s extended
discussion of the question of divorce. He speaks, too, almost entirely in
the interest of husbands. With him woman is not complementary to man, but
his inferior, to be cherished if obedient, to minister to her husband's
welfare, but to have her resolute spirit broken after the manner of
Petruchio, the shrew-tamer. In all this, however, Milton was eminently a
type of the times. It was the canon law of the established Church of
England at which he aimed, and he endeavored to lead the parliament to
legislation upon the most sacred ties and relations of human life.
Happily, English morals were too strong, even in that turbulent period, to
yield to this unholy attempt. It was a day when authority was questioned,
a day for "extending the area of freedom," but he went too far even for
emancipated England; and the mysterious power of the marriage tie has
always been reverenced as one of the main bulwarks of that righteousness
which exalteth a nation.

His apology for Smectymnuus is one of his pamphlets against Episcopacy,
and receives its title from the initial letters of the names of five
Puritan ministers, who also engaged in controversy: they were Stephen
Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcome, William Spenston.
The Church of England never had a more intelligent and relentless enemy
than John Milton.

OTHER PROSE WORKS.--Milton's prose works are almost all of them of an
historical character. Appointed Latin Secretary to the Council, he wrote
foreign dispatches and treatises upon the persons and events of the day.
In 1644 he 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 portraitu