of Kings and Magistrates, largely written, of course, before the execution, and justifying it and all the other proceedings of the Army without any hesitation or compromise. It has some breathings of the Miltonic grandeur; but that is all. For the rest it is a mere party polemic written for the moment; and, as is the case with all pamphlets, the very qualities which gave it its contemporary interest make it unreadable to posterity. Part of it is a sweeping assertion of the inalienable right of the whole people to choose, judge and depose their rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few years later, when England had grown tired of the Army and the Puritans, he was to find as inconvenient as he had already found his early advocacy of the Presbyterian system in matters ecclesiastical. For the moment, however, the pamphlet made him a person of importance. Such a man, learned, eloquent, of high character, of visible sincerity, of utter fearlessness, was not an ally to be despised by a Government which had outraged public opinion at home and abroad. Within a few {57} weeks he was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State; and from henceforth till after the death of Cromwell he wrote the weightiest of the vindications, remonstrances and authoritative demands which the great Protector addressed to an astonished and overawed Europe. We can read them still. Many are insignificant, dealing with petty personal details; but the best, especially those that deal with the universal cause of Protestantism and freedom, rise on spiritual wings far above the language of diplomacy and officialism, letting us hear the authentic voice of Milton preluding the thunders of Cromwell and Blake.

But the first important work required of Milton belonged rather to the man of letters than to the Foreign Secretary. The horror aroused both at home and abroad by the execution of Charles, already great enough in itself to be very inconvenient to the Government, was greatly increased by the publication of a book called Eikon Basilike which purported to be the work of the king himself and appeared immediately after his death. It is a kind of religious portrait of Charles, reporting his spiritual meditations and containing a justification of his life. Its success was prodigious; fifty editions are said {58} to have appeared within a year. It was obviously necessary that some reply should be attempted; and the task was naturally assigned to Milton, who published his Eikonoklastes, or Image-Breaker, in October. It is a mere pamphlet, even more violent than the Tenure of Kings, not ashamed to rake up such absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I by Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic inconsistencies, such as that which denounces Charles for the crime of refusing his consent to bills passed by Parliament and forgets that the Government on whose behalf he is writing established itself by a forcible suppression of the Parliamentary majority. It survives now only by the curious passage in it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia" from which, however "full of worth and wit" in its own kind, it was a disgrace to the king to borrow a prayer at so grave an hour. Perhaps as a mark of their approval of Eikonoklastes, the Council of State gave Milton lodgings in Whitehall; and soon afterwards, in January 1650, called upon him to reply to another Royalist book which was making a {59} great stir. The result was the beginning of a political and personal controversy which lasted almost as long as it was safe for Milton to write about politics at all.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries great scholars had a position which they are never likely to occupy again. In those cosmopolitan days when an Italian governed France, and regiments and even armies were often commanded by foreigners, the honour of possessing a celebrated scholar was eagerly disputed not only by universities, but by cities, sovereign states, and even kings. Learning had then a market value in the world: for then, as always, especially since the invention of printing, European opinion was worth having on one's side; and in the days before journalism the practice was to hire distinguished scholars to write to a political brief. After the death of Charles I it was obviously the policy of Charles II to secure support by a powerful indictment of the iniquity of the rulers of the English Commonwealth. For this purpose his advisers obtained the services of a certain Claude de Saumaise, or, as he was generally called, Salmasius. This man, forgotten now except for Milton, was then a scholar of such fame that his presence was disputed between Oxford {60} and Venice, the French and the Dutch, between the Pope who wanted him at Rome and Christina of Sweden who was soon to persuade him to go to Stockholm. So it is not altogether surprising that Charles II was advised to pay him, and perhaps paid him, much more than he could afford for writing a book called Defensio Regia, which was to be before all Europe the public statement of the case against the new rulers of England. Milton spent a year in preparing his reply, which came out in the beginning of 1651. The Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio is now pleasanter reading for Milton's detractors than for those who honour his name. The unbridled insults which it heaps upon Charles I and still more upon Salmasius, for whom its least offensive titles are such as "blockhead," "liar" and "apostate," exceed even the wide limits of abuse customary in these days. Corruptio optimi pessima: such a man as Milton, if he once descends to the bandying of foul language, will beat the very bargemen themselves. But what astonished his contemporaries was not his violence but his courage. An unknown Englishman had dared to meet the giant of learning on his own ground and had at least held his own. It may have been partly as the result of this {61} that Salmasius no longer found Holland a pleasant place of residence and removed to Sweden. A more certain result is that the English David who had stood up to Goliath was from henceforth a European celebrity. With his usual proud courage he had put his own name on the title-page of his book, challenging to himself both the glories and the dangers that might come of it. He was not to be disappointed of either.

From henceforth he was in the thick of a violent controversy, which made so much more noise than it deserved in its own day that it need make none here. Replies came out both to his Eikonoklastes and to his Defensio: new books grew out of the controversy; Milton's nephew wrote on his behalf, and anonymous friends of Salmasius on his; the adversaries of Milton no more spared his character than he had spared theirs; a Defensio Secunda from his own hand seemed necessary, and appeared in 1654; and so with minor pamphlets and second editions we get on to the end of the weary controversy, in which for contemporaries there was perhaps some fire and light, but for us now little but smoke and darkness of confusion.

Such was the work which was Milton's chief occupation during the Commonwealth, to the {62} doing of which he deliberately sacrificed his eyesight. Within a year after the publication of his book against Salmasius its foreseen result was complete. From henceforth Milton was dependent upon the eyes of others. He was only forty-four when overtaken by this calamity. Yet his courage seems never to have failed him. "I argue not," he tells Cyriack Skinner in his sonnet—

  "Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
    Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
  Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
    The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
    In Liberty's defence, my noble