however, the pamphlet made him a person of importance. Such a man,
learned, eloquent, of high character, of visible sincerity, of utter
fearlessness, was not an ally to be despised by a Government which had
outraged public opinion at home and abroad. Within a few {57} weeks he
was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State;
and from henceforth till after the death of Cromwell he wrote the
weightiest of the vindications, remonstrances and authoritative demands
which the great Protector addressed to an astonished and overawed
Europe. We can read them still. Many are insignificant, dealing with
petty personal details; but the best, especially those that deal with
the universal cause of Protestantism and freedom, rise on spiritual
wings far above the language of diplomacy and officialism, letting us
hear the authentic voice of Milton preluding the thunders of Cromwell
and Blake.

But the first important work required of Milton belonged rather to the
man of letters than to the Foreign Secretary. The horror aroused both
at home and abroad by the execution of Charles, already great enough in
itself to be very inconvenient to the Government, was greatly increased
by the publication of a book called _Eikon Basilike_ which purported to
be the work of the king himself and appeared immediately after his
death. It is a kind of religious portrait of Charles, reporting his
spiritual meditations and containing a justification of his life. Its
success was prodigious; fifty editions are said {58} to have appeared
within a year. It was obviously necessary that some reply should be
attempted; and the task was naturally assigned to Milton, who published
his _Eikonoklastes_, or Image-Breaker, in October. It is a mere
pamphlet, even more violent than the _Tenure of Kings_, not ashamed to
rake up such absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I by
Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic inconsistencies, such as that which
denounces Charles for the crime of refusing his consent to bills passed
by Parliament and forgets that the Government on whose behalf he is
writing established itself by a forcible suppression of the
Parliamentary majority. It survives now only by the curious passage in
it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of
Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the
puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip
Sidney's _Arcadia_" from whi