lenty of "verbal curiosity" in Milton's poetry; he is in some
respects the finest craftsman who ever handled the English speech: so
that this declaration is the more timely to remind us by how wide a chasm
he is separated from those modern greenhouse poets who move contentedly
in an atmosphere of art ideals and art theories. He had his breeding from
the ancient world, where AEschylus fought at Marathon, and he could not
think of politics as of a separable part of human life.

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,

is a lyric ideal that may quite well consist with political indifference,
but how should an epic inspiration be nourished where the prosperity of
the State is lightly esteemed? Even had poetry lost by his political
adventures, he would have been content that politics should gain. And
politics did gain; for Milton's prose works raise every question they
touch, even where they cannot truly be said to advance it. It is as
unseemly for the politicians to complain of his choice, as it would be
for the herdsmen of King Admetus to complain of the presence among them
of a god. The large considerations and high passions imported into the
treatment of practical questions by a Milton, or a Burke, have done much
to keep even party politics at a high level in England, so that civil
servants and journalists may join in the hymn of the herdsmen--

He has been our fellow, the morning of our days,
Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.
God, of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darkened
That had thee here obscure!

In a long autobiographic passage in the _Second Defence of the People of
England_ Milton makes a formal classification of his prose works written
before that date. All of them, he says, were designed to promote Liberty.
By the accidents of the time he was induced to treat first, in his
anti-episcopal pamphlets, of religious liberty. Once that controversy was
fairly ablaze, in the name of the same goddess he applied his incendiary
torch to humbler piles. "I perceived," he says, "that there were three
species of liberty which are essential to the happiness of social
life--religious, domestic, and civil; and as I had already written
concerning the first, and the magistrates were strenuously active in
obtaining the third, I determined to turn my attention to the second, or
the domestic species." He i