Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/31

 LATIN SECRETARYSHIP, 1649-1659 xxiii

specious calm, he divined the storms which were still rolling up from the political horizon, and had dim prescience of the part he himself should be called upon to play in the drama of the King's death and Cromwell's sovereignty. Perhaps the springs of his fancy were dried up by the harassing years just past ; certainly the version of the nine psalms made at this time point to a state of extreme poetic sterility. Indeed, Milton was at no time rich in creative impulses from within. Endowed to an unmatchable degree with sheer voice, pure potentiality of expres- sion, he had to a less degree than many smaller men the kind of imagination which puts forth spontaneous and inevitable bloom in its season. The beautiful appari- tions of Coinus and Lycidas had been evoked from without ; so were the sterner and vaster lines of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes to arise in response to an occasion. But that occasion was to be no less than the overthrow of Puritan England, and for that the time was not ripe. However we explain the case, it is with a kind of impatient wonder that we see the poet, in this time of precious quiet, burdening himself with three huge tasks of compilation, a Latin dictionary, a complete history of England from the earliest times to his own day, and a vast body of divinity, or Methodical Digest of Christian Doctrine. It should in fair- ness be said, perhaps, that mere encyclopaedic scholarship held a much higher place in the seventeenth century than it does to-day. The immense reputation achieved by such men as Salmasius, Milton's future antagonist, apprises us how eager the world then was to set learning above wisdom. This prejudice of the age deter- mined the direction of Milton's effort ; the effort itself was doubtless prompted, as his school-teaching had formerly been, by a nervous desire to lose in busyness the impatience born of greater work deferred.

��LATIN SECRETARYSHIP, 1649-1659

THE time had now come when Milton's patriot zeal was to lift him to a place of eminence in the eyes of his countrymen. He had been known hitherto, second- arily, as a poet of promise, chiefly as a vigorous pamphleteer of rather startling and indecorous opinions ; but his work in neither kind had given him that " experience of great men " and that conversation with great events which he deemed necessary to the making of a poet. When he threw into the silence of consternation which followed the execution of the King at Whitehall, in January, 1649, his fearless de- fence of the regicides, entitled the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the eyes of the whole country turned towards him. His was the first powerful voice lifted in greeting, as it was to be the last lifted in desperate defence, of the free Common- wealth. In tacit recognition of his service Bradshaw's Council of State offered him the Latin Secretaryship. The duties were large and ill-defined, but chiefly consisted in the translating and inditing of correspondence with foreign powers, and the replying to seditious pamphleteers who attacked the new government. Milton

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