e Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin
Secretary to the Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence
which was his official duty, and in the composition of his tract, {156}
_Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, he overtasked his eyes, and in 1654
became totally blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the
years 1640-1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly
called forth by public occasions. By the Elisabethans the sonnet had
been used mainly in love poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth,
"the thing became a trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political
leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the
best is, perhaps, the sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois
Protestants--"a collect in verse," it has been called--which has the
fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors
of Israel. Two were on his own blindness, and in these there is not
one selfish repining, but only a regret that the value of his service
is impaired--

"Will God exact day labor, light denied?"

After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while
in peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But

"On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with dangers compassed round
And solitude,"

he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most
heroic and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before
he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King {157} Arthur, and
again a sacred tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments
finally took shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in
1667. This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant
Christianity. It was Milton's purpose to

"assert eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men,"

or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This
gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the _Paradise
Lost_, which injure its effect as a poem. His "God the father turns a
school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "God's good
boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam
himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is
somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon
whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own
nature, and whose words of defia