this almost inflamed hostility
in the case of a man with such love of beauty and passion for
architecture and music as always abided in Milton, and who could write:

'But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters' pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy-proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim, religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced quire below,
In service high and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before my eyes.'

Here surely is proof of an aesthetic nature beyond most of our modern
raptures; but none the less, and at the very same time, Rome was for
Milton the 'grim wolf' who, 'with privy paw, daily devours apace.' It is
with a sigh of sad sincerity that Dr. Newman admits that Milton breathes
through his pages a hatred of the Catholic Church, and consequently the
Cardinal feels free to call him a proud and rebellious creature of God.
That Milton was both proud and rebellious cannot be disputed.
Nonconformists need not claim him for their own with much eagerness. What
he thought of Presbyterians we know, and he was never a church member, or
indeed a church-goer. Dr. Newman has admitted that the poet Pope was an
unsatisfactory Catholic; Milton was certainly an unsatisfactory
Dissenter. Let us be candid in these matters. Milton was therefore
bidden by his friends, and by those with whom he took counsel, to hold
his peace whilst in Rome about the 'grim wolf,' and he promised to do so,
adding, however, the Miltonic proviso that this was on condition that the
Papists did not attack his religion first. 'If anyone,' he wrote, 'in
the very city of the Pope attacked the orthodox religion, I defended it
most freely.' To call the Protestant religion, which had not yet
attained to its second century, the orthodox religion under the shadow of
the Vatican was to have the courage of his opinions. But Milton was not
a man to be frightened of schism. That his religious opinions should be
peculiar probably seemed to him to be almost inevitable, and not
unbecoming. He would have agreed with Emerson, who declares that would
man be great he must be a Nonconformist.

There is something very fascinating in the records we have of Milton's
one visit to the Continent. A more impressive Englishman never left our
shores. Sir Philip Sidney