The office into which Milton was now inducted is called in the Council books that of Secretary for foreign tongues. Its duties were chiefly the translation of despatches from and to foreign governments. The degree of estimation in which the Latin secretary was held may be measured by the amount of salary assigned him. For while the English chief Secretary had a salary of 730/. (=22001. of our day), the Latin Secretary was paid only 2887. 13s. 6d. (=900l.). For this, not very liberal pay, he was told that all his time was to be at the disposal of the government. Lincoln's Inn Fields was too far off for a servant of the Council who might have to attend meetings at seven in the morning. He accordingly migrated to Charing Cross, now become again Charing without the cross, this work of art having been an early (1647) victim of religious barbarism. In November he was accommodated with chambers in Whitehall. But from these he was soon ousted by claimants more considerable or more importunate, and in 1651 he removed to a pretty garden-house" in Petty France, in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. James's Park. The house was extant till 1877, when it disappeared, the last of Milton's many London residences. It had long ceased to look into St. James's Park, more than one row of houses, encroachments upon the public park, having grown up between. The gardenhouse had become a mere ordinary street house in York Street, only distinguished from the squalid houses on sither side of it by a tablet affixed by Bentham, inscribed "sacred to Milton, prince of poets." Petty France lost its designation in the French Revolution, in obedience to childish petulance which obliterates the name of any one who may displease you at the moment, and became one of the seventeen York Streets of the metropolis. Soon after the re-baptism of the street, Milton's house was occupied by William Hazlitt, who rented it of Bentham. Milton had lived in it for nine years, from 1651 till a few weeks before the Restoration. Its nearness to Whitehall, where the Council sat, was less a convenience than a necessity.

For Milton's life now became one of close attention and busy service. As Latin secretary and Weckherlin's successor, indeed, his proper duties were only those of a clerk or translator. But his aptitude for business of a literary kind soon drew on him a great variety of employment. The demand for a Latin translation of a despatch was not one of frequent occurrence. The Letters of the Parliament, and of Oliver and Richard, Protectors, which are. intrusively, printed among Milton's works, are but one hundred and thirty-seven in all. This number is spread over ten years, being at the rate of about 14 per year; most of them are very short. For the purpose of a biography of Milton, it is sufficient to observe that the dignified attitude which the Commonwealth took up towards foreign powers lost none of its elevation in being conveyed in Miltonic Latin. Whether satisfaction for the murder of an envoy is to be extorted from the arrogant court of Madrid, or an apology is to be offered to

a humble count of Oldenburg for delay in issuing a salvaguardia which had been promised, the same equable dignity of expression is maintained, equally remote from crouching before the strong and hectoring the weak.

His translations were not all the duties of the new secretary. He must often serve as interpreter at audiences of foreign envoys. He must superintend the semi-official organ, the Mercurious Politicus. He must answer the manifesto of the Presbyterians of Ireland. The Observations on the peace of Kilkenny are Milton's composition, but from instructions. By the peace the Irish had obtained home rule in its widest extent, release from the oath of supremacy, and the right to tie their ploughs to the tail of the horse. The same peace also conceded to them the militia, a trust which Charles I, had said he would not devolve on the Parliament of England, "not for an hour!" Milton is indignant that these indulgences, which had been refused to their obedience, should have been extorted by their rebellion and the massacre of " 200,000 Protestants." This is an exaggeration of a butchery sufficiently tragic in its real proportions, and in a later tract (Eikonoklastes) he reduces it to 154,000. Though the savage Irish are barbarians, uncivilized and uncivilizable, the Observations distinctly affirm the new principle of toleration. Though popery be a superstition, the death of all true religion, still conscience is not within the cognizance of the magistrate. The civil sword is to be employed against civil offences only. In adding that the one exception to this toleration is atheism, Milton is careful to state this limitation as the toleration professed by Parliament, and not as his private opinion.

So well satisfied were the Council with their secretary's Observations on the peace of Kilkenny, that they next imposed upon him a far more important labor, a reply to the Eikon Basiliké. The execution of Charles I. was not an act of vengeance, but a measure of public safety. If, as Hallam affirms, there mingled in the motives of the managers any strain of personal ill-will, this was merged in the imperious necessity of securing themselves from this vengeance, and what they had gained from being taken back. They were alarmed by the reaction which had set in, and had no choice but to strengthen them selves by a daring policy. But the first effect of the removal of the King by violence was to give a powerful stimulus to the reaction already in progress. The groan which burst from the spectators before Whitehall on January 29, 1649, was only representative of the thrill of horror which ran through England and Scotland in the next ten days. This reactionary feeling found expression in a book entitled Eikon Basilike, the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitude and sufferings.' The book was composed by Dr. Gauden but professed to be an authentic copy of papers written by the King It is possible that Gauden may have had in his hands some written scraps of the King's meditations. If he had such, he only used them as hints to work upon. Gauden was a churchman whom his friends

"

might call liberal and his enemies time-serving. He was a church, man of the stamp of Archbishop Williams, and preferred bishops and the Common-prayer to presbyters and extempore sermons, but did not think the difference between the two of the essence of religion. In better times Gauden would have passed for broad, though his latitudinarianism was more the result of love of ease than of philoso phy. Though a royalist, he sat in the Westminster Assembly, and took the covenant, for which compliance he nearly lost the reward which, after the Restoration, became his due. Like the university. bred men of his day. Gauden was not a man of ideas, but of style. In the present instance the idea was supplied by events. The saint and martyr, the man of sorrows, praying for his murderers, the King who renounced an earthly kingdom to gain a heavenly, and who in return for his benefits received from an unthankful people a crown of thorns this was the theme supplied to the royalist advocate. Poet's imagination had never invented one more calculated to touch the popular heart. This imitatio Christi, to which every private Christian theoretically aspires, had been realized by a true prince upon an actual scaffold with a graceful dignity of demeanor of which it may be said that nothing in life became him like the leaving it.

This moving situation Gauden, no mean stylist, set out in the best academical language of the period. Frigid and artificial it may read now, but the passion and pity. which is not in the book, was supplied by the readers of the time. And men are now dainty as to phrase when they meet with an expression of their own sentiments. The readers of Eikon Basiliké-and forty-seven editions were necessary to supply the demand of a population of eight millions-attributed to the pages of the book emotions raised in themselves by the tragic catastrophe. They never doubted that the meditations were those of the royal martyr, and held the book, in the words of Sir Edward Nicholas, for "the most exquisite, pious, and princely piece ever written." The Parliament thought themselves called upon to put forth a reply. If one book could cause such a commotion of spirits, another book could allay it-the ordinary illusion of those who do not consider that the vogue of a printed appeal depends, not on the contents of the appeal, but on a predisposition of the public temper.

Selden, the most learned man, not only of his party, but of Englishmen, was first thought of, but the task was finally assigned to the Latin Secretary. Milton's ready pen completed the answer, Eikonoklastes, a quarto of 242 pages, before October, 1649. It is, like all answers, worthless as a book. Eikonoklastes, the Image-breaker, takes the Image, Eikon, paragraph by paragraph, turning it round, and asserting the negative. To the Royalist view of the points in dispute Milton opposes the Independent view. A refutation, which follows each step of an adverse book, is necessarily devoid of originality. But Milton is worse than tedious; his reply is in a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger, which would have

been always unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly in

decent

Milton must, however, be acquitted of one charge which has been made against him, viz., that he taunts the King with his familiarity with Shakespere. The charge rests on a misunderstanding. In quoting Richard III. in illustration of his own meaning, Milton says, “I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the King might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the closest companion of these his solitudes, William Shakespere." Though not an overt gibe, there certainly lurks an insinuation to Milton's Puritan readers, to whom stage plays were an abomination-an unworthy device of rhetoric, as appealing to a superstition in others which the writer himself does not share. In Milton's contemptuous reference to Sidney's Arcadia as a vain amatorious poem, we feel that the finer sense of the author of L'Allegro has suffered from immersion in the slough of religious and political faction.

Gauden, raking up material from all quarters, had inserted in his compilation a prayer taken from the Arcadia. Milton mercilessly works this topic against his adversary. It is surprising that this plagiarism from so well-known a book as the Arcadia should not have opened Milton's eyes to the unauthentic character of the Eikon. He alludes, indeed, to a suspicion which was abroad that one of the royal chaplains was a secret coadjutor. But he knew nothing of Gauden at the time of writing the Eikonoklastes, and it is probable he never came to know. The secret of the authorship of the Eikon was well kept, being known only to a very few persons-the two royal brothers, Bishop Morley, the Earl of Bristol, and Clarendon. These were all safe men, and Gauden was not likely to proclaim himself an impostor. He pleaded it, however, successfully as a claim to preferment at the Restoration, when the Church spoils came to be partitioned among the conquerors, and he received the bishopric of Exeter. A bishopric-because less than the highest preferment could not be offered to one whose pen had done such signal service; and Exeterbecause the poorest see (then valued at 500l. a year) was good enough for a man who had taken the covenant and complied with the usurping government. By ceaseless importunity the author of the Eikon Basiliké obtained afterwards the see of Worcester, while the portion of the author of Eikonoklastes was poverty, infamy, and calumny. A century after Milton's death it was safe for the most popular writer of the day to say that the prayer from the Arcadia had been intepolated in the Eikon by Milton himself, and then by him charged upon the King as a plagiarism. (Johnson, Lives of the Poets.)

CHAPTER IX.

MILTON AND SALMASIUS-BLINDNESS.

THE mystery which long surrounded the authorship of Eikon Basiliké lends a literary interest to Milton's share in that controversy which does not belong to his next appearance in print. Besides, his pamphlets against Salmasius and Morus are written in Latin, and to the general reader in England and America inaccessible in consequence. In Milton's day it was otherwise; the widest circle of readers could only be reached through Latin. For this reason, when Charles II. wanted a public vindication of his father's momory, it was indispensable that it should be composed in that language. The Eikon was accordingly turned into Latin, by one of the royal chaplains, Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. But this was not enough; a defence in form was necessary, an Apologia Socratis, such as Plato composed for his master after his death. It must not only be written in Latin, but in such Latin as to ensure its being read.

In 1647 Charles II. was living at the Hague, and it so happened that the man who was in the highest repute in all Europe as a Latinist was professor at the neighboring university of Leyden. Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise) was commissioned to prepare a manifesto, which should be at once a vindication of Charles's memory, and an indictment against the regicide government. Salmasius was a man of enormous reading and no judgment, He says of himself that he wrote Latin more easily than his mother tongue (French). And his Latin was all the more readable because it was not classical or idiomatic. With all his reading-and Isaac Casaubon had said of him when in his teens that he had incredible erudition-he was still, at sixty, quite unacquainted with public affairs, and had neither the politician's tact necessary to draw a state paper as Clarendon would have drawn it, nor the literary tact which had enabled Erasmus to command the ear of the puplic, Salmasius undertook his task as a professional advocate, though without pay, and Milton accepted the duty of replying as advocate for the Parliament, also without reward; he was fighting for a cause which was not another's, but his own.

Salmasius's Defensio regia-that was the title of his book-reached England before the end of 1649. The Council of State, in very unnecessary alarm, issued a prohibition. On 8th January, 1650, the Council ordered "that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the book of Salmasius." Early in March, 1651, Milton's answer, entitled Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, was out.

Milton was as much above Salmasius in mental power as he was inferior to him in extent of book knowledge. But the conditions of retort which he had chosen to accept neutralized this superiority. His