Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/241

Rh impress of his unique, intense, and exalted personality. The "dread voice," which had spoken already in Lycidas, thundered in sublime and truculent periods against Episcopacy in Of Reformation in England (1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), Animadversions on the Remonstrants' Defence against Smectymnuus (a scurrilous onslaught upon Hall), the Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty (1644), and an Apology for Smectymnuns (1642). The Reason of Church Government is brightened by an eloquent apologia for entering on controversy, and a discussion of the forms appropriate for a great poem, and of the high function of poetry. The Apology for Smectymnuus contains a similar parenthetic defence of his own character, his college career, and his life of studious retirement at Horton—passages in which prose of an exalted beauty that has no parallel outside the prophetic books in the English Bible is found side by side with abuse unmeasured, pedantic, and even petty.

Milton did not long keep in line with his Presbyterian friends. In the Areopagitica, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644), the noblest, purest, most restrained and ordered of his prose writings, it is already for him almost "out of controversy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us, both name and thing." And it was not a purely abstract zeal for liberty of thought which evoked his eloquent appeal and aroused his impatience of presbyters, but the desire to speak his mind freely on a subject that touched him closely; for in the same year he issued