stortion of facts, {49} injustice to opponents, and narrowness of
view which are the inevitable if often unconscious vices of the man who
writes in the interest of a party. But they also contain flights of
noble eloquence, in which, as in the passage about the City of London
in the _Areopagitica_, the soul of partisanship has undergone a fiery
purification and emerges free of all its grosser elements, a pure
essence of zeal and faith and spiritual vision.

The first stage of the struggle was largely ecclesiastical, and Milton
plunged into it with five pamphlets in 1641 and 1642, fiercely
demanding the abolition of Episcopacy and the establishment of a
Presbyterian system in England. Fortunately for himself, as he was
soon to see, the views he advocated did not in the end prevail. For
the next step he took in the way of pamphlet writing would assuredly
have got him into difficulties with any possible kind of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, whether after the model of Laud or of Calvin. It grew
out of the most important and disastrous event in the whole of his
private life. In the spring of 1643 he went into Oxfordshire, from
which county his father had originally come, and, to the surprise of
his friends, who knew nothing of his intention, returned a married man.
His wife was one {50} Mary Powell, the daughter of a Justice of the
Peace at Forest Hill, near Oxford. The Powell family owed the Milton
family five hundred pounds, which may have been the poet's introduction
to them. If so, the marriage to which it led had the results that
might be expected from such a beginning. The war had then already
begun, the King was at Oxford and the Powells were Cavaliers; so that
when Mrs. Milton, who had been accompanied to London by her relations,
was to be left alone with a husband of twice her age, and of severe
tastes, she shrank from the prospect, got away on a visit to her family
and did not return till 1645, by which time the King was ruined and
with him the Powells.

When Shelley deserted his wife he wrote to her asking her to come and
live with him and the lady who had supplanted her. When Milton's wife
deserted him he wrote a series of pamphlets advocating divorce at the
will of the husband. Such are the extravagances of those whose eyes
are so accustomed to a brighter light that when brought into that of
common day they see nothing, and make mistakes which are justly
ridiculous to the children of this world. It is