally
blind. No scientific account of the case exists.
The personal calamity could hardly have been severer; but, as
regards the poet, not the man, it was, perhaps, rather a gain than a


## p. 105 (#121) ############################################

Life during the Commonwealth
105
loss, though it required outward circumstances of a different kind
to replace Milton in his true office. His blindness does not seem
to have been regarded as a disablement from his official employ-
ment, though it led to the appointment of coadjutors and a division
a
of salary; and it was not till later that he engaged in the last
and most discreditable of his angry and undignified controversies.
Those with Ussher and Hall had, at least, the excuse, in matter if
not in manner, of religious convictions; the divorce tracts, of
intense personal interest; Eikonoklastes, of political consistency ;
and Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, of the same, and of official
commission. No one of these excuses really applies to the supple-
mentary wrangle with Alexander Morus or Moir. This Franco-Scot
had published and prefaced a strong royalist declamation, Regii
Sanguinis Clamor, directed against regicides in general and Milton
in particular, and written, but not signed, by Peter du Moulin.
Milton cooked his spleen for two whole years, rummaged the
continent for scandal against Morus, refused to believe the latter's
true assertion that he was only the editor of the book and, in
May 1654, published a Defensio Secunda which is simply a long,
clumsy, would-be satiric invective against his enemy.
Of his private life during this time, we again know very little.
His nephews, like ‘nine tenths of the people of England,' turned
royalists, and wrote light and ungodly literature. He seems to have
had a fair number of friends—though they hardly included any
men of literary distinction except Marvell, all such, as a rule,
being in the opposite camp. D'Avenant may have been another
exception, if the agreeable, but not quite proved, legend that each
protected the other in turn be true; and, as Dryden's relatives,
the Pickerings, were close friends of Cromwell, the younger poet's
acquaintance with the elder may have begun before the restora-
tion. He married a second time on 12 November 1656. His
wife, daughter of a captain Woodcock, was named Catherine, and
lived but fifteen months after the marriage, dying (as the twenty-
third sonnet records pathetically) in childbirth on 10 February
1657/8. The child was another daughter, but survived her mother
only a few weeks. Attention has often been drawn to the ‘veiled
face' of the sonnet as implying that Milton had never seen this
wife. It should, however, be remembered, that the Alcestis parallel
almost requires the veil. We know nothing more of Catherine
Milton, but our state of knowledge might be more ungracious.
Except for the sonnets, of which this appears to be the last,
Milton was still 'miching' from poetry and indulging no muse:


## p. 106 (#122) ############################################

106
Milton
a
for the inspirers of his pamphlets were furies rather than muses.
But he was to be brought back to the latter by major force.
Characteristically, as always, but in a fashion so extreme that
it would seem as if some 'dim suffusion' had come upon his mental,
as well as upon his bodily, sight, he not only would not accept, but
would not believe in, the restoration. In the last twelvemonth
or so of the commonwealth, he addressed two of his stately
academic harangues to parliament, on toleration and the pay-
ment of ministers. He wrote, in the late autumn of 1659 and
later, though he did not publish, A Letter to a Friend and another
to Monck (which he did publish), gravely ignoring every symptom of
contemporary feeling, and gravely prescribing the very doses with
which the patient was nauseated. And, on the eve of the restora-
tion itself, in February 1660, he issued, and would have reissued
(had not the king been actually restored), The Ready and Easy
Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, which he supplemented
by some hectoring notes in his old style on a sermon by Matthew
Griffiths, formerly chaplain to Charles I, with the obvious text
'Fear God and the king. '
Such extravagant insensibility to the signs of the times, in
such a time as the mid-seventeenth century, and in the case of a
person of Milton's antecedents, could, ordinarily, have had but one
awakening. How Milton escaped this has been accounted for in
different ways. Intercession of Marvell or of D'Avenant or of others
is one; insignificance is another—though the latter explanation
cannot be said to fit in very well with the assertions of Milton's
continental renown as a defender of regicide, nor with the fact that
all the more prominent cavaliers had been exiles on the continent.
The soundest explanation is that given by no friend of the restora-
tion—that the restoration was not bloodthirsty. Milton did
not, indeed, escape quite scotfree. He left his house and lay hid for
three months till the Act of Oblivion. His books, or some of them,
were, indeed, burnt by the hangman; and, exactly on what charge
is unknown, in the early winter he was in the custody of the sergeant-
at-arms. It is characteristic again, no doubt, that he exacted a
reduction of the fees (as exorbitant) on his liberation (15 December)
by an order of the House.
The rest of his life is infinitely important to literature ; less so to
biography. His circumstances necessarily became straitened. His
office, of course, went; and the story that he was offered continuance
of it and urged by his wife to accept the offer is absurd, for he
had no wife till 1663. He lost £2000, which he had lent to the repub-
-


## p. 107 (#123) ############################################

Old Age and Death 107
lican government; something more in forfeited property which he
had bought; and a considerable sum by malversation. The great
fire destroyed his father's house in Bread street. But it does
not appear that he was ever in positive discomfort ; and, at his
death, he left what would be equal to about £5000 today. His third
marriage, just referred to, was with Elizabeth Minshull, a young
woman of twenty-four, and a relation of his friend and doctor, Paget.
Most of the stories of his life date from these days, as is natural,
seeing that they were the days of the Paradises and of Samson.
Those as to his harshness to his daughters, and their undutiful-
ness to him, are not improbable, but rather contradictory to one
another, and, quite obviously, what would have been told whether
true or not. There is not much more consistency or certainty in
those about his third wife—though it is generally agreed that he
had no fault to find with her. As to residences, he moved from
place to place, till he settled in Artillery row on the way to Bunhill
fields, where he lived for the last twelve years of his life. His
dress, hours, ways of occupying his sightless day, diet, partiality for
tobacco and abstinence from total abstinence as regards wine, have
been recorded with the strenuous inertia of persons such as Aubrey
and Phillips. Like other people, he left London in the plague
year, going to his old county of Bucks, but to Chalfont St Giles,
not Horton. He had no lack of friends and visitors-Marvell; the
quaker Ellwood, who flattered himself that he had suggested
Paradise Regained; Dryden, of whom he seems to have spoken
with his usual disdainfulness, but who always spoke nobly of him.
Nor does he seem ever to have quarrelled with his brother, or with
his nephews, however much their principles differed from his own.
In 1669, any domestic dissensions which may have prevailed
were terminated by the daughters going out to apprenticeship or
superior service. But, in his later years, he suffered more and more
from gout, and he died of it on 8 November 1674. He was buried
in St Giles's, Cripplegate, the resting place of his father.
His widow died at Nantwich in 1727, more than half a century
after Milton. Her youngest step-daughter, Deborah, died in the
same year. She had married a silk-weaver, Abraham Clarke, and
had many children, of whom two lived, and themselves left issue.
So far as is known, the last direct descendant of Milton was
Elizabeth Foster or Clarke, Deborah's youngest daughter, who
died in 1754, and whose seven children had all died young. Anne
Milton, the poet's eldest daughter, had married, but died in child-
birth. Mary, the second, died unmarried within the seventeenth


## p. 108 (#124) ############################################

108
Milton
century. His brother, Sir Christopher, did not continue the name
beyond another generation ; but there are living representatives
of the family on the female side, deriving from the elder Anne
Milton, the poet's sister, especially by her second marriage with
a man named Agar.
It must not be supposed, from anything that has been said, that
Milton's temperament was essentially or uniformly morose. His
youngest daughter Deborah-an unexceptionable witness, what-
ever tales are true-described him as excellent company, especially
with young people. His very asceticism has been much exaggerated.
One anecdote speaks of his special gratitude to his last wife for
providing 'such dishes as pleased him'; and, while the Lawrence
sonnet cannot be interpreted in any sense but that of cheerful
enjoyment of festivity, the common limitation of 'spare to inter-
pose’ is almost certainly wrong, while the other interpretation is
supported by the companion piece to Cyriack Skinner. The personal
beauty of his youth naturally yielded to age and gout; but he
seems always, despite his blindness, to have been careful of his
dress and appearance. His delight in gardens was life-long, even
when he could not appreciate their trimness. He was a smoker-
the austerest puritan had no objection to the Indian weed-and a
wine drinker, though a moderate one. Ştudy, in spite of fate and
of the harm it had done him, he never abandoned. He was as
little of a Nazarite as of a Stylites, and not more of either than of
the kind of bacchanalian-amorist poet whom he despised. In fact,
if it were not for the testimony of the works, it would not be quite
irrational to reject most of this gossip about him; and, as it is,
reason, no less than charity, may reject a good deal of it. Nothing
but amiable paralogism can give Milton an amiable character,
inasmuch as the intensity of his convictions, and the peculiar com-
plexion of these, almost necessitated a certain asperity. But the
other testimony which the works bear makes unamiableness a very
minor matter.
Nor was this other testimony rejected. It is so easy to get
a falsehood into currency, and so hard to stop it by nailing to any
counter, that most people still talk about the unworthy reception
of Paradise Lost-the £15 of which Milton only received £10;
the coming of Addison to the rescue some fifty years afterwards;
and the rest of it. It must be sufficient here to say that 1300 copies of
this long poem, in a most unfashionable style and on a subject
which the profane would probably shun altogether and the pious
would probably think unsuitable for poetry, were sold in eighteen


## p. 109 (#125) ############################################

Growth of Reputation 109
ance.
6
months ; that, apparently, at least 3000 were sold in ten years;
that six editions appeared before the close of the century and
nine before Addison wrote. Turning from statistics to belles
lettres, Dryden, the greatest by an infinite distance of the younger
generation of men of letters, did it the heartiest justice from the
first and always. Roscommon, who died in 1685, had praised and
imitated it. Samuel Woodford, the paraphrast of the Psalms and
Canticles, had criticised its versification very soon after its appear-
And though, even after blank verse had recovered the
stage from intrusive heroics, the extension of its use was slow,
that use came in gradually before Addison took up the matter at
all; and the style was regularly called 'the manner of Milton. '
Piety, good taste and, perhaps, a slight fellow feeling in Whiggery,
no doubt induced Addison to stamp Milton's passport with the
visé of a criticism which retained its importance throughout the
eighteenth century. But that passport, from the first, had been
recognised by all whose opinion was of value and even, in a
vague way, by the general. A considerable commentary had been
appended to the sixth edition by Patrick Hume, in 1695; fifty
years later, Lauder's calumnies and forgeries, curious, and not
quite intelligible (for it was impossible that they should survive
examination), started afresh the commentatorial zeal which had
been displayed, not according to knowledge, by Bentley, and, not
altogether according to wits, by bishop Newton. There was, and
still is, plenty of room for comment, inasmuch as Milton could
only seem 'not a learned man' to one who, like Mark Pattison,
took his standard of learning from the Casaubons. But such a
calculus stands outside pure poetical-critical appreciation. This
has never failed Milton, and can never fail him. If the spirit
of poetry is not in him, it is nowhere.
It did not, however, show itself prodigialiter. The parallel
contrast between the precocity of Cowley and the comparatively
slow development of Milton, but a few years earlier, must have
often suggested itself; but it may be doubted whether it has much
real validity as anything more than accident. Indeed, the lesson
of another pair of contemporaries—Shelley and Keats-practically
denies it any. The carefully dated primitiae~'at fifteen yeers
old,''Anno aetatis 17,' 'Anno A etatis 19'-exhibited nothing that
almost any good versifier of that fertile time might not have
written. Of the two boyish Psalm-paraphrases, 114 has abso-
lutely nothing distinctive; the other, a good metre, but nothing
more. The poem entitled On the Death of a fair Infant


## p. 110 (#126) ############################################

IIO
Milton
(his little niece) can bear its two years further weight for age ;
but there is, perhaps, only one line-
Or that crown'd Matron sage white-robed Truth-
which one would pronounce distinctly Miltonic, and even this is
not exclusively so. At a Vacation Exercise-yet another two
years younger or older-makes, perhaps, a slight further advance
in more than metre (this will be dealt with separately). But it is
only in the summoning of the rivers at the close that approach
to individuality is suggested, and, even then, there is a strong
suggestion of Spenser.
But if Milton obeyed a common, though not quite universal, law
in treading the mere high-road for some time, a parting of the ways
came in the most striking fashion with On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity, composed in the year of his majority. Most striking-for
the opening stanzas of the proem, though much finer than anything
he had done, were still not quite Milton. Not merely Spenser, but
the greater Davies, either Fletcher, several other poets actually or
nearly contemporary, might have written them. The Hymn itself,
in its very first lines, not merely in metre but in diction, in arrange-
ment, in quality of phrase and thought alike, strikes a new note-
almost a new gamut of notes. The peculiar stateliness which
redeems even conceit from frivolity or frigidity; the unique
combination of mass and weight with easy flow; the largeness of
conception, imagery, scene; above all, perhaps, the inimitable
stamp of phrase and style-attained, chiefly, by cunning (selection
and collocation of epithet-give the true Milton. "Gaudy' is not
an out-of-the-way word, and it may have been suggested to him by
the fine Marlowesque line of Henry VI-
6
-
The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day,
or by fifty other passages. But, placed exactly where it is in the
first stanza, it colours, values, composes the whole. The greater
beauties of the piece that follow—the 'reign of peace'; the music
of the spheres; the silencing of the oracles ; and the flight of the
dethroned idols—are well known. The piece gives us all its
author's poetry in nuce-his union of majesty and grace, his
unique and all-compelling style, his command of 'solemn music'
such as had never before been known.
We cannot, of course, go through all the minor poems in
detail ; but The Passion or, rather, the note at its fragmentary
close, deserves notice because it completes the testimony of The


## p. 111 (#127) ############################################

The Early Poems
III
Nativity. That showed us the poet : this shows us the critic
whom, as has been well remarked, every great poet must contain.
*This Subject the Author, finding to be above the years he had
when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left
it unfinished. ' There have not been many poets who would have
been 'nothing satisfied with such lines as
He sov'ran Priest stooping his regall head
.
His starry front low-rooft beneath the skies;
or, best of all,
See see the Chariot, and those rushing wheels,
That whir”d the Prophet up at Chebar flood.
But Milton felt this dissatisfaction: and Milton was right. His
hand was still uncertain. It had slipped from the helm as he
burst into the hitherto silent sea of the style of the Nativity,
and he had drifted into mere respectable Fletcherian pastiche with
some better touches. And he knew this : as, doubtless, he had
known the other. There could be no doubt about him after the
acquisition and demonstration of the double knowledge.
The recognition of this is the most important thing in the study
of the first stage of Milton's poetical career. It was a few years
before the executive mastery rendered the critical control regulative
rather than prohibitive or suspensory; but very few. The famous
Shakespeare lines are probably a little, and even not a very little,
earlier than the date of the second folio, in which they appeared,
and, if not perfect intrinsically, are admirable as from a young
disciple to a dead master. The Hobson pieces, though quite out
of Milton's line and much less well done in their own than they
would have been by Cleiveland or John Hall, are, at least, curious.
An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester is a notable study
for the verse of L'Allegro; and its companion Arcades, of which
more presently, is a more notable study for Comus. A hint from
Peele not the last—and a suggestion from Shakespeare, matter
nothing : Milton was to be always a literary poet. These things
mark the full initiation, the final winning of the spurs.
From L'Allegro itself to Samson Agonistes, we have to do
with the adept and the knight. The comparative valuation of the
various poems of these forty years may be left to others, for it
depends partly upon personal preferences, partly upon considera-
tions of scale and subject and other things that can never be


## p. 112 (#128) ############################################

II 2
Milton
년
​e
brought to a satisfactory common denominator of criticism. But
the positive quality of poetry is in and over them all, from first to
last, unmistakable by those who have been born or taught to
recognise it. And it is this positive quality, in its various in-
lividual manifestations, and in its relations to the general history
and development of English poetry at large, that we have now to
disengage and study in chronological order, only neglecting this
latter in the case of the Sonnets, so as to group them together, as
is usually done, in what is the actual place of most of them—the
gap between Lycidas and Paradise Lost.
The twin studies of cheerfulness and melancholy will, of course,
come first, for it is impossible to admit the ingenious attempt
(above referred to) to postdate them. Their extraordinary
felicity has not met any important gainsayings. That some of the
details are not quite accurate, as natural history, would matter
extremely little in any case, and has even a certain interest in
connection with the peculiarity (to be noticed later) of Milton's
poetic painting. Another interesting point is the skill with which
the full or shortened octosyllabic couplet, with iambic or trochaic
cadence at pleasure, is handled. This famous old measure, handed
down from The Owl and the Nightingale, if not earlier, had been
fingered into new beauty by Shakespeare and others in the last
years of the sixteenth century and had been specially cultivated
by Fletcher, Browne, Wither and others in the earlier seventeenth.
Its capabilities have never been so perfectly and variously shown as
in these two charming poems, which are also, as it were, diploma-
pieces, exhibiting Milton's almost unsurpassable combination of
bookishness and natural imagination, the art of phrase which still
has all the gracefulness of youth, the power over imagery and
association, the whole suffused with a temper which is soft even
when sad, and which never jars or thorn-crackles even at its most
mirthful.
When the beautiful fragment Arcades (to return to it for
a special purpose) was written is not known; it must have
come before Comus, but may be of any year between 1630 and
1634. It was addressed to Alice, countess dowager of Derby-
the same lady who, as lady Strange (she was by birth lady Alice
Spencer) had been the recipient of Spenser's Teares of the
Muses forty years before, and who, after the death of her first
husband (Strange, it must be remembered, was then the second
title of the earls of Derby), had married lord keeper Egerton,
afterward lord chancellor viscount Brackley. The masque was


## p. 113 (#129) ############################################

Arcades and Comus
113
6
performed at Harefield in Middlesex, not far from Horton, and
it is supposed, though not known, that the music was by Milton's
friend Lawes. Fragment as the libretto is, the songs, especially
the second, 'On the smooth enamelled green' are perfection; and
the decasyllabic couplets of the Genius's speech have deep interest
as being Milton's most considerable serious attempt in this form.
He takes, as was natural, the enjambed variety, but care-
fully avoids the breathless overlapping of his seniors Browne
and Marmion and Chalkhill and his younger contemporary
Chamberlayne.
The connection of Comus with Arcades is so close in all ways
that it is scarcely improper to regard it as deliberate. The earl of
Bridgewater, for whom it was written, was lady Derby's stepson
through her second husband, and his wife was her daughter by her
first. He was president of Wales, and, in virtue of his office,
lived at Ludlow castle, where Comus was acted. His daughter
Alice, who acted the Lady, must have been named after her
double grandmother. Lawes here certainly wrote the music,
and he acted the Attendant Spirit. As for the story, it was
partly supplied (beyond all question) by Peele's Old Wives Tale,
largely supplemented from Milton's classical and modern reading
(especially the Comus of the Dutchman Puteanus (1608)) and his
own imagination ; partly derived, at least according to tradition,
from an actual adventure of lady Alice and her two brothers.
But it has not always been sufficiently noticed that the whole, as
it were, is a filling up of Arcades—the Genius of the Wood
dividing himself into good and evil parts as Thyrsis and Comus,
the merely accidental songs being adapted and multiplied to suit
the action, and that action itself being devised, in full colour
and body, to take the place of a mere occasional situation, like that
of the earlier piece.
The amplification was more than justified, and in a surprisingly
large number of ways.
The actual dramatic effect of the piece is
not great; and, on the other side, it has been pronounced too
much of a fully equipped drama to be a masque. But, putting
questions of words and names apart, it is a most admirable poem ;
and there have even not been wanting those who put it, for length
and poetic quality combined, first of all its author's works, while
admitting the superiority of Lycidas in the latter respect and the
three great later pieces in the first. One special point of interest is
that Milton here discards for his “tragedy, as Sir Henry Wotton
called it (i. e. the body of his dialogue), the couplet which he had
8
E L, VII.
CH. V.


## p. 114 (#130) ############################################

I14
Milton
used in Arcades, and adopts blank verse; while the rest of the
piece is in octosyllabic couplet or lyrical measures which are
almost an improvement on L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Arcades
itself. Something more will be said of the form later : the sub-
stance is amply worthy of it and, like it, duplex in character—an
ethical height and weight which the poet had never reached before
being matched with unimpaired grace in the lighter parts. It
would be difficult to find a poem where profit and delight are
more perfectly blended.
In Lycidas, the delight reaches an even higher pitch. For
once, there is no need to quarrel even with such an apparent
hyperbole as Pattison’s ‘high-water mark of English poetry'-
especially as high-water mark is not a thing that can only once be
reached. The circumstances, form and character of this exquisite
poem have been the subject of a great deal of writing. It formed
part of a collection of epicedes on Edward King, a slightly younger
contemporary of Milton at Christ's, who had become fellow and
tutor, and had intended to take orders, but was drowned on a
voyage to Ireland in the summer of 1637. Milton's contribution
is signed 'J. M. ' only. The general scheme is that of a classical
pastoral elegy; the verse form is a very peculiar, in fact, up to its
date, unique, arrangement of stanzas and lines of unequal length,
for the most part irregularly, and not entirely, rimed, but termi-
nating in a regular octave. To what extent the poem expresses
personal sorrow has been largely, but very unnecessarily, ques-
tioned; as an elegy, it has, poetically speaking, no superior even
in a language which contains the various laments on Sidney
before, and Adonais and Thyrsis after. The whole poem is a
tissue of splendid passages, not unconnected, but sewn cunningly
together rather than woven in one piece as regards subject. One,
however, of these passages contains, for the first time, a note
'prophesying war. ' Up to this date, Milton's verse, though
abstaining alike from the passionately amorist tone of contempo-
rary profane lyric, and from the almost erotically mystical tone of
contemporary sacred poetry, had contained nothing polemical;
and, even in the frequent eulogies of chastity in Comus, nothing
positively austere. Here, St Peter, coming among other symboli-
cal figures to bewail the dead, is made to deliver a tremendous
denunciation of what Milton later directly entitled 'the corrupt
clergy' of the time, and a prophecy of their ruin. The strict
pro-
priety of this has been questioned, even by some who agree with
Milton's views on the subject: the force and fire of the expression


## p. 115 (#131) ############################################

Sonnets
115
>
(not injured by a little obscurity, wbich, perhaps, was a necessary
precaution) may be admitted by the most thorough admirer of
Laud. And all the rest (except from the point of view of an objection
to pedantry which is itself ultra-pedantic) is absolutely proof
against criticism. There cannot be better verse than Lycidas.
The few, but extremely interesting, Sonnets derive their interest
from various sources. Except the earliest two, and the batch of
Italian pieces which follows, they bridge the interval between
Milton's first poetical period and his last—dotting the twenty
dark years with spots of light. It is true that the evil spirit of the
prose pamphlets retains some influence here, that his footing is
seen in the Tetrachordon sonnets, in the tail-sonnet (twenty lines,
the fifteenth and eighteenth of six syllables only) On the new
forcers of Conscience and, to some, though less, extent, in the
political sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell and Vane. It is true, also,
that one (xiv) On the Religious Memory of Mrs Catherine Thomson
is the most commonplace thing that Milton ever wrote. But, even
were the best and the most of them less good, they would be
interesting as resuming (with little following for more than another
century) the Elizabethan practice of this great form, and as
bringing it nearer to the commoner Italian model. Individually
and intrinsically, they do not need any allowance. Wordsworth’s
hackneyed praise is not very specially applicable to most of them;
and Johnson's contempt was contempt of the form itself, no doubt
slightly accentuated by dislike of the author. Taken dispassion-
ately, Milton's sonnets are examples, curiously various considering
their small number, at once of the adaptability of the kind to
'occasional purposes, and of the absence of any necessity that
this adaptability should be abused, as Wordsworth himself
certainly abused it, and as lesser men have abused it still more.
Nowhere, moreover, and this is natural, is the poet's tendency to
be autobiographical shown in a more interesting way. The pretty
overture to the nightingale not only shows the true Miltonic style
very early, but gives us a Miltonic person who might have developed
very differently. The other side--the side which did develop
appears in the three and twentieth year' (vii), and at once fore-
tells the compensations for the loss of the less austere personage.
And all the better later examples give that compensation, with
lighter touches here and there in the sonnets to Lawes, Lawrence
and Cyriack Skinner. The grace of these; the splendour of On
the late Massacher in Piemont and the sonnet on his blindness;
the dignity, even in partisanship, of the three political addresses;
8--2


## p. 116 (#132) ############################################

116
Milton
the idealised tenderness of the finale on his dead wife-give us
not merely great poetry, but invaluable comment on the other
great poetry which was to follow them.
The year 1645, however, saw a more important event in
Milton's literary biography and in the history of English literature
than the move to Barbican, or the reconciliation with his wife, or
even the downfall of the royal cause. Hitherto—in this respect
following a considerable and respectable, though inconvenient and
dangerous, Elizabethan tradition—he had been very shy of printing
his poems. The Shakespeare lines were merely a trimming to the
edition of Shakespeare in which they appeared, and we do not know
exactly how they came there. Lycidas had formed part of a
collection containing other men's work; Lawes's edition of
Comus was anonymous. But now, at a time when his mind was
occupied with things very different from the composition of poetry,
Milton consented to the publication of his earlier poetical work (by,
and at the instance of, the bookseller Humphrey Moseley) as
Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos'd at
several times . . . 1645. It has been supposed that this publication,
with its accompanying commendatory poems, was intended as a
sort of self-vindication, or counter-sally, in respect of his polemical,
and, in parts, highly unpopular, prose pamphlets. This seems very
doubtful; for anything like excuse, or plea in mitigation, was
absolutely alien from Milton's undoubting self-confidence and his
positive contumacy of spirit. Nor does the motto
Baccare frontem
Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro
necessarily involve any such intention. 'Good luck and escape from
the evil eye and the evil tongue to the poems' is all it invokes.
Probably, there was nothing more behind the matter than the fact
that, since Milton returned from Italy, he had had other things to
think about; and that Moseley's direct solicitation (a fact recorded
in the preface) was the main, if not the sole, occasional cause of the
appearance. The book had a bad portrait, with a Greek inscrip-
tion, by Milton himself, stigmatising the badness. For twenty
years and more after this he did not publish any poetry.
On the origin, date and circumstances of the great poem that
broke his silence, a very great deal has been written. That
Paradise Lost was entered at Stationers' Hall (that is to say, that
it was printed and ready for sale) on 20 August 1667 is the main
documentary fact. Four months earlier, on 27 April, Milton had
executed with Samuel Simmons the famous agreement for four
>


## p. 117 (#133) ############################################

Paradise Lost
117
>
payments of five pounds each, one down, the second when 1300
copies should have been sold, the third when a second edition on
the same scale should have been absorbed and the fourth at the
exhaustion of a third. But, in each, Simmons was allowed an
extra 200 copies on which he was to pay nothing. The MS, of
course, had been submitted for licensing? ; and the actual censor-
a chaplain of the archbishop of Canterbury named Tomkyns
had made slight objections but had not persisted in them. The
volume, a small quarto, with the poem in ten books, not twelve, was
published at 38. , and the second payment fell in about a year and
a half (26 April 1669) after the first. Further, the variations of
title-page, and, in a less degree, of text, usual in the same edition
of books at the time, are unusually great here, and have been
carefully tabulated, so far as possible, by Masson. The most im-
portant is the notable addition on ‘The Verse,' which did not
appear till 1668.
These things, in their various degrees, are certainties; and it is
a further certainty that, after Milton's death, his widow com-
pounded for the third five pounds (already due) and the fourth
which was accruing, for the present payment, in December 1680,
of eight pounds. The popular version of the matter seldom gets
the total-£18-right; but that is not the most important blunder
or fallacy connected with it. It is as certain that the offer of
£18,000 will not produce a Paradise Lost, as that the actual fee
or guerdon of £18 did not prevent its production.
With regard to the actual time occupied in composition, and the
sources, as they are vaguely called, of the poem, we know very
little-practically nothing. There is no doubt that, just before his
energies were diverted into pamphleteering, Milton had planned
a great epic; and, as his Latin poems show, had thought of some-
thing from the legends of the Bruts, or stories of Britain, to match
the Iliad and the Aeneid. It is further certain that, about 1640,
or a little later, he wrote out a long list (actually existing at
Trinity college, Cambridge) of subjects from British and Scriptural
history for dramatic treatment. Not only is Paradise Lost among
these, eo nomine, but four successive drafts, each more elaborate
than the preceding, exist of the persons and the distribution of
subject—the last and fullest, however, having its title changed
to 'Adam Unparadized' [sic]. Edward Phillips says that the
>
1
1 The actual M8 of bk. I which was submitted passed into the possession of Tonson
and thence to his descendants, who sold it & short time ago. It was, of course, in the
band of an amanuensis, not in Milton's (see remarks below).


## p. 118 (#134) ############################################

118
Milton
2
opening lines of Satan's speech? ('0 thou that with surpassing
glory crowned') were originally written and shown to him
and others ‘several years before the poem was begun,' as the
overture of the tragedy. On Phillips's authority, Aubrey gives
‘15 or 16' years for ‘several'; while the same vouchers assign the
actual date of beginning the epic to 1658 or thereabouts. If we
believe the quaker Ellwood, it was actually finished by 1665; but
plague and fire stopped the way to the press. Aubrey antedates
the finishing by two years or so.
On the whole, this is gossip.
What is certain is that Milton had had the subject before his
mind, either for epic or dramatic treatment, quite a quarter of
a century when it was published. The present writer has always,
from internal evidence of a vague but not unsatisfying kind, been
inclined to believe that the poem was actually begun not long after
his blindness had become a settled fact to him, which would coincide
with the 15 or 16 years above mentioned. The gossip has one
more interesting item, whatever may be its positive value, that he
wrote, or, rather, composed, it and his other poems by dictation
during half the year only, ‘from the Autumnal Equinox to the
Vernal. '
Again, fact assures us that the matter of the poem was largely
the result of general reading. Fancy, which has sometimes de-
served a harsher name, goes further and tries to assign particular
sources. The lies of Lauder--who actually took portions of Hog's
Latin translations of Milton, garbled them into divers more or less
obscure writers and put them forth as Milton's originals, plagiarised
by him-stand by themselves here; though, from another point of
view, they have an ungoodly fellowship of literary mystifications
and forgeries to keep them company. But the parallel-hunters
and the plagiarism-hunters and the source-hunters have spent
immense pains—by no means always or often with malicious
intent-to show that Milton imitated, borrowed from, or, in this
way and that, followed, the Adamo of the Italian dramatist
Giambattista Andreini (1613), the Lucifer, also a drama, of the
Dutch poet Vondel (1654), the Adamus Exul of Grotius (1601),
Sylvester's Du Bartas (1605) and even Caedmon, whose Genesis
was published by Milton's friend Junius, in 1655. Even more than
most such things, these suggestions, if they insinuate what is
properly called plagiarism, deserve simple contempt; and, if they
only infer acquaintance, are matter of simple curiosity at most.
Supposing Milton to have read all these books, Paradise Lost
1 P. L. IV. 32.


## p. 119 (#135) ############################################

Paradise Lost
119
6
6
remains Milton's; and it is perfectly certain, not merely that
nobody else could have constructed it out of them, but that a
syndicate composed of their authors, each in his happiest vein and
working together as never collaborators worked, could not have
come within measurable distance of it, or of him.
For, after all the detraction and all the adulation (the latter,
in some cases, as damaging as the former or more so) which
Paradise Lost has received, it remains unique. It is not, as it has
been foolishly called, the only great poem'in existence; but it is
the only poem as great in a particular way, or, rather, it is quite
alone in its kind of greatness. It will be found that all objections
to it, when examined, involve a sort, or different sorts, of petitio
principii. 'It has no hero (for Adam is hardly such and Christ's
victory does not come till later) or a bad and unsuccessful hero
in Satan. ' Why should it have one? “The story is known before-
hand. ' This applies practically to all classical epic and drama.
'It, or part of it, is dull. That is a matter of taste. “Its religious
ideas are exploded. ' That is a matter of opinion. The list of
thrust and parry might be largely extended; but this may
suffice.
On the other hand, it can show a sustained magnificence of
poetic conception, and of poetic treatment in the solemn and
serious way, which has practically never been denied by any com-
petent critic. It would be difficult to find any two persons who
differed from each other more than Voltaire and Johnson, or any
two who, for different reasons, disliked Milton more. Yet Johnson
practically admits, though without enthusiasm, the magnificence
above claimed, and Voltaire is only enabled to shrug it off-he
hardly denies it—by the aid of a certain incompetence to appre-
ciate it if he would. It has been pronounced not delightful by
persons not incompetent: it can never, by any such, be pro-
nounced not great. That the whole is not quite at the height of
the first two books may be granted; but, even the lower level would
be a mountain top in other poetry. It matters little whether it
be approached from the side of form, or from that of spirit. As
regards form, it practically endowed English with a new medium
for great non-dramatic poetry: what, at the very time of
its completion, was being pronounced 'too mean for a copy of
verses,' was made great enough for the greatest poem. As regards
spirit, we find the loftiest height of argument, the most gorgeous
description, action not extremely varied but nobly managed,
character not much individualised but sufficiently adapted to the


## p. 120 (#136) ############################################

I 20
Milton
action, above all, a suffused imaginative dignity, not merely unsur-
passed, but unparalleled elsewhere.
The exact relations of Paradise Lost and its sequel or pendant
are rather uncertain. It is so perfectly natural that Milton should
have written this sequel that, perhaps, some people may hardly
look further; and it is equally natural that some time should
be allowed to pass between the successive publications. It has,
however, been customary to accept the statement of the afore-
mentioned quaker Ellwood to the effect that he, visiting Milton
at Chalfont during his retreat before the plague, 'pleasantly' said
to the poet 'Thou hast said much here of “Paradise Lost,” but what
hast thou to say of “Paradise Found”? Whereupon, Milton
answered nothing and 'sat some time in a muse'; but, next year, in
London, showed Ellwood the poem. Of course, if this be true,
it was finished considerably before the publication of Paradise
Lost. There is, however, a good deal that is suspicious about this
statement; it is not confirmed or supported by Phillips or any
other contemporary authority; and there is against it strong
evidence of a kind which receives too little general attention the
evidence of prosody. Critics who take very different views of
Milton's versification admit equally that there is a difference
between that of the two poems—a difference specially suggesting
some interval between their composition; but less between that
of Paradise Regained and its companion in publication Samson
Agonistes.
At any rate, these two were published together in 16711 by
one John Starkey, who lived at the prelatical sign of The Mitre in
Fleet street. They had been licensed (again by Tomkyns) on 2 July
1670. Of the details—copies printed, terms of publication and so
forth-we do not, in this instance, know anything; but, as the book
is said to be ‘Printed by J. M. ,' it has been supposed that it was
an independent venture of the poet's own. The sale was less rapid
than that of Paradise Lost, or (which is improbable) the edition was
much larger—at any rate, it was not exhausted for nine years, and
the tradition of the comparative unpopularity of the poem is early.
Phillips says that it was 'generally censured to be [i. e. criticised
as being] much inferior to the other, though he [his uncle] could
not hear with patience any such thing. He would have had more
1 Observe that, if Ellwood be right, Paradise Regained must have been kept
complete and unprinted for five years, by a poet who was in bad health and advancing
age, in spite of what has been shown to have been a rather flattering reception, so far
as sale went, of the earlier poem,


## p. 121 (#137) ############################################

Paradise Regained
I 21
than his usual uniqueness if he could have heard it with patience;
but an author's partiality need not bear all the blame of his im-
patience. The inferiority which the 'general censure' of Paradise
Regained has continued to ascribe, though it may be admitted to
some extent, is an accidental, and, so to speak, artificial, inferiority.
The subject is certainly less interesting: partly because it allows
of less addition, traditional or original, to the scriptural narrative,
and, partly, because the conclusion is even more foregone. It is
probable that, to Milton, with his semi-Arian views, the succumbing
of Christ to temptation was a sufficiently epical contingency: to the
orthodox and the infidel alike, it lacks that element. The poem is
rather long for the actual action, and yet rather short in itself a
mere episode in the real ‘Regaining of Paradise. ' And there are
other objections which may be made, some from what may be
called the point of view of the professional critic, some from more
popular approaches.
But, in purely poetic value, Paradise Regained is little inferior
to its predecessor. There may be nothing in the poem that can quite
touch the first two books of Paradise Lost for magnificence; but
there are several things that may fairly be set beside almost
anything in the last ten. The splendid 'stand at bay' of the
discovered tempter-Tis true I am that spirit unfortunate'-in
the first book; his rebuke of Belial in the second, and the picture
of the magic banquet (it must be remembered that, though it is
customary to extol Milton's asceticism, the story of his remark to
his third wife, and the Lawrence and Skinner sonnets, go the
other way); above all, the panoramas from the mountain-top in the
third and fourth; the terrors of the night of storm; the crisis on
the pinnacle of the temple—are quite of the best Milton, which is
equivalent to saying that they are of the best of one kind of poetry.
Our diminishing acquaintance with the circumstances of Para-
dise Regained as compared with those of Paradise Lost dwindles
to almost nothing when we come to Paradise Regained's com-
panion in print. No Ellwood boasts its suggestion; although
there are two Samson subjects for dramas in the Cambridge list
neither of these has any detail appended to it, and one refers to
an early episode (the fox tails and fire brands) of the hero's
life. And, though the other, Dagonalia, is concerned with the
catastrophe, it does not follow that the subject would have been
treated in the actual way of Agonistes. Nor is much to be learnt
from the short preface 'Of that sort of Dramatic Poem called
Tragedy. Although longer and less defiant than the afterthought


## p. 122 (#138) ############################################

I 22
Milton
on "The Verse of Paradise Lost, it is mainly explanatory of
differences from the accepted English form, the poet specially
objecting to tragicomic admixture, disclaiming stage intention
and maintaining the unities of action and time, without mention-
ing that of place, which, however, is, in fact, observed. His
comment on his choric metres is less enigmatical than that on the
Rous ode in Latin which, however, should be taken with it. It
merely disclaims regular strophic arrangement.
The poem itself is of the very highest interest, and does not
need any doubtful—hardly any certain external support. There
is scarcely anything, in poetry—Dante again excepted—which com-
bines poetical and personal appeal in so striking a fashion. The
parallel of Samson and Milton himself is extraordinary, even at first
blush, and the poet, with his strong autobiographical tendency, has
brought it out still further. The blindness, the triumph of politi-
cal enemies, the failing strength and closing life (see, especially,
the poignant lines? 'So much I feel my genial spirits droop. . .
And I shall shortly be with them that rest'), the unbroken
and undaunted resolution-all are in both. And there are less
certain, but most suggestive, added touches. There is no need to
.
make the story of the first marriage worse by confounding Mary
Powell with Dalila, nor can the cases be made to cover each other
by the utmost violence or the most perverted ingenuity. But, in
the Dalila passages of Samson, there certainly is that combination
of susceptibility to feminine charms and distrustful revolt against
them which is thoroughly Miltonic. One cannot but see in the
altercation with Harapha what Milton would have liked to say-
if he never said it—to an 'over-crowing' malignant; and the
whole tissue of situations is worked into similarity, now actual,
now allegoric.
But, quite independently of this, Samson Agonistes, from the
purely literary point of view, is a poem of the highest interest and
of the greatest beauty. An acting play, we are told, it was never
meant to be; but, even of the acting quality, it has probably as
much as any English play on the strict classical model can have.
It has certainly more than either Cornelia or Philotas, than either
Merope or Erechtheus. As a poem, dramatised in a given form,
it needs no allowance and no apology. Both the style and the
versification, to some extent, show that 'drooping of the genial
spirits' which has been quoted: they are harder and stiffer. But
there is even more art, if less 'bloomy flush of life'; and the art is
2 Ll. 594-8.
i See post.


## p. 123 (#139) ############################################

Samson Agonistes
123
almost more imposing than ever, if less graceful. When Mark
Pattison thought that, to critics who maintain that beauty is the
only characteristic of poetry, Samson ‘will seem tame, flat, mean-
ingless and artificial,' he showed clearly that he did not understand
the point of view to which he was referring.
Above all, the choruses give us not only much splendid verse
but an extraordinary abundance of special points of interest.
To begin with, there is—and this point is not Samsonic—the sub-
mission to the once loved, then slighted, enchantress rime. The
first two or three choruses or choric scenes are blank; rime,
not regular, but on a sort of further unregularised Lycidas
scheme, reappears with the striking epiphonema ‘God of our
Fathers, what is man' (1. 667), and is never wholly abandoned
afterwards. Nevertheless, the poet continues his ceaseless ex-
perimentation in the mere forms of verse, putting rime out of
the question-varying the assortment of his lengths, associating
different feet on an extension of the same bold principle which
had underlain the versification of Paradise Lost and, in places,
venturing on entirely new rhythms, his intention in which is not yet
quite certain, as in the famous 'O how comely it is and how
reviving' and 'When their hearts were jocund and sublime. '
And all this art is used for the presentation of a picture of
really great action and high passion, a picture which, if we
were ignorant of, and insusceptible to, all Biblical associations,
if we knew nothing about Milton's personal history, would
appeal to the eternal human interests. It may be that, in his
central and, as the phrase goes, greatest, works, Milton had some-
times forgotten this appeal. He had not done so in his earlier
and happier period; and, though the time was late and hardly
happy, he had returned to it now?
The subject of Milton's prose work is not a very easy one, and
it has been often neglected—comparatively, at least—in general
surveys of his work. So long, indeed, as criticism was mainly coloured
by the critic's agreement or disagreement with the author's views, it
1 Later than Paradise Regained and Samson, and in the year before his death,
Milton published (adding the tractate Of Education) a second edition of his minor
poems (Poems, etc. upon Several Occasions) with Thomas Dring. He omitted the
English prefatory matter not his own to Comus, but added On the Death of a fair
Infant and At a Vacation Exercise, and all his later minor verse except the Fairfax,
Vane, Cromwell and Cyriack Skinner II sonnets. Some, but not all, copies of this
included a new portrait instead of the old libel. And it is of rather more than merely
bibliographical importance to remember that here, also, as in the 1645 issue, and as
in Lawes's editio princeps, Comus is not called Comus but simply A Mask.


## p. 124 (#140) ############################################

1 24
Milton
was almost impossible that anything valuable should be said on the
subject. There could not be any critical edification in discourse
which tended, on the one side, towards a sermon on the 30th of
January and, on the other, towards a Calf's Head club harangue.
But, even if the king be kept as entirely as possible out of the
matter, many difficulties, not merely troublesome but, as Milton's
own time would have said, 'disgustful,' remain. That poets have
usually been good prose-writers is a commonplace; and that some
of Milton's prose passages are among the finest in English is
hardly denied by anybody. Yet, even here, there have been gain-
sayers who were not political partisans, and whose competence
was not to be questioned; while, if we stop short of absolute gain-
saying, there has been hardly anybody, whose competence and
impartiality are not questionable, to praise without abundant
and uncomfortable allowance and exception. '
The difficulty arises mainly from the fact that, except in the
Education tractate, and in the curious Histories, Milton was
always 'fighting a prize' in his prose compositions; and that,
hardly ever, except in Areopagitica, had he a prize before him
which was worth the fight in a literary sense. This, to some
extent, might have been compensated if he had been a born ‘Swiss
of Heaven' in his controversies—if he had known how to make the
most of his case without positive passion. But he did not.