AREOPAGITICA, the best-known of the prose works of John Milton. The full title runs 'Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr. John Mil ton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England.' These words recall Isocrates and Mars Hill, and illustrate Milton's erudition, as well as his predilection for what he terms "the old and elegant hu manity of Greece.* They indicate also that his plea was made, not so much for full lib erty of the press and toleration of opinion— although splendidly high-minded and liberal he was not prepared to tolerate "Popery and open superstition*— as for the abolition of that sys tem of licensing books and tracts, the stupidity and inconvenience of which he could expose and denounce from personal experience and with weighty arguments drawn from an extraordi narily wide reading of history and literature.
The tract, for it is a speech in form only, appeared in November 1644 after Milton had caused to be printed without license two pamphlets on divorce, which had occasioned much scandal and had involved him, not seri ously as it turned out, in trouble with the House of Commons. It is needless to add that the 'Areopagitica) was itself unlicensed, and it is pleasant to know that although shortly after it was published there seemed to be a chance that the House of Lords would call its author to account, he did not suffer for his boldness (consult for full details Masson, Vol. III, pp. 262-97, and the most elaborate edition, that of T. Holt White, 1819).
Its subject matter still possessing wide spread interest and great importance, and its style being more e9aable and less cumbrous than that of Milton s other prose works, the has naturally surpassed them in permanent influence and, if the word may be employed in connection with Milton, in popu larity. More wonderfully eloquent passages may be found in other tracts, as well as a larger number of indispensable autobiographical de tails, but Milton the "lord of as Tennyson called Virgil, and Milton the noble patriot and man are perhaps nowhere else in the prose works so accessible to the latter-day reader. How Milton towers above other mor
tals is well perceived by anyone who examines the pamphlets on the freedom of the press published in some quantity two generations later, to which such authors as Tindal and Defoe contributed; but one need not search outside the itself for proofs of Milton's superiority as a man and a writer. Take for example the famous passages on killing a good book, on "a fugitive and cloistered Virtue,* and "our sage and serious Poet Spencer,* on the essen tial intelligence of the people,— the roots of democracy were in this intellectual aristocrat on the visit to Galileo, on the dismemberment of "the Virgin Truth,* on England, "a nation not slow and dull,* which later he sees "as an Eagle riming her mighty youth.* Eloquence and personal dignity and learning are here in full measure, but the 'Areopagitica' is also notably practical, and its sarcasm is rendered more than usually effective and even agreeable by a vein of genuine though grim humor, which perhaps only once is unintelligible save to the student of Latin. Barring the almost ludicrous depreciation of Aristophanes, the tract is but slightly amenable to hostile criticism, and one is not surprised to find that two poets, Thom son of 'The Seasons' and Lowell, have written introductions to it, and that on the eve of the French Revolution Mirabeau appears to have abridged it in 'Sur la Liberte de la Presse, Imitee de l'Anglois de Milton.'