become a humble but necessary wheel
of the machinery of administration, the Orpheus among the Argonauts of
the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER V.

Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649. He
removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his
labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in
Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which
but a fragment now remains. His first performance was in some measure a
false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg,
clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded by that body that
the English envoy never formally delivered it. An epistle to the Dutch
on the murder of the Commonwealth's ambassador, Dorislaus, by refugee
Cavaliers, had a better reception; and Milton was soon engaged in
drafting, not merely translating, a State paper designed for the
press--observations on the peace concluded by Ormond, the Royalist
commander in Ireland, with the confederated Catholics in that country,
and on the protest against the execution of Charles I. volunteered by
the Presbytery of Belfast. The commentary was published in May, along
with the documents. It is a spirited manifesto, cogent in enforcing the
necessity of the campaign about to be undertaken by Cromwell. Ireland
had at the moment exactly as many factions as provinces; and never,
perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter
confusion. Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be "an
eagle towering in his pride of place," but he may seem to have
degenerated into the "mousing owl" when he pounced upon newswriters and
ferreted unlicensed pamphlets for sedition. True, there was nothing in
this occupation formally inconsistent with anything he had written in
the "Areopagitica"; yet one wishes that the Council of State had
provided otherwise for this particular department of the public service.
Nothing but a sense of duty can have reconciled him to a task so
invidious; and there is some evidence of what might well have been
believed without evidence--that he mitigated the severity of the
censorship as far as in him lay. He was not to want for better
occupation, for the Council of State was about to devolve upon him the
charge of answering the great Royalist manifesto, "Eikon Basilike."

The controversy respecting the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" is a
remarkable instance of the d