ances that he
about this time gave up his pupils, except his nephews, and removed to a
smaller house in High Holborn, not since identified; the Powells also
removing to another dwelling. "No one," he says of himself at this
period, "ever saw me going about, no one ever saw me asking anything
among my friends, or stationed at the doors of the Court with a
petitioner's face. I kept myself almost entirely at home, managing on my
own resources, though in this civil tumult they were often in great part
kept from me, and contriving, though burdened with taxes in the main
rather oppressive, to lead my frugal life." The traces of his literary
activity at this time are few--preparations for a history of England,
published long afterwards, an ode, a sonnet, correspondence with Dati,
some not very successful versions of the Psalms. He seems to have been
partly engaged in preparing the treatise on Christian Doctrine, which
was fortunately reserved for a serener day. In undertaking it at this
period he was missing a great opportunity. He might have been the
apostle of toleration in England, as Roger Williams had been in America.
The moment was most favourable. Presbyterianism had got itself
established, but could not pretend to represent the majority of the
nation. It had been branded by Milton himself in the memorable line:
"New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." The Independents were for
toleration, the Episcopalians had been for the time humbled by
adversity, the best minds in the nation, including Cromwell, were
Seekers or Latitude men, or sceptics. Here was invitation enough for a
work as much greater than the "Areopagitica" as the principle of freedom
of thought is greater than the most august particular application of it.
Milton might have added the better half of Locke's fame to his own, and
compelled the French philosophers to sit at the feet of a Bible-loving
Englishman. But unfortunately no external impulse stirred him to action,
as in the case of the "Areopagitica." Presbyterians growled at him
occasionally; they did not fine or imprison him, or put him out of the
synagogue. Thus his pen slumbered, and we are in danger of forgetting
that he was, in the ordinary sense of that much-abused term, no Puritan,
but a most free and independent thinker, the vast sweep of whose thought
happened to coincide for a while with the narrow orbit of so-called
Puritanism.

Impulse to work of another sort was at hand. On January 30,