nted; he was a
citizen first, a poet and an unhappy man afterwards. He directed his
energies to proving, not that he should be exempted from the operation of
the law, but that the law itself should be changed. He had entered into
marriage, with full ceremonial ushering, by the main door; he would go
out the same way, or not at all. Thus even in this most personal matter
he pleads, not for himself, but for the commonweal. He cannot conceive of
happiness as of a private possession, to be secretly enjoyed; it stands
rooted, like justice, in the wise and equal ordinances of the State; and
the only freedom that he values is freedom under the law.

Like the citizen of some antique state, he discourses of marriage in the
market-place. In his efforts to be persuasive, both here and in the
_Areopagitica_, he humbles himself to management and the seasonings of
flattery. It is a new trade for him, and suits oddly with his pride. But
he hoped much, at this time, from the Parliament, that "select assembly,"
containing so many "worthy senators" and "Christian reformers," "judges
and lawgivers." In the enthusiasm of his hopes, he credits them with a
desire "to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece," with a wisdom
greater than that of the Athenian Parliament, with a magnanimous
willingness to repeal their own acts at the dictate of the voice of
reason. And all this at a time when the Presbyterians were in the
ascendant, intent upon establishing a discipline neither old, nor
elegant, nor humane, so little acquainted with Greece, that it was one of
Selden's amusements to confute their divines by citing a reading from the
Greek Testament. Milton was destined to grievous disappointment, and his
rage against the Presbyterians, in some of his later pamphlets, was the
fiercer.

But although his pamphlets are both occasional and personal, and even
address themselves at times to conciliation and persuasion, the views
that they advocate and the system of thought that underlies them were not
the products of time and accident. Milton was an idealist, pure and
simple, in politics. Had he lived under the Tudor sovereigns, he would
have been reduced, with Sir Thomas More, Montaigne, and John Barclay, the
author of _Argenis_, to express himself by way of romance and allegory.
It was his fortune to live at a time when the Tudor state system was
breaking up with appalling suddenness, and along with it the Tudor
compromise in the affairs of the