Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/32

 xxiv THE LIFE OF MILTON

accepted without hesitation. By so doing he put off once more, this time it might seem for ever, the possibility of fulfilling his secret purpose. He had not served in the armies of Parliament ; indeed, when the King's forces had advanced to Brentford and thrown London into a panic, he had not even gone out with the train-bands to Turnham Green to join in repulsing the foe, but had stayed at home instead and written a sonnet to Prince Rupert's troopers, beseeching them, in the name of the Muses, to spare his house from rapine. But if he had not chosen to shoulder a musket he had shown himself able to do yeoman's service with his quill. It may well have been with the thought of making good his failure to take up the sword in the time of his country's need, that he now laid at her feet the most elo- quent pen in Europe.

His first important service was a reply to the Eikon Basilike, a book purport- ing to have been written by the late King while in imprisonment, and now seized upon with devotion by the partisans of the exiled family. Against this " Royal Image " Milton wrote Ikonoklastes, the " Image-breaker." It is a work which reflects little credit upon the author. He imputes to the dead king, as one of his crimes, a taste for Shakespeare, and makes it a prime argument of his hypocrisy that one of the prayers which he was believed to have used in his captivity was taken from a passage a very beautiful and devout passage of Sidney's Ar- cadia. One of the curiosities of Milton's complex character was, as Lowell has reminded us, his power to force his conviction into the service of his enthusiasm. When it was necessary for him to defend his use of blank verse in Paradise Lost he repudiated the value of rhyme in toto, though his own works were there to gain- say him ; his own marriage having proved unfortunate, he was for wiping the whole institution out of existence. In the same spirit of false but absolutely sincere gen- eralization, he turns here upon his beloved Shakespeare and honored Sidney, be- cause he finds them made use of by a man whose memory he execrates.

Following upon these pamphlets came Milton's great opportunity for a European hearing in vindication of the Commonwealth, and he embraced it at a frightful price. Charles II., an exile at the Hague, had cast about for some man learned enough to support the cause of his house against the revolutionists. He found such a one in Salmasius, a world-famous scholar and a mighty man of Latin. Nobody to-day would dream of employing for such a task the services of a mere scholar, however colossal, but the seventeenth-century reverence for the pedantry of learn- ing gave the name of Salmasius a portentous weight. On the appearance of his book, the Defensio 2egia, Milton was instructed to prepare a rejoinder. He gave himself to the task with an ardor doubly inflamed by the magnitude of the quarrel and the reputation of his antagonist. He called his reply a Defense of the English People, but as we look at it to-day the great issues seem buried almost irrecover- ably beneath a mass of very unheroic personalities. Milton sneers at Salmasius's Latinity, twits him with subjection to his wife, and exhausts the vocabulary of thieves' Latin trying to find a name of contumely adequate to character his base- ness. In the midst of this work Milton's eyes showed signs of failing, and he was

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