John Milton

From Barbican Milton removed, in Sept. or Oct. 1647, to a smaller house in that part of High Holborn which adjoins Lin coln's Inn Fields. His Powell relatives had now left him, and he had reduced the number of his pupils, or perhaps kept only his two nephews. But, though thus more at leisure, he did not yet resume his projected poem, but occupied himself rather with three works of scholarship, which he had already for some time had on hand. One was the compilation in English of a complete history of England, or rather of Great Britain, from the earliest times; another was the preparation in Latin of a complete system of divinity, drawn directly from the Bible; and the third was the collection of materials for a new Latin dictionary. Milton had always a fondness for such labours of scholarship and com pilation. Of a poetical kind there is nothing to record, during his residence in High Holborn, but an experiment in psalm-trans lation, in the shape of Ps. lxxx.–lxxxviii. done into service-metre in April 1648, and the sonnet to Fairfax, written in September of the same year.

Milton's Secretaryship.

Milton's sonnet "On the Lord Gen eral Fairfax, at the siege of Colchester," attested the exultation of the writer at the triumph of the parliamentary cause. When the king was beheaded (1649) the first Englishman of mark out of parliament to attach himself openly to the new republic was John Milton. This he did by the publication of his pamphlet entitled Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, proving that it is lawful, and Bath been held so in all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary Magistrate have neglected or denied to do it. It was out within a fortnight after the king's death, and was Milton's last per f ormance in the house in High Holborn. In March 1649 Milton was offered, and accepted, the secretaryship for foreign tongues to the council of state of the new Commonwealth. The salary was to be £288 a year (worth about £1,500 a year now). To be near his new duties in attendance on the council, he removed at once to temporary lodgings at Charing Cross. Thus he must at once have made acquaintance with President Bradshaw, Fairfax, Cromwell himself, Sir Henry Vane, Whitelocke, Henry Marten, Haselrig, Sir Gilbert Pickering and the other chiefs of the council and the Commonwealth, if indeed he had not known some of them before. After a little while, for his greater convenience, official apartments were assigned him in Whitehall itself.

At the date of Milton's appointment to the secretaryship he was 4o years of age. His special duty was the drafting in Latin

of letters sent to foreign states and princes, and the examination and translation of letters in reply. As Latin was the language employed in the written diplomatic documents, his post came to be known indifferently as the secretaryship for foreign tongues or the Latin secretaryship. In that post, however, his duties, more particularly at first, were very light in comparison with those of his official colleague, Walter Frost, the general secretary. Foreign powers held aloof from the English republic as much as they could ; and Milton's presence was required only when some piece of foreign business turned up. Hence, from the first, his employment in very miscellaneous work. Especially, the council looked to him for everything in the nature of literary vigilance and literary help in the interests of the struggling Commonwealth. He was employed in the examination of suspected papers, and in interviews with their authors and printers; and he executed several great literary commissions expressly entrusted to him by the council. The first of these was his pamphlet entitled Observations on the Articles of Peace (between Ormonde and the Irish), pub lished in May 1649. A passage of remarkable interest in it is one of eloquent eulogy on Cromwell. More important still was the Eikonoklastes (which may be translated "Image-Smasher"), published by Milton in Oct. 1649, by way of counterblast to the famous Eikon Basilike ("Royal Image"), which had been in circulation in thousands of copies since the king's death, and had become a kind of Bible in all Royalist households, on the supposition that it had been written by the royal martyr himself. (See GAUDEN, JOHN.) In the end of 1649 there appeared abroad the Defensio regia pro Carob I., by Salmasius, the greatest scholar of Europe. Milton threw his whole strength into a reply, through the year 165o, interrupting himself only by a new and enlarged edition of his Eikonoklastes. His Latin Pro populo angli cano defensio (1651) ran at once over the British Islands and the Continent, and was received by scholars as an annihilation of Salmasius. Through the rest of 1651 the observation was that the two agencies which had co-operated most visibly in raising the reputation of the Commonwealth abroad were Milton's books and Cromwell's battles.

Through 1651 Milton also acted as licenser and superintending editor of the Mercurius politicos, a newspaper issued twice a week, of which Marchamont Nedham was the working editor and proprietor. Milton's hand is discernible in some of the leading articles.