people trained in the
traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when England
had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back
the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his
left hand only. There are passages of fervid eloquence, where the style
swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rhythmical rise and fall to
it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer. But in general his
sentences are long and involved, full of inversions and latinized
constructions. Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic
lines. Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of
expediency and common sense, began with a formidable display of
learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the Fathers of the
Church for opinions in support of his own position. These authorities he
deployed at tedious length, and followed them up with heavy scurrilities
and "excusations," by way of attack and defense. The dispute between
Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I. was like a duel
between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous
maces. The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a
modern reader: _A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a
Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation_. The
most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech
for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are
of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy
Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on Toleration_,
he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of
discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden.
Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the
Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence which was his
official duty, and in the composition of his tract, _Defensio pro
Popululo Anglicano_, he overtaxed his eyes, and in 1654 became totally
blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640-1660 are
a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public
occasions. By the Elizabethans the sonnets had been used mainly in love
poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, "the thing became a
trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like F