That a youth and early manhood of such poetical promise should have been succeeded by twenty years of all but incessant prose polemics has been a matter of regret with many. But this is to ignore his political and social side. Milton was not only the greatest pamphleteer of his generation—head and shoulders above the rest—but there is no life of that time, not even Cromwell's, in which the history of the great Revolution in its successive phases, so far as the deep underlying ideas and speculations were concerned, may be more intimately and instructively studied than in Milton's. Then, on merely literary grounds, what an interest in those prose remains! From the entire series there might be a collection of specimens, unequalled anywhere else, of the ca pabilities of that older, grander and more elaborate English prose of which the Elizabethans and their immediate successors were not ashamed.
While it is wrong to regard Milton's middle twenty years of prose polemics as a degradation of his genius, who does not exult in the fact that such a life was rounded off by a final stage of com pulsory calm, when the "singing robes" could be resumed, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes could issue in succession from the blind man's chamber? Of these three poems, and what they reveal of Milton, no need here to speak at length. Paradise Lost is one of the few monumental works of the world, with nothing in modern epic literature comparable to it except the great poem of Dante. This is best perceived by those who penetrate beneath the beauties of the merely terrestrial por tion of the story, and who recognize the coherence and the splen dour of that vast symbolic phantasmagory by which, through the wars in heaven and the subsequent revenge of the expelled arch angel, it paints forth the connection of the whole visible universe of human cognisance and history with the grander, pre-existing and still environing world of the eternal and inconceivable. To this great epic Paradise Regained is a sequel, and it ought to be read as such. The best critical judgment now pronounces Para dise Regained to be not only, within the possibilities of its briefer theme, a worthy sequel to Paradise Lost, but also one of the most artistically perfect poems in any language. Finally the poem in which Milton bade farewell to the Muse, and in which he reverted to the dramatic form, proves that to the very end his right hand had lost none of its power or cunning. Samson Agonistes is the most powerful drama in the English language after the severe Greek model, and it has the additional interest of being so contrived that, without any deviation from the strictly objective incidents of the Biblical story which it enshrines, it is yet the poet's own epitaph and his condensed autobiography.
Much light is thrown upon Milton's mind in his later life, and even upon the poems of that period, by his posthumous Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine. It differs from all his other prose writings of any importance in being cool, abstract and didactic. Professing to be a system of divinity derived directly from the Bible, it is really an exposition of Milton's metaphysics and of his reasoned opinions on all questions of philosophy, ethics and politics. The general effect is to show that, though he is rightly regarded as the very genius of English Puritanism, its representa tive poet and idealist, yet he was not a Puritan of what may be called the first wave, or that wave of Calvinistic orthodoxy which broke in upon the absolutism of Charles and Laud, and set the English Revolution agoing. He belonged distinctly to that larger and more persistent wave of Puritanism which, passing on through Independency, and an endless variety of sects, many of them rationalistic and freethinking in the extreme, developed into what has ever since been known as English Liberalism. The trea tise makes clear that, while Milton was a most fervid theist and a genuine Christian, believing in the Bible, and valuing the Bible over all the other books in the world, he was at the same time one of the most intrepid of English thinkers and theologians.