an saw his ministers silenced or deprived, his Sabbath
profaned, the most sacred act of his worship brought near, as he
fancied, to the mass. Roman doctrine met him from the pulpit, Roman
practices met him in the Church. It was plain that the purpose of Laud
aimed at nothing short of the utter suppression of Puritanism, in other
words, of the form of religion which was dear to the mass of Englishmen.
Already indeed there were signs of a change of temper which might have
made a bolder man pause. Thousands of "the best," scholars, merchants,
lawyers, farmers, were flying over the Atlantic to seek freedom and
purity of religion in the wilderness. Great landowners and nobles were
preparing to follow. Ministers were quitting their parsonages rather
than abet the royal insult to the sanctity of the Sabbath. The Puritans
who remained among the clergy were giving up their homes rather than
consent to the change of the sacred table into an altar, or to silence
in their protests against the new Popery. The noblest of living
Englishmen refused to become the priest of a Church whose ministry could
only be "bought with servitude and forswearing."

[Sidenote: Milton at Horton.]

We have seen John Milton leave Cambridge, self-dedicated "to that same
lot, however mean or high, to which time leads me and the will of
Heaven." But the lot to which these called him was not the ministerial
office to which he had been destined from his childhood. In later life
he told bitterly the story how he had been "Church-outed by the
prelates." "Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what
tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must
subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a
conscience that would retch he must either straight perjure or split his
faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the
sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and
forswearing." In spite therefore of his father's regrets, he retired in
1633 to a new home which the scrivener had found at Horton, a village in
the neighbourhood of Windsor, and quietly busied himself with study and
verse. The poetic impulse of the Renascence had been slowly dying away
under the Stuarts. The stage was falling into mere coarseness and
horror. Shakspere had died quietly at Stratford in Milton's childhood;
the last and worst play of Ben Jonson appeared in the year of his
settlement at Horton; and though F