apt to forget one point of ancient
wisdom,--that it is the wearer of the shoe, and not the cobbler, who best
knows where the shoe wrings him.

The speculations of the poet awaken no hostile resentment so long as they
are admittedly abstract. He is at liberty to build his Republic, his City
of the Sun, his Utopia, or his New Atlantis, amid the indifferent
applause of mankind. But when his aim becomes practical and immediate,
when he seeks to stir the heap by introducing into it the ruthless
discomfort of an idea, a million littlenesses assail him with deadly
enmity, and he is found sorrowfully protesting his amazement:--

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.

So he is brought, with great reluctance, to the estimate of men which is
expressed by Milton in _The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_; "being
slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the
public state conformably governed to the inward vicious rule whereby they
govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartily but good
men."

Milton cannot claim the exemption from censure which is allowed to the
theorists, the builders of ideal states somewhere in the clouds. On his
own behalf he expressly disclaims any such intention. "To sequester out
of the world," he says, "into Atlantic and Utopian politics, which never
can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely
as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God has placed us
unavoidably." Poetry might well have served him, if his object had been
to add another to imaginary commonwealths. He took up with politics
because he believed that in the disorder of the times his ideas might be
made a "programme," and carried into effect.

It was in 1641, when already "the vigour of the Parliament had begun to
humble the pride of the bishops," that he first intervened. "I saw," he
says, "that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that
the foundation was laying for the deliverance of mankind from the yoke of
slavery and superstition.... I perceived that if I ever wished to be of
use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the church, and
to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I
therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was
engaged, and to trans