pieces composing the Apologia of regicide, the _Eikonoclastes_, the
controversy with Salmasius (written in Latin), and the postscript thereto,
devoted to the obscure Morus. And lastly come the pamphlets in which, with
singular want of understanding of the course of events, Milton tried to
argue Monk and the weary nation out of the purpose to shake off the heavy
yoke of so-called liberty. The _History of Britain_, the very agreeable
fragment on the _History of Muscovy_, the late _Treatise Against Popery_,
in which the author holds out a kind of olive branch to the Church of
England, in the very act of proclaiming his Arianism, and the two little
masterpieces already referred to, are independent of any such
classification. Yet even in them sometimes, as always in the others, _furor
arma ministrat_; and supplies them as badly as if he were supplying by
contract.

Nevertheless both Milton's faults and his merits as a prose writer are of
the most remarkable and interesting character. The former consist chiefly
in the reckless haste with which he constructs (or rather altogether
neglects the construction of) his periods and sentences, in an occasional
confusion of those rules of Latin syntax which are only applicable to a
fully inflected language with the rules necessary in a language so
destitute of inflections as English, and in a lavish and sometimes both
needless and tasteless adaptation of Latin words. All these were faults of
the time, but it is true that they are faults which Milton, like his
contemporaries Taylor and Browne, aggravated almost wilfully. Of the three
Milton, owing no doubt to the fury which animated him, is by far the most
faulty and uncritical. Taylor is the least remarkable of the three for
classicisms either of syntax or vocabulary; and Browne's excesses in this
respect are deliberate. Milton's are the effect of blind passion. Yet the
passages which diversify and relieve his prose works are far more beautiful
in their kind than anything to be found elsewhere in English prose. Though
he never trespasses into purely poetical rhythm, the solemn music of his
own best verse is paralleled in these; and the rugged and grandiose
vocabulary (it is particularly characteristic of Milton that he mixes the
extremest vernacular with the most exquisite and scholarly phrasing) is
fused and moulded with an altogether extraordinary power. Nor can we notice
less the abundance of striking phrase, now quaint, now grand, no