oem. But their beauty dwelt with him; the
memory of the embattled chivalry of Arthur and Charlemagne recurs to him
when he is seeking for the topmost reach of human power and splendour
that he may belittle it by the side of Satan's rebel host; and the
specious handmaidens who served the Tempter's phantom banquet in the
desert are described as lovely beyond what has been

Fabled since
Of fairy damsels met in forest wide
By Knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.

If Milton's attitude to mediaeval romance is one of regretful suspicion,
his attitude to the greatest of mediaeval institutions is one of bitter
contempt. He inveighs even against the "antiquitarians," such as Camden,
who, he says, "cannot but love bishops as well as old coins and his much
lamented monasteries, for antiquity's sake." For near twelve hundred
years these same bishops "have been in England to our souls a sad and
doleful succession of illiterate and blind guides." It is needless to
multiply extracts illustrative of Milton's opinions on the Church; behind
the enormous wealth of rhetoric and invective poured forth in his
pamphlets, the opinions that he holds are few and simple. When he had
been disappointed by the Presbyterians, and had finally turned from them,
his beliefs inclined more and more, in two points at least, to the tenets
of the newly arisen sect of Quakers--to a pure spiritualism in religion,
and the complete separation of Church and State. Their horror of war he
never shared. The model of the Church he sought in the earliest records
of Christianity, and less and less even there; the model of the State in
the ancient republics. All subsequent experience and precedent was to him
a hindrance and a mischief. So rapidly and easily does his mind leap from
the ancient to the modern world, that even when he speaks of his love for
the drama, as in his first Latin elegy or in _Il Penseroso_, it is
sometimes difficult to say whether he is thinking of the Elizabethan or
of the Attic dramatists.

The lodestar of his hopes is liberty, his main end the establishment of
"a free commonwealth." He knows as well as Montesquieu that democracy in
its pristine dignity can be erected only on a wide foundation of public
virtue. "To govern well," he declares in the treatise _Of Reformation in
England_, "is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that
which springs from thence, magnanimity (take