shire, the center of Royalist force and sentiment. Milton apparently thought of marrying again, but after the ruin of the king's cause in 1645 became reconciled to his wife and received both her and her distressed kindred. She bore him several children before her death in 1652. He never directly refers to her, but passages in the divorce tracts and his treatment of the characters of Eve and Dalila have been thought to reflect his feeling toward a union which can hardly have been one of perfect sympathy. Certainly, on the subject of marriage he gave particular though not unique evidence of his propensity for making every matter he touched, however general its scope, seem of most passionate concern to himself. Yet if we knew nothing of his own experience, we could justly say that in proposing at this juncture to reform marriage he was merely elaborating his conception of liberty from within in relation to a specific problem in which he and others had long been interested.

The problem of education was a similar one, and Milton treated it, though more briefly, from the same point of view. He had written college themes on the subject and would revert to it repeatedly in his later writings. At the moment, there was some possibility that Parliament itself might take it up, and Samuel Hartlib, an admirer of Comenius, elicited from Milton the small tract "Of Education" (March, 1644). Education as Milton conceived it was properly merely such training as would enable minds as vigorous as his own to learn most rapidly the "solid things" he desired to know, the things most useful to a free spirit in a society of free spirits. For languages, not as instruments but as ends in themselves, and for the logic and metaphysics of the schools, he has utmost contempt. One should study not Aristotle but the subjects Aristotle himself studied. One should study God's creation as the best means to know God. Thus might a

man be enabled "to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war."

The divorce tracts almost immediately involved Milton in the controversy which had meanwhile begun to rage over liberty of thought and expression. The Presbyterians of the Assembly, notwithstanding his advice, set forth to formulate a uniform doctrine and a unified government for the church. But included in their number were five Independent ministers who had become accustomed among the English exiles in Holland to a decentralized or congregational system. Desiring the same freedom in England and assured that they could not get it from the Assembly, they appealed to Parliament and the public by publishing an "Apologeticall Narration" (January, 1644). This was in effect a challenge to the ancient authority of the clergy over opinion. The Reformation, bringing with it the translation and publication of the Bible, had by this time enormously increased the number of persons literate in the vernacular. Though the press, under the control of the Stationers' Company and the Star Chamber, had long remained secondary or ancillary to the church, the ferment of the present crisis caused printing-presses and printed matter to multiply prodigiously and the old system of licencing and censorship completely to break down. A flood of books and pamphlets poured forth, Milton's among them, urging all manner of new opinions and changes in religion and government. Roused by the clergy and the Stationers' Company, Parliament had (June, 1643) just adopted a new ordinance for the appointment of proper persons from whom licence to print must be secured. But some offenders, notably Milton, continued to disobey the ordinance. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" was a particular subject of complaint. Now the significance

of such conditions became dramatically clear when respectable divines like Goodwin and his associates in a matter pertaining to the church would venture to appeal from the clergy to the public through the press. There followed an outburst of pamphlets, many of them necessarily unlicenced, arguing bitterly for and against religious toleration and freedom of the press and the pulpit, a controversy which lost nothing of its significance as Cromwell's army showed that a measure of toleration and independency could win victories in the field whatever might be said against it on the floor of the Assembly.

This controversy Milton entered in November, 1644, by publishing without licence an address to parliament demanding that the licencing ordinance be revoked. "Areopagitica" was not, however, more bold than many another product of the teeming press of 1644. It attracted little attention at the time. For after times it gave enduring expression to that belief in the supreme usefulness of free thought which the Puritan spirit has so often asserted and so often denied. "Areopagitica" assumes that our prime concern is to seek happiness in this world. In order to do so, we must be ever on the alert to know and understand the truth about ourselves and our world, not one man or one class of men at any one time for other men but each man for himself in every age by his own effort during each moment of existence. This is fate. Life is by necessity one continued act of choice between freedom and slavery. It is not enough that truth is; truth must be sought and chosen, and the whole of experience must be kept open to each man that he may seek and choose for himself. Books are a part, perhaps the highest part, of life; life is, as it were, a book. No page may be stricken out lest by that loss someone lose something he needs to know. Truth cannot be known without untruth, good without evil. Not to know both is not to know either; a man may be a

"heretic in the truth." Therefore no book may safely be suppressed. Even bad books are a part of the entirety of experience. Suppression, the licencing of books by members of a priestly caste, is an invention of the Roman church when its priests, having renounced their own intellectual freedom, lost the power to know truth and make it prevail by the only possible means, those of the mind and the spirit, and sought instead to enslave others by tyranny. Now that England is emerging from her long night of ignorance, it is time that such tyranny be destroyed.

"Areopagitica" showed where Milton would be found. in the next act of the national struggle. He was still preparing for the great poem. He published his minor poems in 1645. He would turn aside now and then to compose a memorable sonnet. But Cromwell and his army were marching in the direction which the poet would have' taught them to take and in which he must follow. When, therefore, they had got the king in their grasp and the time was ripe for dealing boldly with him once for all, Milton was ready with his "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" (February, 1649) to prove that Charles, being a tyrant, law and right demanded his removal and punishment, if not by the magistrate then by any who had the power. Immediately Milton's services were officially engaged in the support of the new government. As so-called Latin secretary his duty was to put into Latin the communications of the revolutionary state with foreign powers, but also to defend it before public opinion at home and abroad. "Eikonoklastes" (October, 1649) was, so to speak, a semi-official reply to "Eikon Basilike," a book purporting to consist of meditations and prayers by the dead king, now become the martyr of the royalists. "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano" (April, 1651) and "Defensio Secunda" (May, 1654) were written in defence of

the Commonwealth, "Pro se Defensio" (1655) in defence of Milton himself, against enemies abroad. "Defensio Secunda" contains two passages of particular interest to the modern reader. In the first Milton once more reviews the motives and achievements of his own career in the promotion of "liberty from within." In the second he draws the characters of Cromwell and the great chieftains of the Commonwealth, urging them to go on rebuilding the state in such liberty.

Milton went blind in writing the "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano," but he continued to serve the government until 1660. Cromwell ruled and died, and the Commonwealth dissolved in chaos. At the very last in three final pamphlets, Milton made a forlorn effort to show how liberty might still be secured. Monk's troopers were in London when the "Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth" (February-April, 1660) was being published, and Charles II was being ushered in to the relief of a people wearied of heroics if not of freedom. Milton hid for a time, but was then left unmolested to write the poem he had planned in his youth and had often promised the English people should be written when they had triumphed over tyranny.

In

He had already compiled a treatise, "De Doctrina Christiana" (published 1825), in which he set down the scriptural and theological basis for his doctrine of liberty. "Paradise Lost" (1667) and “Paradise Regained" (1671) the freedom which England had forsworn was displayed as nevertheless the law of God's universe. In "Samson Agonistes" (1671) came a supreme rendering of the human tragedy of defeat which Milton could not but believe to be the ultimate proof of the fate which requires that man save himself by freeing his own spirit from the powers of this world. He died on November 8, 1674. The language of his thought and imagination was that of scripture and