Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/243

Rh Edwards declared in his Gangræna (1646), "go from the laws and constitution of kingdoms, and will be governed by rules according to nature and right reason." To Milton, in like manner, "the law of nature is the only law of laws truly and properly to all mankind fundamental: the beginning and the end of all government:  to which no parliament or people that will thoroughly reform but must have recourse." And to the defence of this position, and the denunciation of kings, he brought the temper and the "topics" of classical antiquity, the sentiment which made Hobbes declare, "I think I may truly say, there was never anything so dearly bought as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues."

But Milton was not one of the great thinkers of the century. He had not the philosophic breadth of Hooker, or the penetrating if limited vision of Hobbes. His pamphlets are read not for their political wisdom, or because they represent the feeling of the great mass of Englishmen on either side, but because of the high and confident temper of their faith in freedom and reason, the deep interest of the "autobiographical oases," and the strength and beauty of their prose. Milton's prose is pedantic in structure and frequently scurrilous in phraseology, but it rises to heights English prose has not often attained. His command of word, phrase, and figure, learned and poetical, homely and sublime, is unlimited; and if the rhythm of his sentences is not as regular as Hooker's and Browne's, or so flowing