test or hate any
essence, but the devil, or so at least abhor anything, but that we
might come to composition. If there be any among those common objects
of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason,
virtue, and religion, the multitude; that numerous piece of
monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the reasonable
creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and
a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra. It is no breach of charity
to call these _Fools_; it is the style all holy writers have afforded
them, set down by Solomon in canonical scripture, and a point of our
faith to believe so. Neither in the name of _multitude_ do I only
include the base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even
amongst the gentry; a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with
the same wheel as these; men in the same level with mechanics, though
their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses
compound for their follies. But, as in casting account three or four
men {27} together come short in account of one man placed by himself
below them, so neither are a troop of these ignorant _Doradoes_ of that
true esteem and value as many a forlorn person, whose condition doth
place him below their feet. Let us speak like politicians; there is a
nobility without heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked
with another, another filed before him, according to the quality of his
desert, and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of
these times, and the bias of present practice, wheel another way, thus
it was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the
integrity and cradle of well-ordered polities: till corruption getteth
ground; ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations
contemn; every one having a liberty to amass and heap up riches, and
they a licence or faculty to do or purchase anything.

(_Religio Medici_.)

JOHN MILTON 1608-1674

THE DANGER OF INTERFERING WITH THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, her
navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and
battle oft rumoured to be marching up, even to her walls and suburb
trenches; that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other
times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and {28} most
important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning,
rea