Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/34

 xxvi THE LIFE OF MILTON

judge from the deep marital tenderness of these lines upon his '' late espoused saint," hers must have been the most gracious influence in the poet's adult life.

Up to the close of Cromwell's reign Milton continued, as a kind of Latin Secre- tary extraordinary, to indite those messages to foreign powers which made the period of the Protectorate the most dignified in the diplomatic history of England. The most famous of these was among the last, a letter to the Duke of Savoy con- cerning the Piedmontese massacre ; in its official way it is as impressive as the sonnet on the same subject in which Milton gave vent to his individual horror and indignation. His duties were nominally continued under Cromwell's son Richard ; but events were hastening with irresistible force toward the downfall of the Pro- tectorate and the recall of the King. Milton was one of the last to succumb to the logic of the situation. His attitude toward the great questions of Church and State had changed many times in the twenty years that were passed. He had begun as an Episcopalian with reservations ; he had written his first pamphlets in advo- cacy of a modified Presbyterianism ; next he had gone over to the " Root and Branch " party, and advocated complete disestablishment of the Church ; then, turning fiercely upon the Presbyterians, and declaring that " New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large," he had joined the Independents, and had finally pushed the thesis of this party to the length of complete toleration of religious opinion. But in all these changes, except the last, he had gone with the country. His mind, as Lowell says, had not so much changed as expanded to meet new national condi- tions. Though he had differed stoutly from Cromwell in his later policy, he had remained unshaken in his allegiance to the idea of popular government, even in the unpropitious form of a military dictatorship. Dismissed from his office by Gen- eral Monk in April, 1659, on the very eve of the return of the exiled court, he pub- lished his pamphlet entitled A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Com- monwealth. The very phrase was full of unconscious satire. Upon the blind poet, as he sat meditating through those days of public rejoicing, there rested a second blindness, that of the idealist resolute to see nothing but his ideal.

The King's return, however, at last became so imminent that the stoutest idealism had to succumb. Nobody knew how inclusive the royal clemency would prove to be, and Milton was too marked a man to abide the event with safety. The last glimpse we get of him for the next four months is in the shape of a conveyance of bond for four hundred pounds, to Cyriack Skinner, dated the day before the public proclamation of Charles in London. With the ready money thus furnished he went into hiding, Phillips informs us, at a friend's house in Bartholomew Close. On June 16 an order for his arrest was issued by the House of Commons, and two months later his EikonoJdastes and Defense of the English People were ordered burnt by royal proclamation. Strangely enough, however, in the final Bill of In- demnity his name is not mentioned. Why the author of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates should have been let off scot free from the vengeance which overtook so many men essentially less implicated, constitutes a historical puzzle which Pro- fessor Masson has labored in vain to solve. Andrew Marvell afterwards obtained

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