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it has less of unction than is to be found in some of Milton's earlier prose, there is more of the common-sense tone which possesses hardly less controversial value. I have extracted a passage of this kind; a protest in which, every allowance being made, there remains a rather bitter residuum, which may be said to contain the most forcible part of the argument.

Under the Committee of Safety which superseded the pretence of renewed Parliamentary Government, Milton's office had become to all purposes a sinecure; and his Letter to a Friend concerning The Ruptures of the Commonwealth (October 1659), was in point of fact only one among many contending attempts to solve a problem to which one hand alone held the master-key. Monk restored the Long Parliament in order that this "Parliament " might appoint him dictator. Early in March 1660 Milton published his Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the Inconveniences and Dangers of readmitting Kingship in this Nation. The plan which he now proposed was practically that of a permanent and therefore irresponsible Parliament together with a decentralisation of the administrative system. But of greater interest even than those features (the last of importance put forth by him) which drew down upon this treatise an arrowy sheet of criticisms such as hardly any of his previous political speculations had been asked to weather, including the burlesque "censure of the Rota," which reminds us that we are already approaching the age of Hudibras, is the firmness with which Milton here once more proclaims his fundamental political principles, among them liberty of conscience, at a time when he will know them to be in extreme, if not in hopeless, peril. I extract, as a concluding passage from Milton's political prose, one which has, in more senses than one, the prophetic note proper to a writer who he too-looked forward with no faltering eye to a Restoration.

"whom

Milton had taken comfort in the thought, that while his argument might commend itself to many "sensible and ingenuous men," he had perchance at the same time spoken to some God might raise of these stones to become children of liberty." Soon he stood among the ruins of the Commonwealth which he had served so amply and yet so freely; and, the period of danger which ensued overpast, his labours in the years remaining to him were "turned to peaceful end."

I pass by what he wrote or published in prose in these later

years of his life; including the brief prefatory note on that sort of Dramatic Poem which is called Tragedy, prefixed to his Samson Agonistes (1671), and the tract, provoked by the first Declaration of Indulgence, on True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration (1673), which, notwithstanding its precision of form, exhibits the historical instincts rather than the logical powers of the writer in its rejection, at any cost, of the toleration of "idolatry." One passage in this tract has, it must be allowed, a faint echo of the well-known ring, "At least, then, let them have leave to write in Latin."

I have thought it permissible, with the aid of Professor Masson's monumental work, to treat the prose writings of Milton in their historical connexion, so far as was possible within the slight framework of an introductory note. It is difficult to imagine that, although by profession, as well as by the character of his genius, a man of letters rather than a statesman, he could have approved of his treatises being primarily dealt with as a whole, in any other fashion. In him throbbed the pulse of the historic movement of his age, and what he wrote as a publicist he wrote for the sake of the matter which he essayed to mould. It could not have occurred to him to take thought of the form of his prose compositions in the first instance, or to speculate on the truism that the effect of things depends on the manner of saying them. The very "pitch" of his style he cannot, after the fashion of more than one eminent historian, have taken thought of accommodating to his themes, although it would contrariwise have been inconceivable to him— or, indeed, to any of the great prose writers of his age—to write down to a particular section of his public. Of his style, as of his matter, his own words hold good, that "though it be an irksome labour to write with industry and judicious pains that which neither weighed nor well-read, shall be judged, without industry or the pains of well-judging, by faction and the easy literature of custom and opinion: it shall be ventured yet."

That, however, a genius such as Milton's should clothe its products in a style of its own, whether the work (in his own phrase) of his "right hand" or of his "left," was at the same time in the nature of things. Upon Milton's prose style an excellent critic, quite recently taken away from us, rightly says that "the most diverse opinions have been pronounced," and necessarily so, "inasmuch as everything depends upon the point of view." Milton's own point of view was to give himself in his prose,

so far as the form admitted, wholly and unreservedly. Thus, as will be readily allowed, there are in Milton's prose works, English as well as Latin, passages of a rapt enthusiasm which, though rarer in occurrence, approach in effect the sublimities of his verse. On the other hand, his wrath and indignation—sometimes hardly to be distinguished from spite-set no bounds to the violence of their invective, and he allows his temper to have its own way in flouts and gibes. Too much has, I think, been made of the vituperative qualities of Milton's prose, as if they were of its essence; they are such in no other sense than that outside the restraint of verse he gave his nature free play, and in this, thanks perhaps to his city breeding, there was an element which finds expression in the copious diction of self-consciousness and (to use plain terms) of arrogant impatience. Again, coming forth as he did from his library, where at the time when he began to publish in prose he was intent upon a series of learned works chiefly in the Latin tongue, he brought his library and his Latin out with him into the open air. Many considerations help to explain the fact (which I suppose will hardly be disputed) that the Latinism of Milton's style was more marked than that of any other great writer's of this period. Among them was his constant habit of writing as well as reading Latin side by side with English, first in the pursuit of his regular literary and educational labours, then in the performance of his official duties as Foreign Secretary. Bacon's case had not been altogether dissimilar; but he had from his youth up been in close contact with public life, both Parliamentary and forensic. Milton's Ciceronianisms of construction, the prerogative position allowed by him to pronouns both relative and personal, and, above all, his favourite inversion of the usual English order of construction, where the governing verb precedes rather than follows a clause, or series of clauses, dependent upon it, argue a singularly retentive ear, perhaps also a preference for oratorical to historical models. He was not, I think, even in his later verse, altogether unconscious in some of his classicising mannerisms; but his peculiarities of construction are not, to my mind, so exceptional as they have frequently been asserted to be, nor are his English prose works so full of them as to warrant the censure that they spoil his style. His vocabulary, on the other hand, is abnormally prone to eccentric and occasionally unpleasing forms, not all of which can be set down to the adventurous curiosity which still affected the choice

of words in this, the last period, as it might almost be called, of the English Renascence. In both construction and vocabulary, it must be remembered, the age of experiment only passed away when the self-restraint of good taste imposed itself as a law, no longer violable with impunity, in the post-Restoration days. (It will be remembered how Milton himself, in a treatise in which he flings about him such forms as "affatuated" and "imbastardized" and "proditory" and "robustious," takes exception to the new-fangled word "demagogue.") Altogether, while it was indisputably not given to him, as it was to Pascal, to write a prose style with which no modern critic can find fault, his offences against perfection have been partly exaggerated and partly left insufficiently explained.

I am not sure but that both in syntax and diction the ease of Milton's style suffered from the absence of the controlling eye. Most of his prose was written when his sight was either threatening to leave him or had abandoned him altogether. His instincts were rhetorical; the predilections of his reading had probably followed the same bent; and he must, if he paused at all to consider the effect of what he had dictated, have asked for an echo of his own voice and its intentions. Nobody who has written much (in however humble a fashion) for his own oral delivery, but will concede it to be no easy task to write for delivery by others. I feel sure that the complaint frequently urged against the want of harmony in Milton's cadences is at least partially due to the difficulty experienced by casual readers in accommodating themselves, as they read, to a complex manner of eloquence more individual than that of Burke-not to mention Burke's imitators.

I do not deny, in conclusion, that there are traces of pedantry in Milton's prose style, as there are even in the most magnificent exemplars of his verse, and, I am willing to add, in his character and his career. They are most apparent when he descends; nor is it paradoxical that there should be a kind of greatness which best stands erect. Milton's colloquial sallies are at times such as might be expected from an excessive familiarity with epistolary Latin, at other times they are the efforts of a forced sportiveness too grim to be altogether agreeable. But even in these, and how infinitely more in the wealth of illustrations, images, and ideas lavished upon any subject which he is fain to treat, do we recognise the wealth of an imagination which seems at times, within the limits of a single sentence, to master diction and

syntax and all the conditions of written speech! To decry such a style as composite is to revive the short-sighted captiousness of an obsolete method of criticism, which was capable of analysing materials, but not of apprehending the power which transfuses what it has appropriated. Milton's prose, all exceptions taken, and all cavils allowed their force, remains the most extraordinary literary prose, and the most wonderful poet's prose, embodied in English literature.

A. W. WARD.