aryl, Prynne, and an anonymous
pamphleteer, who seems to have been a somewhat contemptible person, a
serving-man turned attorney, but whose production contains some not
unwelcome hints on the personal aspects of Milton's controversy. "We
believe you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as to you,
except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute
against the canon law as well as you." Milton's later tracts are not
specially interesting, except for the reiteration of his fine and bold
idealism on the institution of marriage, qualified only by his no less
strenuous insistance on the subjection of woman. He allows, however,
that "it is no small glory to man that a creature so like him should be
made subject to him," and that "particular exceptions may have place, if
she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly
yield; for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser
should govern the less wise, whether male or female."

Milton's seminary, meanwhile, was prospering to such a degree as to
compel him to take a more commodious house. Was it necessity or
enthusiasm that kept him to a task so little compatible with the repose
he must have needed even for such intellectual exercise as the
"Areopagitica," much more for the high designs he had not ceased to
meditate in verse? Enthusiasm, one would certainly say, only that it is
impossible to tell to what extent his father's income, chiefly derived
from money out at interest, may have been impaired by the confusion of
the times. Whether he had done rightly or wrongly in taking the duties
of a preceptor upon himself, his nephew's account attests the
self-sacrificing zeal with which he discharged them: we groan as we read
of hours which should have been devoted to lonely musing or noble
composition passed in "increasing as it were by proxy" his knowledge of
"Frontinus his Stratagems, with the two egregious poets Lucretius and
Manilius." He might also have been better employed than in dictating "A
tractate he thought fit to collect from the ablest of divines who have
written on that subject of atheism, Amesius, Wollebius," &c. Here should
be comfort for those who fear with Pattison that Milton's addiction to
politics deprived us of unnumbered "Comuses." The excerpter of Amesius
and Wollebius, as we have so often insisted, needed great stimulus for
great achievements. Such stimulus would probably have come
superabundantly