about to begin in earnest; and for a period of twenty years Britain was to be the scene of a social strife such as had been scarce paralleled in the world before. During these twenty years there was very little literature produced in England that was not polemical in its tenor. There were controversial treatises and pamphlets in abundance; there were also satires and songs for political purposes, and full of political allusions; but of pure history, pure philosophical writing, or pure poetry, there was little. The men of talent from whom literature of such kind was to be expected were either dispersed abroad, or, if they remained in England, were whirled along in the common agitation. In the lives of Shirley, Waller, Hobbes, Davenant, Cleveland, Denham, and Cowley, and even in those of men like Jeremy Taylor and Fuller, the effects of the civil wars of Charles's reign, as bending them somewhat, both in external and in internal respects, out of what might otherwise have been their course, may be traced without difficulty. But in the case of Milton the effect is infinitely more striking. But for the civil wars we should have known but half the man. In his case there was a preëstablished harmony of mind with the great national revolution' through which he had to pass; there were elements in his moral and intellectual being which actually waited for the convulsion; nay, of him alone, in the midst of the Davenants, and Cowleys, and Wallers, can it be said that there was something in his very notions of literature itself which, corresponding as it did by a profound affinity to the new Puritan spirit then beating in the heart of the English people, pointed for that very reason to a literary development which should be 66 no mere continuation of the dregs of Elizabethan wit, but an outburst as original intellectually as the Puritan movement was socially, and requiring partisanship with that movement as its explanation and comment. On the first manifest signs of that movement he consented, as he says, to lay aside his singing-robes" for a more convenient season, and "to leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts," in order to "embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes." He imagined that a year or two of such work, to which he felt that he was lending "only his left hand," would be all that would be required of him. But once engaged in the controversies of the time, he was led on and on; and for the space of full twenty years we see him only as a polemical prose-writer, giving and taking blows in the cause of the Revolution, and producing nothing at all in verse except an occasional Latin scrap or epigram, and a few English sonnets suggested by passing occurrences. To attempt here a full and connected narrative of this period of his life is evidently impossible; it will be sufficient to present a chronological scheme of the main facts, including a list of his successive publications. 1640-42 (Milton ætat. 31-33). — The Long Parliament met November 3, 1640. Milton had by this time changed his mode of life. The household at Horton having been broken up, and his father having gone to reside at Reading with his younger son Christopher, then a barrister-atlaw and of royalist politics, Milton had taken lodgings in the house of one Russell, a tailor, in St. Bride's Churchyard, Fleet Street. Here he took to lodge and board with him his two young nephews, Edward and John Philips, then about nine or ten years of age, the sons of his sister Anne, now married for the second time to a Mr. Agar of the Crown Office. The arrangement seems to have been one of mere kindness at first; but his friends having suggested to him that he might take a few more boys to educate, he removed in 1641 to a larger house in Aldersgate Street, situated in a garden, and out of the bustle of the city. Here he received some additional pupils, the sons of wealthy friends, and occupied his time partly in educating them after a peculiar system of his own, and partly in private studies. It was in these circumstances that he wrote his first pamphlet. Amid the numerous matters occupying the attention of Parliament, the trial of Strafford, &c., - that of church reform was paramount. The root of the evil, it was felt by the Puritans, was in the prelatical constitution of the Church; and already there were petitions and bills having for their object nothing less than an abolition of bishops, deans, and chapters, and all Episcopal forms, and a reconstruction of the Church of England after the Presbyterian model. Into this controversy Milton threw himself; and, the press being then free for such opinions, he published in 1641 a treatise or bulky pamphlet in two books, in the form of a letter to a friend, entitled Of Reformation, touching Church Discipline in England, and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it. The treatise answers to its name, and is throughout a vehement attack on Prelacy in its forms and essence. It helped to infuriate the controversy which was already waging. A defender of Episcopacy appeared in Hall, Bishop of Norwich. Hall was answered -- by a counterblast from five Puritan ministers, Stephen Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young (Milton's old tutor), Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow, who clubbed the initials of their names together so as to form the word "Smectymnuus"; and Archbishop Usher came to the rescue of Hall, and wrote a confutation of Smectymnuus. Milton feeling that the prelates were likely to have the best of the debate, both in learning and in literary talent, unless he interfered, grappled with Usher and his associates in two additional pamphlets: the one, entitled Of Prelatical Episcopacy, addressed mainly to the question of the apostolical origin of Episcopacy; the other, which is much the longer, entitled The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy. Nor was this all. Bishop Hall having himself written a reply to Smectymnuus, entitled The Remonstrant's Defence, Milton produced a fourth tract, written in the form of a dialogue, and entitled Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence, &c.; and finally, these "Animadversions" having drawn forth an anonymous reply, supposed to be by a son of Bishop Hall, in which Milton's character was scurrilously attacked, the controversy was wound up (1642) by Milton's Apology against a Pamphlet called "A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus." 1643-45 (Milton ætat. 34-36). The civil war had now fairly begun. The king had his headquarters at Oxford, and his troops and those of the Parliament were fighting for the possession of the country. The Westminster Assembly had met to help the Parliament in discussing the religious question. In the midst of this confusion Milton took a step usually taken in quieter times. "About Whitsuntide" (1643), says his nephew Philips," he took a journey into the country, nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was more than a journey of recreation. After a month's stay from home, he returns a married man who set out a bachelor; his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a justice of the peace of Forest Hill, near Shotover in Oxfordshire." There had been a previous acquaintance and some money transactions between the two families. What occurred after the marriage is known to every one. Being no Minerva, but a simple and apparently rather stupid country-girl, "accustomed to dance with king's officers at home," the young wife found the life she was leading intolerable, and could see nothing in her husband but a man of harsh and morose ways, whom she could not understand, and who was always at his books. She asked leave to return home on a short visit, and, having gone, she flatly refused to come back. Her parents abetted her in the refusal, and seem, among other things, to have alleged their son-inlaw's politics as a reason, they being royalist . Milton's conduct on the occasion was most characteristic. Where other men would have remained quiet, or, if so inclined, have consoled themselves in secret, he made his case the matter of public argument. In a subsequent sketch, indeed, of his own life about this time, he speaks as if .. was less any private reason, than the systematic prosecution of a path of activity which he had marked out for himself, that led him to the public discussion in which he now engaged. While other men were fighting for liberty, he says, he |