CHAPTER VIII.

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: POETS, WITS, AND DRAMATISTS.

1. John Milton; his Life and Writings from the Year 1650.-2. Beginning of the Era of French Literary Influence in England.-3. The New Criticism; Thomas Rymer. 4. Edmund Waller.-5. Abraham Cowley; Henry Vaughan. — 6. Samuel Butler.-7. Andrew Marvel.-8. Sir William Davenant.-9. Dryden's Earlier Contemporaries. — 10. Thomas Killigrew; Sir Charles Sedley. — 11. Buckingham.-12. Dorset; Rochester.-13. Roscommon.-14. Mulgrave.— 15. Thomas D'Urfey. — 16. Sir George Etherege.-17. Samuel Pordage. - 18. Thomas Shadwell.-19. Elkanah Settle.-20. John Crowne.-21. Nathaniel Lee. 22. Thomas Otway.-23. Aphra Behn.-24. Catherine Philips.-25. John Dryden's Life and Writings.-26. Dryden's Later Contemporaries; William Wycherley.-27. William Congreve. - 28. John Vanbrugh.-29. George Farquhar.-30. Thomas Southern.-31. John Oldham.-32. Nahum Tate.-33. George Stepney. -34. Thomas Creech; Richard Duke.—35. Samuel Garth.-36. John Pomfret; William Walsh; William King; Thomas Brown; George Granville.

1. MILTON had been appointed Foreign Secretary to the Council of the Commonwealth, when, late in the year 1649, appeared a book, written in Latin, with the royal arms of England on its title-page, and entitled "Salmasius's Royal Defence of Charles I., addressed to his legitimate heir, Charles II." The author was Claude Salmasius, one of the most renowned scholars in Europe; and his book was an artful and powerful arraignment of the people of England for the crime of murdering their king.

Milton was called upon by the Council of State to reply to Salmasius. His health was already weak, the sight of his left eye already gone, and he was told he would lose his eyesight altogether if he undertook this labor. But to maintain before Europe in Latin, as he had maintained before his countrymen in English, what was for him, and, as he believed, for England, the living truth involved in the great struggle, with all its passions and misdeeds, was the next duty in his intellectual war.

Milton wrote his "Defence of the People of England," and the sight of the remaining eye then gradually vanished. Yet he said, in a sonnet to his old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, for Milton loved alike those who had taught him and those whom he had taught,

His

"Yet I argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied

In Liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe rings from side to side.

This thought might lead me through the world's vain masque,
Content, though blind, had I no better guide."

Defence for the People of England" was published early in 1651, and is, above all things, Milton's argument for the responsibility of kings against the theory of their divine right to an absolute command over their subjects. Salmasius said, "As to the pretended pact between a king and his subjects, certainly there is none in kingdoms born of force of arms, as almost all existing kingdoms are;" and he thought it simply ridiculous to say, as the English did, that a king was the minister and servant of his people, and waged not his own wars, but theirs. Milton wrote to convince the many and the few. To the thinkers the great body of argument was addressed; for them he appealed out of his own highest nature to their highest sense of right; but he satisfied the many, too, by blending with his answer vigorous combat of the kind that alone would win attention from the thoughtless. He not only cast back the contumelies of Salmasius against the English people, but scorned an advocacy that, upon a question of the welfare of humanity, was on a vital point, not what the writer thought, but what he had agreed to say. He trusted still to the fair battle of thought. At the end of the preface to his reply he said, “And I would entreat the illustrious States of Holland to take off their prohibition, and suffer the book to be publicly sold; for when I have detected the vanity, ignorance, and falsehood that it is full of, the farther it spreads the more effectually it will be suppressed." In the noble close to his "Defence," Milton urged on

the people of England that they must themselves refute their adversary, by a constant endeavor to outdo all men's bad words with their own good deeds. God had heard their prayers, but now, he said, you must show "as great justice, temperance, and moderation in the maintaining your liberty as you have shown courage in freeing yourselves from slavery."

This book first gave to Milton European reputation, and was commonly regarded as a complete victory over Salmasius. But in the next year, 1652, appeared "The Cry of Royal Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides," reputed to have been written by one Alexander Morus, a Scotch divine of doubtful character, actually written by one Pierre Dumoulin, a Frenchman, who was afterwards made prebendary of Canterbury. Salmasius, who had avowed his purpose of replying to Milton, died in 1653.

Second
He

Milton's rejoinder to this second attack forms his Defence for the People of England," published in 1654. calls Cromwell father of his country," and earnestly admonishes him that his country has intrusted to his hands her freedom. In the duties before him there are, said Milton, difficulties to which those of war are child's play. He must not suffer that liberty for which he encountered so many perils to sustain any violence at his own hands, or any from those of others; and he must look for counsel to men who had shared his dangers, men of the utmost moderation, integrity, and valor; not rendered savage or austere by the sight of so much bloodshed and of so many forms of death; but inclined to justice, to the reverence of the Deity, to a sympathy with human suffering, and animated for the preservation of liberty with a zeal strengthened by the hazards which for its sake they have encountered." Of his countrymen during the struggle they had gone through, Milton says here: "No illusions of glory, no extravagant emulation of the ancients, influenced them with a thirst for ideal lib. erty; but the rectitude of their lives and the sobriety of their habits taught them the only true and safe road to real liberty; and they took up arms only to defend the sanctity of the laws and the rights of conscience." Of himself he says: "No one ever knew me either soliciting any thing myself or through my

friends. I usually kept myself secluded at home, where my own property, part of which had been withheld during the civil commotions, and part of which had been absorbed in the oppressive contributions which I had to sustain, afforded me a scanty subsistence."

In 1654, gradual loss of sight in the remaining eye ended in Milton's complete blindness. The disease was not in the eyes themselves, which remained unimpaired, but in the nerve of sight; its exciting cause was exhaustion of nervous power by excessive use of his eyes in study from childhood.

The Commonwealth, held together by the might of Cromwell, fell after his death. His amiable son Richard called a Parliament which vanished before the power of the army, and Richard Cromwell passed from the Protectorate to private life. He lived to see the Revolution, and he died a country gentleman in 1712. The attempt to revive the Long Parliament as a central authority failed also to restrain the army. George Monk marched out of Scotland to subdue, as he said, the military tyranny in England, but it was soon evident that there was no hopeful way out of the discord but a restoration of the monarchy.

In these days John Milton, first fearing predominance of the Presbyterians, had addressed to the Parliament called by Richard Cromwell "A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes," showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion. To the revived Long Parliament, which succeeded the short-lived Parliament called by Richard Cromwell, Milton addressed "Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church,' in which he argued that each pastor should be maintained by his own flock. On the 20th of October, 1659, Milton wrote "A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth." A few months later he published a pamphlet called "The 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." He urged, to the last moment of hope, the first principles of what he said is not called amiss the good okl cause;"