Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/98

 62 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS against the Scotch ; and we may suppose Milton to have been watching the course of events with profound anxiety, not without some anticipation of the patriotic labor which awaited him. Meantime he occupied himself with the edu- cation of his sister's two sons, and soon after, by way of obtaining an honorable maintenance, increased the number of his pupils. In 1641 he conducted his defence of ecclesiastical liberty, in a series of attacks upon episcopacy. These are written in a bitter spirit of abusive hostility, for which we seek an insufficient apology in his exclusive converse with a party which held bishops in abhorrence, and in the low personal respectability of a large portion of the episcopal bench. At Whitsuntide, in the year 1643, having reached his thirty-fifth year, he mar- ried Mary Powell, a young lady of good extraction in the county of Oxford. In 1644 he wrote his " Areopagitica, a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing." This we are to consider in the light of an oral pleading, or regular oration, for he tells us expressly [Def. 2] that he wrote it " ad justae orationis modum." It is the finest specimen extant of generous scorn. And very remarkable it is, that Milton, who broke the ground on this great theme, has exhausted the arguments which bear upon it. He opened the subject : he closed .it. And were there no other monument of his patriotism and his genius, for this alone he would deserve to be held in perpetual veneration. In the following year, 1645, was published the first collection of his early poems ; with his sanction, undoubtedly, but probably not upon his suggestion. The times were too full of anxiety to allow of much encour- agement to polite literature ; at no period were there fewer readers of poetry And for himself in particular, with the exception of a few sonnets, it is probable that he composed as little as others read, for the next ten years ; so great were his political exertions. In 1649, soon after King Charles was put to death, the Council of State re- solved to use the Latin tongue in their international concerns, instead of French. The office of Latin Secretary, therefore, was created, and bestowed upon Milton. His hours from henceforth must have been pretty well occupied by official labors He was one of the most prominent men in his party, a close friend to Cromwell, who frequently visjted him ; and his advice was sought on all questions of impor- tance. Yet at this time he undertook a service to the state, more invidious, and perhaps more perilous, than any in which his politics ever involved him. On the very day of the king's execution, and even below the scaffold, had been sold the earliest copies of a work admirably fitted to shake the new government, and for the sensation which it produced at the time, and the lasting controversy which it has engendered, one of the most remarkable known in literary history. This was the " Eikon Basilike, or Royal Image," professing to be a series of meditations drawn up by the late king, on the leading events from the very beginning of the national troubles. Appearing at this critical moment, and co-operating with the strong re- action of the public mind, already effected in the king's favor by his violent death, this book produced an impression absolutely unparalleled in any age. Fifty thou- sand copies, it is asserted, were sold within one year ; and a posthumous power was