hink of free government as of an engine
for depressing unusual merit was impossible for Milton. He lived in an
age that had found in Plutarch's men its highest ideals of political
character. Never, since their own day, had the "noble Grecians and
Romans" exercised so irresistible a fascination on the minds of men, or
so real an influence on the affairs of the State, as was theirs at the
time of the Renaissance. The mist in which they had long been enveloped
was swept away, and these colossal figures of soldiers, patriots, and
counsellors loomed large and clear across the ages, their majesty
enhanced by distance and by art, which conspire to efface all that is
accidental, petty, and distracting. We cannot see these figures as they
appeared to the Renaissance world. One of the chief results of modern
historical labour and research has been that it has peopled the Middle
Ages for us, and interposed a whole society of living men, our ancestors,
between us and ancient Rome. But in Milton's time this process was only
beginning; the collections and researches that made it possible were
largely the work of his contemporaries,--and were despised by him. When
he looked back on the world's history, from his own standpoint, he saw,
near at hand and stretching away into the distance, a desert, from which
a black mass of cloud had just been lifted; and, across the desert, lying
fair under the broad sunshine, a city--

With gilded battlements, conspicuous far,
Turrets and terrasses, and glittering spires.

It was towards this ancient civic life, with its arts and arms and long
renown, that he reached forth passionate hands of yearning. The
intervening tract, whither his younger feet had wandered, almost ceased
to exist for him; the paladins and ladies of mediaeval story were the
deceitful mirage of the desert; the true life of antiquity lay beyond. In
all his allusions to the great themes of romance two things are
noticeable: first, how deeply his imagination had been stirred by them,
so that they are used as a last crown of decoration in some of the most
exalted passages of his great poems; and next, how careful he is to stamp
them as fiction. His studies for the early _History of Britain_ had
cloyed him with legends conveyed from book to book. Once convinced that
no certain historical ground could be found for the feet among the whole
mass of these traditions, Milton ceased to regard them as eligible
subjects for his greatest p