ce
may be partly explained by his feeling that "to descant on the
misfortunes of a person fallen from so high a dignity, who hath also
paid his final debt both to nature and his faults, is neither of itself
a thing commendable, nor the intention of this discourse." The intention
it may not have been, but it was necessarily the performance. The scheme
of the "Eikon" required the respondent to take up the case article by
article, a thing impossible to be done without abundant "descant" of the
kind which Milton deprecates. He is compelled to fight the adversary on
the latter's chosen ground, and the eloquence which might have swept all
before it in a discussion of general principles is frittered away in
tiresome wrangling over a multitude of minutiae. His vigorous blows avail
but little against the impalpable ideal with which he is contending; his
arguments might frequently convince a court of justice, but could do
nothing to dispel the sorcery which enthralled the popular imagination.
Milton's "Eikonoklastes" had only three editions, including a
translation, within the year; the "Eikon Basilike" is said to have had
fifty.

Milton's reputation as a political controversialist, however, was not to
rest upon "Eikonoklastes," or to be determined by a merely English
public. The Royalists had felt the necessity of appealing to the general
verdict of Europe, and had entrusted their cause to the most eminent
classical scholar of the age. To us the idea of commissioning a
political manifesto from a philologist seems eccentric; but erudition
and the erudite were never so highly prized as in the seventeenth
century. Men's minds were still enchained by authority, and the
precedents of Agis, or Brutus, or Nehemiah, weighed like dicta of
Solomon or Justinian. The man of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew learning
was, therefore, a person of much greater consequence than he is now, and
so much the more if he enjoyed a high reputation and wrote good Latin.
All these qualifications were combined in Claudius Salmasius, a
Frenchman, who had laid scholars under an eternal obligation by his
discovery of the Palatine MS. of the Anthology at Heidelberg, and who,
having embraced Protestantism from conviction, lived in splendid style
at Leyden, where the mere light of his countenance--for he did not
teach--was valued by the University at three thousand livres a year. It
seems marvellous that a man should become dictator of the republic of
letters by edit