hile my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for
liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest,
and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the
various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had
what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed
grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval
discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and
philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.
He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in
the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when
England had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to
welcome back the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he
had the use of his left hand only. There are passages of fervid
eloquence, where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a
rithmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of
Common Prayer. But in {155} general his sentences are long and
involved, full of inventions and latinized constructions. Controversy
at that day was conducted on scholastic lines. Each disputant, instead
of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency and common sense,
began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin
authors and the fathers of the Church for opinions in support of his
own position. These authorities he deployed at tedious length and
followed them up with heavy scurrilities and "excusations," by way of
attack and defense. The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the
execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two knights in full
armor striking at each other with ponderous maces. The very titles of
these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader: _A
Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble
Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation_. The most
interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech for
the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are
of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy
Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on
Toleration_, he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the
modern method of discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and
Locke and Dryden. Under th