the matter made much better by
the consideration that it is not so much ignorance as temper which is the
cause of this deformity. Lest it be thought that I speak harshly, let me
quote from the late Mr. Mark Pattison, a strong sympathiser with Milton's
politics, in complete agreement if not with his religious views, yet with
his attitude towards dominant ecclesiasticism, and almost an idolater of
him from the purely literary point of view. In "_Eikonoclastes_," Milton's
reply to _Eikon Basilike_, Mr. Pattison says, and I do not care to attempt
any improvement on the words, "Milton is worse than tedious: his reply is
in a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger which would have been always
unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly indecent." Elsewhere (and
again I have nothing to add) Mr. Pattison describes Milton's prose
pamphlets as "a plunge into the depths of vulgar scurrility and libel
below the level of average gentility and education." But the Rector of
Lincoln has not touched, or has touched very lightly, on the fault above
noted, the profound lack of humour that these pamphlets display. Others
have been as scurrilous, as libellous, as unfair; others have prostituted
literary genius to the composition of paid lampoons; but some at least of
them have been saved by the all-saving sense of humour. As any one who
remembers the dreadful passage about the guns in _Paradise Lost_ must know,
the book of humour was to Milton a sealed book. He has flashes of wit,
though not many; his indignation of itself sometimes makes him really
sarcastic. But humorous he is never.

Destitute of this, the one saving grace of polemical literature, he plunged
at the age of thirty-three into pamphlet writing. With a few exceptions his
production in this kind may be thrown into four classes,--the
_Areopagitica_ and the _Letter to Hartlib_ (much the best of the whole)
standing outside. The first class attacks prelatical government, and by
degrees glides, under the guise of apologetics for the famous
_Smectymnuus_, into a fierce and indecent controversy with Bishop Hall,
containing some of the worst examples of the author's deplorable inability
to be jocular. Then comes the divorce series, which, with all its varied
learning, is chiefly comic, owing to Milton's unfortunate blindness to the
fact that he was trying to make a public question out of private grievances
of the particular kind which most of all demand silence. Next rank the