CHAPTER 16

The Poetics of Polemic

‘Struggle of Contrarieties’

Joseph Hall responded to Smectymnuus with A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (1641), and Milton responded to Hall in July 1641 with Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus— once more anonymously—and experimented for the first time with another rhetorical mode to which he would repeatedly return in his prose: the animadversion. This mode involved the quotation of an opponent’s text and extensive refutation of it by means of various proofs. It has something in common with the mode of disputation that Milton was familiar with from his university exercises, but also with judicial oratory as an opponent is forensically cross-examined in print. Milton would return to the format of animadversion in Colasterion, a response to an attack on his arguments for divorce, and his first two publications as an official propagandist for the Commonwealth government in 1649, his Observations upon the Articles of Peace, Made and Concluded with the Irish Rebels and, most exhaustively, Eikonoklastes. Animadversions is structured by the quotation of statements about church government from Hall’s Defence, followed by Milton’s literal and logical rebuttals; but animadversion had also become associated with ad hominem satire as the opponent is mocked and ridiculed for their stupidity. Milton adopts at times in Animadversions a knockabout satirical language that he presumably felt would be acceptable to Smectymnuus as it recalls the indecorous style of the Martin Marprelate tracts of the 1580s, written from a Presbyterian perspective against the Elizabethan bishops—although the Marprelate style had caused almost as much offence to the leading Elizabethan Puritans as to the bishops against whom it was directed.¹ The Marprelate style of rough jest and comic dialogue enabled Milton to develop a semi-dramatic polemical mode that contrasted sharply with the solemn, conventional disputational style of his opponent. Hall had himself published a notable volume of verse satires in the aftermath of the Marprelate controversy, Virgidemiarum (1597), and Milton relentlessly turns the festive judgement on Hall into one of literary value, scorning the ineffectiveness of his satirical poetry as an index of the intellectual emptiness of the episcopal cause:

Ans[werer]. Who would be angry therefore but those that are guilty, with these free-spoken and plaine hearted men that are the eyes of the Country, and the prospective glasses of their Prince? But these are the nettlers, these are the babbling Bookes that tell, though not halfe your fellows feats. You love toothlesse Satyrs; let me informe you, a toothlesse Satyr is as improper as a toothed sleekstone, and as bullish.

Remon[strant]. I beseech you brethren spend your Logick upon your own workes.

Ans. The preemptory Analysis that you call it, I beleeve will be so hardy as once more to unpinne your spruce fastidious oratory, to rumple her laces, her frizzles, and her bobins though she wince, and fling, never so Peevishly.²

There are moments of content that must have given the clerics of Smectymnuus pause, even if they were untroubled by the unconventional style. The long quotation from the May Eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender by ‘our admired Spenser’ to exemplify how the prelates’ ‘whole life is a recantation of their pastorall vow’ would have been less surprising than the quotation of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto against Constantine in Of Reformation; but the sudden outburst against religious censorship under the bishops exhibits both Milton’s reading about, and experience of, the conditions of writing and reading in Counter-Reformation Italy. There is a ferocious attack on the bishops’ ‘Monkish prohibitions, and expurgatorious indexes, your gags and snaffles, your proud Imprimateurs not be to obtain’d without the shallow surview, but not shallow hand of some mercenary, narrow Soul’d, and illiterate Chaplain’.³ ‘[N]arrow Soul’d’ is the opposite of the Aristotelian prize virtue of magnanimity (megalopsychia, ‘great souled’) that was also elevated by Cicero in his vision of the perfect orator as magnus animus and that Milton regarded as the goal of a complete education; while ‘illiterate’ does not possess its modern sense but derives from the medieval term illiteratus, someone who has no education in Latin. What books does Milton have in mind? Perhaps Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants, about which Laud had been so concerned when Chillingworth was writing it and which eventually appeared from Oxford University Press with multiple ecclesiastical imprimateurs. Milton insists that there is ‘nothing more sweet to man’ than ‘liberty of speaking’ and celebrates the reappearance of ‘the conceal’d, the aggreev’d, and long persecuted Truth’ under ‘our time of Parliament, the very jubily, and resurrection of the State’.⁴ The priority of secular over religious government is asserted and the attack on pre-publication religious licensing closely anticipates that of Areopagitica, in which the free circulation of books and ideas is depicted as reuniting and reanimating the divided body of a personified Truth—except in the later work it is aimed against the Presbyterians and Parliament for their restoration of licensing in 1643. The aim of Smectymnuus was to replace episcopal with Presbyterian church government, not to promote liberty of thought, speech, and writing: Milton’s apparent misunderstanding of the Presbyterians’ character and aims—perhaps due to his taking his cultured friend Young to be representative of the Presbyterian party—was soon to result in the personal humiliation of having his arguments for reform of the divorce laws condemned as libertine.

Given confidence by his vigorous performance against Hall in Animadversions, Milton published the longest of his anti-prelatical works, The Reason of Church-government, in the opening months of 1642, as a Catholic uprising unfolded bloodily in Ireland and the king entered Parliament in an embarrassingly botched attempt to arrest five of its members on the charge of treason—an event that precipitated the departure of the king from London on 10 January 1642 for Hampton Court and subsequently York. The next time that Charles returned to London would be to face trial in 1648. Milton was responding to Ussher’s compilation of works, Certain Briefe Treatises, Written by Diverse Learned Men Concerning the Antient and Moderne Government of the Church (Oxford, 1641). He returned to the prose genre of the oration, adopting a dignified tone after the rough forensic mode he had turned on Hall. One of the authors whom Ussher gathered in his compilation of apologies for episcopacy was Lancelot Andrewes, and it has sometimes been thought a glaring volte-face for Milton to criticize the arguments of the bishop to whom he had dedicated spectacular neo-Latin verse in Elegia tertia fifteen years earlier. But that is to assume his Latin funeral elegy must have been an expression of personal affection and veneration, rather than an experiment in poetic form designed to impress Cambridge readers close to Andrewes, such as Mede. Moreover Milton is respectful, initially at least, of Andrewes’s reputation and acknowledges that Andrewes and Ussher ‘for their learning are reputed the best able to say what may be said in this opinion’ of episcopacy.⁵

The declared purpose of The Reason of Church-government—which is advertised as ‘By Mr John Milton’, the first occasion on which Milton appeared in print under his full name—is to prove that the pattern of church government set down in Scripture is Presbyterian rather than prelatical; but even in its opening pages, familiar Miltonic images from the poetry of the music of the spheres and of the shapes of angelic virtue in the heavens work against any argument for simply replacing one kind of religious conformity with another. ‘Discipline’ in religion is ‘not only the removal of disorder’ but an imitation of the ‘shape and image of vertue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walkes, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to mortall eares’.⁶ The conveyance of the perfect harmonies of heavenly virtue to ‘mortall eares’ is for Milton, as we have repeatedly seen, the burden of the poet as daemonic mediator between heaven and earth. This discipline in worship is not represented as a necessary consequence of sin and the Fall but rather encompasses the ranks of the angels (‘distinguisht and quaterniond into their celestiall Princedoms, and Satrapies [provinces of ancient Persia]’) and also the ‘blessed in Paradise, though never so perfect’. Such divine discipline does not constrict and bind individuals to its uniform pattern but creates an order in which infinite variety moves:

Yet it is not to be conceiv’d that those eternall effluences of sanctity and love in the glorified Saints should by this means be confin’d and cloy’d with repetition of that which is prescrib’d, but that our happiness may orbe itself into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of eccentricall equation be as it were an invariable Planet of joy and felicity[.]⁷

The conceit here is astronomical, eccentricity being the measure of deviation of the orbit of a heavenly body from circularity, while ‘invariable planet’ encapsulates the paradox of creation as concordia discors: ‘planet’ derives from the Greek for ‘wanderer’. The striking verb ‘orb’ and the ‘thousand vagancies’, or wanderings, of ‘glory and delight’ recall the imagery of the ‘Nativity Ode’, in which the stars ‘in their glimmering Orbs did glow / Until their Lord bespake, and bid them go’, and the shepherds are surrounded by a ‘Globe of circular light’, which is revealed to be the ‘glittering ranks’ of the angels, ‘Harping in loud and solemn quire, / With unexpressive notes to Heav’ns new-born Heir’ (lines 75–6, 110, 114–16). There is also an anticipation of the dance of the angels in the fifth book of Paradise Lost:

Mystical dance, which yonder starrie Spheare
Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheeles
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem (5. 620–4)

Milton had turned to vernacular prose to campaign against the conformity enforced by Laudian episcopacy, but his complex metaphors for the divine pattern of religious discipline were a continuation of his devotional poetic idiom of over twelve years earlier. Yet the imagery of celestial discipline, of incorporation into ‘glittering ranks’, is overshadowed in the prose by imagery of individual freedom and independent movement—‘orbe itself’; ‘a thousand vagancies’; ‘eccentricall equation’—which implies that free will is integral to the operation of creation at all its levels. The heavenly order of wandering movement is opposed to a discipline that is characterized by cloying confinement, repetition, and prescription. The language in the opening chapter of The Reason of Church-government recalls the ‘Nativity Ode’ and the various astral, daemonic ascensions of the poet in Milton’s early verse and university exercises, but it also anticipates the explicit assertion of free will theology in Areopagitica: ‘If every action which is good or evill in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name . . . when God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a meer artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions’.⁸ The same theology of free will is at the heart of Paradise Lost: in the third book, God is adamant that created beings, whether the fallen angels or man, are ‘Authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose; for so / I formed them free, and free they must remain, / Till they enthrall themselves’ (3. 122–5).

The Latin meaning of error is ‘wandering’ and in Areopagitica the discovery of truth through recognition of error is described in terms of wandering into new, unchartered intellectual areas:

Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? . . . This justifies the high providence of God, who though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet powrs out before us ev’n to a profusenes all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of vertue, and the exercise of truth.⁹

Free will—‘freedom to choose’—is the foundation in Areopagitica of the apology both for the unrestricted circulation of ideas in books and for the toleration of varieties of Protestant opinion. The ‘thousand vagancies’ and ‘eccentrical’ movement of the stars that paradoxically constitute the divine discipline of the heavens in The Reason of Church-government are paralleled in more earthy, material images in Areopagitica of the construction of the ‘house of God’ through a concors discordia of dissimilar beliefs:

And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.¹⁰

The argument and language of Areopagitica are anticipated more explicitly in the final chapter of the first book of The Reason of Church-government, where Milton addresses the claims of the ‘prelatical’ party that the attempts to reform or replace episcopal church government will enable ‘sects and errors’ to proliferate: ‘Forsooth if they be put downe, a deluge of innumerable sects will follow: we shall all be Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists.’ Milton rejects such claims as scaremongering and emphasizes the relative nature of such sectarian labels, choosing two of the more extreme sectarian identities, associated with claims of being perfected on earth, to make his point: ‘the Primitive Christians in their times were accounted such as are now call’d Familists and Adamites’.¹¹ But he also develops a more sophisticated and positive argument for the emergence of diverse religious beliefs as the conformity previously enforced by episcopal power splinters: ‘it best besteems our Christian courage to think they are but as the throws and pangs that go before the birth of reformation, and that the work it selfe is now in doing’. The resounding declarations in Areopagitica that good can only be known through experience of evil, and truth through knowledge of error, are fuller developments of the earlier insistence that true reformation emerges from the ‘triall’ of virtue by vice and the ‘fierce encounter of truth and falsehood together’ in ‘so violent a jousting’: it is in the nature of created things that they ‘cannot suffer any change of one kind, or quality into another without the struggle of contrarieties’.¹²

A Calvinist Suit of Armour

The conventional account of Milton’s intellectual development is that it was the hostile Puritan reaction to his divorce writings in 1643–4, in which he argues for divorce on the grounds simply of incompatibility between husband and wife, that led to his split from the Presbyterians on whose behalf he had written the anti-prelatical tracts. According to this account, the arguments about freedom of will, thought, belief, and expression which characterize Areopagitica can be explained in terms of a reaction to the Presbyterians’ attempts to suppress his own ideas and to enforce religious and intellectual conformity in exactly the same ways as the bishops against whom they themselves had campaigned. The ‘transformation that occurs in the prose tracts of 1643–5’ has also been ascribed to Milton’s reading of natural law theorists, in particular John Selden, the celebrated general scholar who had suffered imprisonment under Charles I for his actions as a member of Parliament in 1628–9 and become an impressive advocate of the legality of the Parliamentary cause. Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium (1640) is indeed cited in Areopagitica in defence of the proposition that truth is the product of studious encounter with every sort of opinion and error.¹³ Yet the narrative looks now less like one of intellectual transformation than of elaboration of arguments that Milton had already advanced in the anti-prelatical works. Indeed we might recall that as early as 1639, he had recorded in his commonplace book the Church Father Lactantius’s observation that God permits evil, ‘ “So that reason may correspond to virtue”. For virtue is made known, is illustrated, and is exercised by evil’.¹⁴ Milton’s sense of the indivisibility of good and evil stretches back beyond his career as a prose polemicist, and was derived, at least in part, from entirely orthodox Christian sources.

The assumption that the explicit assertion of a free will theology in 1644 marks Milton’s break with the Calvinist doctrine of his youth and of the Presbyterian party for which he had written in the anti-prelatical tracts has been shown throughout this book to be built on a false premise. Areopagitica rather contains the first explicit formulation of a theology and soteriology founded in the virtuous exercise of reason that had previously been given complex poetic and dramatic expression in the Maske ten years earlier. It is thus hardly surprising that there is virtually no mention of Presbyterian doctrine, as opposed to discipline, in the anti-prelatical writings: about the closest that Milton comes in The Reason of Church-government is in a reference to the actions of the Scots in expelling episcopacy: ‘And that the principal reformation here foretold is already come to pass as well in discipline as in doctrine the state of our neighbour Churches afford us to behold.’¹⁵ The opposition to episcopacy in England in 1641–2 involved an uneasy alliance between those who favoured establishing a new national Presbyterian church government, most prominently Smectymnuus, and so-called Independents, who rather favoured granting complete autonomy to each separate congregation, were generally more tolerant of sectarianism, and encompassed a more diverse range of theological views than orthodox Calvinism. Leaders of the two parties had agreed in a meeting at Edward Calamy’s house in London in November 1641 to maintain a united front in the campaign against episcopacy, but the coalition did not last: after Parliament convened the Westminster Assembly of Divines in June 1643 to decide on what form of church government should replace episcopacy, the Presbyterians turned their polemical fire on their former allies, the Independents, depicting their dissent from Presbyterian orthodoxy as fostering sectarian heresy in much the same way that the defenders of episcopacy stigmatized the Presbyterians.

Milton may have been arguing for Presbyterian church government in 1642 but at the level of imagery the logic of his argument aligned with the Independent argument for the self-determination of individual congregations—indeed the image of happiness ‘orbing’ itself ‘into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight’ implies an ideal of absolute individual autonomy in spiritual matters, free from any prescriptive authority. In a striking geometric metaphor, the sharply hierarchical structure of episcopacy is imagined as a ‘pyramidal figure’, which is ‘the most dividing and schismaticall forme that Geometricians know of’; the pyramid must dissolve and episcopacy ‘must be faine to inglobe, or incube her selfe among the Presbyters’.¹⁶ But the logical drive of the metaphor is towards Independency and indeed individuality rather than Presbyterian church structures, which were flatter than those of episcopacy but still rose in a hierarchy from a local to a national level of decision-making. There is little sense of the Calvinist conviction that there was an obligation on the elect to restrain and govern the reprobate through a compulsory church government, maintained by an alliance of ministers and magistrate. Tellingly the image of ‘inglobing’ returns at the end of the tract when Milton maintains that it is not fear of church discipline that encourages virtuous behaviour but ‘honest shame, or call it if you will esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence towards their own persons’. The ethical proof here is Greek: his example is of Hector’s behaviour in the Iliad and the argument about shame is from Plato’s Republic and Euthyphro. This philosophy that virtuous action is a consequence of the fear of shame, which is begot by ‘self-esteem’— Milton was in fact the first to coin this term in his fifth and final anti-prelatical work, the Apology Against a Pamphlet—is Hellenic, not Christian. Self-esteem ‘hath in it a most restraining and powerful abstinence to start back and glob it self upward from the mixture of any ungenerous and unbeseeming motion’.¹⁷ The process by which self-esteem creates virtue sounds rather like the whole process of creation from Chaos described in Paradise Lost:

And vital virtue infus’d, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg’d
The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life: then founded, then conglob’d
Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted. (7. 236–40).

The notion of self-esteem as the motor of virtue in the anti-prelatical prose is remote from the orthodox Protestant—or indeed Christian— doctrines of sin, grace, and regeneration. The essentially Platonic philosophy of grace as the reward of self-willed moral virtue that he had dramatized in the Maske is explicated in the prose of The Reason of Church-government; in his autobiographical digression in the second book of the tract, Milton implicitly presents himself, as we shall see, as an exemplar of virtue, attained through his dedication to learning, his sexual purity, and the uses to which he puts his inspired poetic ability.¹⁸ It is worth wondering once again what Smectymnuus must have made of all this, especially Milton’s sceptical attitude towards the charge of sectarian heresy and insistence on the toleration of opinion and error in the pursuit of a greater truth. An important element of the argument in The Reason of Church-government is that the imposition of episcopal authority has not facilitated the prevention of schism in English religion, but has itself been the cause of schism by enforcing doctrine and discipline that have no clear authority in Scripture. This is to apply to the specific case of the Laudian Church the general arguments that John Hales made in his Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, first published in 1642 but in circulation since 1636, and for which Hales was called to account by Laud. As we saw in Chapter 11, Hales’s language and argument bear comparison with that of Milton in The Reason of Church-government and Areopagitica, as is evident from Hales’s opening declaration that ‘Heresie and Schisme as they are commonly used, are two Theologicall scar crows, with which they, who uphold a party in Religion, use to fright away such, as making enquiry into it, are ready to relinquish and oppose it, if it appeare either erronious or suspitious’.¹⁹

It is more likely that Milton was familiar with the work of his ‘learned friend’ Hales about religious schism than with the arguments for religious toleration beginning to appear in print by figures associated with popular radical movements, such as the future Leveller leader William Walwyn’s Compassionate Samaritan, published four months before Areopagitica in July 1644.²⁰ It is habitually noted that by excluding ‘Popery and open superstition’, Milton did not extend toleration to Roman Catholicism in Areopagitica, as did both Walwyn in the Compassionate Samaritan and Roger Williams in his Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution (1644) in the same year; but it is likely more relevant to the formation of Milton’s ideas about liberty of conscience that he did not come to the same conclusions as Hales’s friend in the Great Tew circle, William Chilling-worth, who had argued in 1638 in The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation for an ecumenical national church that could encompass all Christian believers. Hales and Chillingworth regarded themselves in the 1630s as following in the Erasmian humanist tradition in their anti-Calvinism and emphasis on a rational and learned scepticism of clerical claims to exclusive religious authority. They were sceptical at the same time of the Laudian appeal to the Church Fathers and antiquity.²¹ It is this scholarly milieu and intellectual tradition to which Milton can be more convincingly connected than to the culture of ‘popular’ religious radicalism emerging in London as civil war broke out, even if Hales and Chillingworth sided with the royalist party in the political conflict that finally broke out into open warfare between the Charles I and Parliament in the autumn of 1642.

This is to provoke the question once more: why did Milton take up polemical prose in common cause with Smectymnuus and the Presbyterian clergy? He showed no interest in Calvinist doctrine and held views about the role of reason, virtue, and free will in salvation that they would likely have condemned as ‘Arminian’ at best and at worst Pelagian heresy, while his arguments for a replacement of episcopal church government displayed little enthusiasm for Presbyterianism as a solution and showed rather imaginative sympathy with the self-determination of Independency that the Presbyterians would soon bitterly condemn as opening the door to blasphemy and irreligion.²² The example of his cultured tutor and friend Thomas Young should not be underestimated; but Milton might also be regarded as late example of the European phenomenon influentially described by Hugh Trevor-Roper, in which free-thinking Erasmian intellectuals—including Catholics such as de Thou and Sarpi, the two most cited authors in Milton’s commonplace book— were pushed towards a Calvinism with which they had little in common theologically or temperamentally by the persecutory policies of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. The turning-point for these intellectuals in this account was the placing of Erasmus’s works on the Index by Pope Paul IV in 1559. They donned a Calvinist ‘suit of armour’ because ‘Calvinism, however intellectually reactionary’, provided the ‘necessary political ally of intellectual progress’ against a persecutory Catholicism.²³

Something similar might be said about Milton in 1630s England: he was compelled towards an alliance with Presbyterians with whom he did not really have much in common theologically or temperamentally, but some of whom, like Young, he knew to be sound scholars, by what he perceived to be the clerical imposition of conformity under the Laudian Church. Milton’s peculiarly intense investment in humanist ideals of education and social theory led Milton to see the same process that had occurred in Italy, and in Catholic England, now occurring once again under Laud and Charles: the suppression of learning and culture by a clerical usurpation of civil power. This is why he could transfer the language of anti-Catholic polemic from episcopacy to Presbyterianism with such ease by 1644 when the Presbyterians had, to his horror, turned their charge of heresy on his own writings on divorce. It is also why theological doctrine and varieties of ecclesiastical discipline had little to do with Milton’s ‘radicalization’ in the 1640s, and reading history and poetry had everything. This accounts for his otherwise perplexing decision to devote much of the second book of The Reason of Church-government to literary criticism, autobiography, and the promise that he will complete the great English epic once the insufferable conditions of episcopal tyranny have been removed.

‘Inquisitorious and Tyrannical Duncery’

In the first book of The Reason of Church-government, Milton had lamented how the persecutory policies of the Laudian Church mimicked those of the Catholic Church in Spain and Italy, and how such repression brought ‘a num and chill stupidity of soul, an inactive blindness of mind upon the people by their leaden doctrine’.²⁴ There is an echo here of the passage in Milton’s seventh Prolusion on the value of learning in which he recalls (in Latin) the condition of England in the medieval ‘dark age’ of Catholic rule, when ‘blind illiteracy [caecus inertia] had penetrated and entrenched itself everywhere, nothing was heard in the schools but the absurd doctrines of drivelling monks’. ‘Inactive blindness of mind’ is a more literal translation of caecus inertia, which carries the sense of heaviness, of lumpen ignorance, and Milton makes an equation between stupidity and materiality that can be traced throughout his writing, from the student exercises to the late poems. Popish clerical repression prevents the spiritualizing intellectual ascent that Milton had always associated with privileged divine knowledge; and as he made very clear in the extraordinary second book of The Reason of Church-government, the repression of Laudian episcopacy must be removed to enable him to ascend to the role of national poet.

This was Milton’s first appearance under his full name in any printed work, verse or prose, and that shedding of anonymity to appear in public evidently released him to reveal Virgilian poetic ambitions that had been known previously only to his family, close friends, and students and tutors during his time at Christ’s College. He begins his famous, much-quoted autobiographical account of his vocation and the conditions that threaten it by emphasizing that if he sought merely to show off his ‘wit and learning’ to readers, then ‘I should not write thus out of mine own season, when I have neither yet compleated to my minde the full circle of my private studies’. The humanist ideal of the universal scholar was acknowledged to be in one sense a utopian one, and so it might be asked whether Milton (now ten years out of Cambridge) would ever have felt himself to have completed the ‘full circle’ of his studies. Nor would he have chosen to write in prose, ‘wherin knowing my self inferior to my self, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand’.²⁵ This statement has often been taken at face value but the claim that his prose is the work of a true poet might rather be said to increase its prestige: it is a quality of prose that only such a poet can produce.²⁶ The pride that Milton took in his prose writing is suggested by his donation to the Bodleian library in 1646 of a set of all eleven of the prose tracts that he published by 1645, which he thought worthy of being received, as he put it in the Latin dedication to the librarian John Rouse, into ‘a temple of everlasting memory’; and by his gift in the same year of ten of the prose works to ‘the most learned man’, the royal librarian Patrick Young, ‘satisfying himself with but few readers of this kind’—an anticipation of the expectation in Paradise Lost to ‘fit audience find, though few’.²⁷ Milton then declares that while it would be more suitable for ‘a Poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and his singing robes about him’—once more the familiar image of the daemonic poet— to ‘divulge unusual things of my selfe’, he will proceed to do so anyway in the ‘cool element of prose’. He cites as proof of his poetic vocation the reception of his writing, ‘prosing or versing, but chiefly the latter’, by his teachers at home and at school, by the ‘privat Academies of Italy’, and by his ‘friends here at home’. He also refers for the first time in the prose to the ‘inward prompting’ that leads him to believe he ‘might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die’.²⁸

Milton explains how his decision that he should write such immortal verse in the vernacular was motivated by a desire to instruct his countrymen and also by a more pragmatic awareness that ‘it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among theLatines’. He consequently applied himself ‘to that resolution which Ariosto follow’d against the perswasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toylsom vanity, but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect’. We have seen Milton’s fascination with the biographies of the great poets, particularly Virgil and Dante, and here he shows that he has also been reading the Italian biographies of Ariosto, perhaps mediated through Sir John Harington’s ‘Life of Ariosto’, prefixed to his 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso.²⁹ What follows is a discussion of which literary forms would offer the best vehicle for Milton’s poetic ambition. What did Archbishop Ussher, to whom the tract was nominally a response on the authority of episcopal church government, make of all this, coming from a polemicist of whom he had presumably never previously heard?

Milton first considers the examples of the ‘diffuse’ epic by Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, as well as (more surprisingly) the Book of Job as an example of ‘brief’ epic. While his notes on potential literary projects from around this period suggest he was moving away from the idea of an Arthurian epic that he had envisaged in Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis, he remained interested at this point in considering what ‘Knight before the [Norman] conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian Heroe’ and in composing heroic poetry derived from ‘our own ancient stories’. The notes on literary projects in the Trinity manuscript consist mainly of titles for tragic dramas, and Milton shifts to a consideration of the claims of drama which is notable for the opacity of its syntax: ‘Or whether those Dramatick constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides raigne shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation, the Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral Drama in the Song of Salomon consisting of two persons and a double Chorus, as Origen rightly judges.’³⁰ Scripture affords an alternative example of ‘doctrinal and exemplary’ drama, and while there may be an implicit sanction granted to the instructive power of drama by adducing the biblical example, there is no clear register in this sentence of the priority of the Christian over the classical model of instruction: the syntactical disconnection between the two parts of the sentence perhaps reflects some semi-conscious awareness that the biblical example should properly be (but is not) given priority.

The tone becomes once more polemical as Milton details the failure of his poetic contemporaries to fulfil the educative role of the true poet, which is to ‘inbreed and cherish’ in their people ‘the seeds of vertu, and publick civility’. He complains of the ‘corruption and bane’ that ‘our youth and gentry . . . suck in dayly from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant Poetasters, who having scars ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem . . . doe for the most part lap up vitious principles in sweet pils to be swallow’d down, and make the taste of vertuous documents harsh and sowr’.³¹ That Milton hits at poets associated with the Caroline court—the ‘sons of Ben’—is evident from the immediately subsequent condemnation of the ‘publick sports, and festival pastimes’ that Charles and Laud had sought to enforce through the 1633 Book of Sports as an extension of the liturgy of the Church. We have seen how the young Milton attached a particular soteriological significance to virginity. An identification of the sexual morality of the poet and the generic ambition of his poetry is made more vehemently in The Reason of Church-government, where Milton evidently felt confident enough in his future career as the nation’s epicist to declare in print that he would

covnant with any knowing reader, that for some few years I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be rays’d from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at wast from the pen of some vulgar Amorist, or the trencher fury of a riming parasite, nor to be obtained by the Invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallow’d fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips of whome he pleases; to this must be added industrious and select reading, steddy observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affaires.³²

The sense in Elegia sexta of the generic and moral inferiority of love elegy has intensified in the anti-prelatical prose into disgust at the moral corruption of its practitioners, the ‘vulgar Amorists’—a phrase which invokes specifically writing in the style of Ovid’s Amores. The elegiac poet and the priestly, prophetic poet are opposed in the manner of the (jocular) 1629 verse letter to Diodati, but in the polemical, public context of the prose work the tone is now one of censorious moral judgement and disgust. Epic gravity is asserted over elegiac and lyric flippancy, but the generic hierarchy is also a moral one.

As in the invocation of the ‘heavenly Muse’ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the poet calls for his mouth to be touched by ‘hallowed fire’ from the angelic altar (line 28), Milton presents himself as a type of Isaiah, whose prophetic speech is released by a fiery coal placed against his lips by the one of the seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6–7). Milton’s lips are purified by holy fire but the ‘Vulgar Amorist’, whose desire is directed towards the body, is unable to control his physical discharges and so is implicitly feminized in terms of contemporary stereotypes of woman as ‘leaky vessel’. The wine drunk by the elegiac poet flows ‘at wast’ back out through his pen: ‘at wast’ punningly reduces the verse to waste-product which is produced from the waist, to both urine and, with a recollection of the opening line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’), seminal fluid. Milton had seen the writers of Ovidian verse at Cambridge—he may have had the likes of Thomas Randolph in mind—turn into the ‘riming parasites’ of Laudian and court society, with their ‘trencher fury’ or wholly materialistic, patronage-led poetic ambitions. Conversely Miltonic texts will maintain (like their author’s chaste, sealed-up body) integrity and individuality, preserving ‘as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’, as Areopagitica would describe a good book.³³ The link ‘between sexual purity and prophetic utterance’ that is made in Milton’s major works of the 1630s—the Maske, ‘Lycidas’, Epitaphium Damonis— also informs the polemical prose.³⁴

It is an astonishing covenant that Milton makes with his reader, especially since that reader would have bought the tract expecting an argument for the replacement of episcopal with Presbyterian church government rather than a promise to write an English epic that could compete with Homer and Virgil. Milton craves ‘excuse that urgent reason hath plucked from [him] by an abortive and foredated discovery’ the conviction that he will produce the great national epic. When Milton received his passport to leave for Italy from Henry Lawes, he described the ‘spheres’ that would speed him on his way as ‘overdated’; now the promise to complete an epic is ‘foredated’. Yet it is made clear that this promise depends on the religious and political conditions in which Milton writes: he will not be able to fulfil his covenant with the English people until ‘the Land had once infranchis’d herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.’³⁵ This is an archetypal humanist analysis of the relationship between the condition of the institutions of Church and state and the moral, intellectual, and cultural health of a nation. The ‘inquisitorious’ behaviour of the Laudian clergy has returned England to the intellectual and cultural dark age of life under the Roman Catholic Church; only with the complete reformation of the English Church and the expulsion of clerical tyranny can such great feats of learning and literature be once more attempted.

Milton warns of the bishops’ ‘corrupt and servile doctrines boring our eares to an everlasting slavery, as they have done hitherto’: while the obvious allusion is to Exodus 21: 6, there may also be an invocation of the punishments that had been meted out to the ears of Prynne, Bast-wick, and Burton in 1637, and that cast a shadow over the poet’s ambition to ascend to epic in ‘Lycidas’. In his next prose work, An Apology Against a Pamphlet, he charged his pro-episcopal opponent of being as ‘good at dismembering and slitting sentences, as his grave Fathers and Prelates have bin at stigmatizing and slitting noses’.³⁶ Although we have seen how little evidence there is that Milton was ever set on a clerical career after leaving Cambridge, he concludes his lengthy autobiographical digression by disclosing that he has been ‘Church-outed by the Prelats’, having perceived ‘what tyranny had invaded the Church’ in the 1630s: the threat now is that he will be outed from the pantheon of poets by the continuation of that tyranny. But whatever the notes in Milton’s commonplace book indicate about the private political direction of his thinking, in the concluding section of the work he echoes Presbyterian and Parliamentarian polemic of the early 1640s by representing the bishops as ‘evil counsellors’ to Charles, ‘the greatest underminers and betrayers of the monarch’. The set-piece image of the king as a Samson who has been rendered impotent by the ‘prelatical razor’ is nonetheless deeply ambiguous: it presents Charles as a once-mighty figure who has betrayed himself to the ‘strumpet flatteries of prelates’ and is now bound and blinded, made to ‘grinde in the prison house of their sinister ends and practices’.³⁷ The ‘puissant hair’ that represents Charles’s kingly power will grow back, and there is an echo of the ‘Mitr’d locks’ that St Peter shook in ‘Lycidas’ before he ‘sternly bespake’ (line 112) in the prophecy of how the rejuvenated locks of the king, ‘sternly shook’, will ‘thunder with ruin’ upon the heads of the bishops. But of course, in an episode that would prove enduringly fascinating to Milton, the destruction of the Philistines who had bound Samson also inevitably entailed Samson’s own death.

Ignorance of the Beautiful

The lifting of his career-long anonymity as a writer in The Reason of Church-government prompted Milton to make his poetic ambitions not only public but to present them as evidence of the need to abolish the persecutory structures of episcopal church government. He represented himself as exemplary of the kind of exceptional person who would flourish in an England freed of such religious tyranny—by which in 1642 he ostensibly meant an England placed, as with Scotland, under a Presbyterian system of church government.³⁸ Yet he returned to anonymity to respond in April 1642 to an attack on Animadversions, entitled A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libel, Entituled, Animadversions. This was also published anonymously, although in An Apology Against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Confutation, Milton does hint on several occasions at his suspicion that it was written by Joseph Hall in collaboration with his son. Yet Milton regardless made his own life, character, and formation as a poet the foundation of his response, even though his readers outside Smectymnuus would presumably not have known of his identity. He seems to have been genuinely insulted by the confuter’s characterization of the writer of Animadversions as ‘a grim, lowring, bitter fool’, who ‘being grown to an Impostume in the brest of the University, was at length vomited out thence into a Suburbe sinke about London’, where he haunted ‘the Play-Houses, or the Bordelli’. The confuter admits in his opening lines that, as he does not know the identity of the man behind Animadversions, he ‘must fetch his character from some scattered passages in his own writings’.³⁹ Milton leapt on this reference to constructing a ‘character’ because one of Joseph Hall’s best-known publications was his Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608), the first of the several collections of ‘characters’ or types of people that appeared during the seventeenth century. Milton suggests that the confuter has pieced together his attack ‘from some penurious Book of Characters he had been culling out’: he responds with a narrative of his own virtue that is constructed upon an extraordinary but characteristic defence of his sexual morality through an account of his reading.

Milton recalls his literary interests at university to refute the charge that he visits brothels and to demonstrate rather his ‘love and stedfast observation of that vertue which abhorres the society of Bordello’s’. He recounts how at university he was ‘allured to read’ the ‘Smooth Elegiack Poets, whereof the Schooles are not scarce’ and ‘which imitation I found most easie’, before rejecting ‘those authors any where speaking unworthy things of themselves; or unchaste of those names which before they had extoll’d’. Milton was particularly attracted by the ‘pleasing sound’ of elegy: smooth, musical love poetry is here associated with licentiousness.⁴⁰ There is an anticipation in this language of the ten-line Latin recantation that Milton appended to his Latin elegies in the 1645 Poems, ‘Haec ego mente olim lævâ’ (In the past with foolish mind), in which the elegies are dismissed as ‘empty memorials of my wantonness’. Having been seduced by the superficial attractions of such verse as a student, Milton assures his readers that now ‘my heart has grown numb with a cover of thick ice’ (lines 1–2, 8). It is hard to know how to judge the tone of this recantation, given that only four of the elegies may be said to treat of Ovidian amatory themes and that the palinode, or retraction of a view in an earlier poem, particularly a love poem, was a literary convention in itself. Milton’s careful insertion of his age above the more Ovidian of the elegies in the Poemata is a reminder that the recantation of love elegy as a youthful indiscretion is a typical gesture of the poet who has left behind childish things as he progresses up the Virgilian hierarchy of poetic genres. Yet the movement of Milton’s narrative of his reading in the Apology is moral as much as generic: soon he came to prefer ‘the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts, without transgression’. It was Dante and Petrarch who confirmed Milton ‘in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem; that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honour-ablest things’.⁴¹ Milton does say in the Apology that if he found a talented writer, then ‘their art I still applauded, but the men I deplor’d’, and the claim that the true poet ‘ought himself to be a true poem’ is not, it is true, quite the same thing as saying that the good poet must be a good man, leaving open at least the possibility of an aestheticized rather than a simply moral life; although the whole point of this section of the Apology is to vindicate Milton’s impeccable chastity, and elsewhere in the work he insists, echoing a fundamental precept of Quintilian’s account of the perfect orator, that ‘how he should be truly eloquent who is not withall a good man, I see not’.⁴²

The rejection of the elegiac poets for Dante and Petrarch is followed by the relegation of lyric poetry as a kind, as Milton recounts how he eventually found in Platonic philosophy a truer guide to virtuous love. We have seen how important the examples of Dante and Petrarch were to Milton’s sense of the formation and role of the poet. In the light of the Maske, there seems little reason to doubt Milton’s account of the place of Greek philosophy in his intellectual and moral development:

Thus from the Laureat fraternity of Poets, riper yeares, and the ceaselesse round of study and reading led me to the shady places of philosophy, but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon. Where if I should tell ye what I learnt, of chastity and love, I meane that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only vertue which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy. The rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion which a certaine Sorceresse the abuser of loves name carries about; and how the first and chiefest office of love, begins and ends in the soule, producing those happy twins of her divine generation knowledge and vertue, with such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listning, Readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding[.]⁴³

The passage is echoed in the palinode, ‘Haec ego mente olim lævâ’, where it is the ‘Socratic streams’ offered by the ‘shady Academy’ which ‘casued me to discard the yoke I had incurred’ (lines 5–6). The appearance here of the figures of Circe as a poisonous figure of sexual temptation and of Love as an allegorical figure of chastity, with her cup of virtue that is only offered to ‘those who are worthy’, seems to replay the drama of the Maske as an abstracted moral philosophy. The Platonic union between Love and the Soul, producing Knowledge and Virtue, recalls lines in the Daemon / Attendant Spirit’s speech that are not in the Bridgewater text but were added in 1637, in which the Daemon describes how ‘far above in spangled sheen’ sit ‘celestial Cupid’ and ‘his eternal bride’ Psyche, from whose union issue twins, Youth and Joy (lines 1003–11).

However, a few months later, in the summer of 1642, Milton got married. Mary Powell was the seventeen-year-old daughter of an Oxfordshire landowner, Richard Powell, who in 1627 had taken out a loan from Milton’s father and from whom Milton himself had long been collecting interest payments. The reproduction of Knowledge and Virtue through a Platonic union of Love and the individual soul now anticipates the defence of marriage as a Christian precept that immediately follows in the Apology. Milton’s education in sexual morality was completed by reading the Scriptures (‘last of all not time, but as perfection is last’) and he returns to Revelation 14, a scriptural passage that had long fascinated him, in which the hymn that is sung at the marriage of the Lamb can only be understood by the 144,000 men who were ‘redeemed from the earth’ because ‘they were not defiled with women; for they are virgins’. We have seen how literally Milton had read this passage in Epitaphium Damonis three years earlier, and how it echoes through several of his major poetic works of the 1630s: Milton emphasizes the effect on his youthful beliefs of imagining ‘that place expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lambe, with those celestiall songs to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defil’d with women’. But in the Apology he adopts the orthodox Calvinist interpretation of this passage in Revelation, insisting that the biblical phrase ‘not defiled with women’ in Revelation ‘doubtlesse means fornication: for marriage must not be call’d a defilement’.⁴⁴ Milton now offers a firmly Reformed reading of the meaning of ‘virginity’ in the New Testament as encompassing chastity within marriage. His own impending marriage—or sense that he would soon seek to marry—doubtless shaped his conviction by 1642 that the heavenly song which animates the inspired poet, the vates, can be as well understood—indeed might be better understood—by the chastely married as the perpetually virginal; or perhaps a change in his views on the matter even encouraged him to marry.

To his own elevated literary education in sexual morality, Milton contrasts his experience of the Laudian clergy, whose intellectual and literary inadequacies are presented as an index of their moral corruption. He biliously recalls how at Cambridge he had witnessed future ministers ‘so oft upon the Stage writhing and unboning their Clergie limes . . . prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court-Ladies, with their Groomes and Madamoisellaes’.⁴⁵ Milton combines his contempt for both the Laudian emphasis on ceremonial religion and the effeminate luxury of the Caroline court with an expression of puritanical distaste for the immorality of theatrical display. The suggestion of grotesque sexual as well as dramatic performance in the image of the (presumably cross-dressed) student actors ‘writhing and unboning’ recalls the charges of sodomy levelled against Buckingham and the royal court in the manuscript libels that circulated in the universities in the late 1620s. He may again have had in mind the university comedies of his Cambridge contemporary Randolph, which had received great acclaim from the visiting Caroline court. Here Milton sounds like Prynne in his attack on masques in Histrio-Mastix, and he would again adopt this typically Puritan anti-theatrical language in furious attacks in Eikonoklastes on the corrupt theatricality of Charles’s court and the susceptibility of the English people to idolatry of false, empty images of power. Yet, as is evident from the list of projects for drama in the Trinity manuscript and his disagreement in the commonplace book with Tertullian’s blanket condemnation of ‘shows’ as anti-Christian, his position in 1639–42 was that ‘the little corruptions of the theatre should indeed be removed’ but the instructive power of the serious ‘dramatic arts’, in particular tragedy, should be nonetheless harnessed for the public good.⁴⁶ It may be that he was now less well disposed to the sort of stage comedies that were popular, both in Latin and the vernacular, in Caroline Cambridge.

The Ciceronian distinction between humanissimi homines and barbaria was a repeated motif of Milton’s Cambridge prolusions, and in the Apology he applies this distinction to define the opposition between himself and the confuter, and by extension the bishops whom the confuter is taken to represent:

How few among them that know to write, or speak in a pure stile, much lesse to distinguish the idea’s, and various kinds of stile: in Latine barbarous, and oft not without solecisms, declaming in rugged and miscellaneous geare blown together by the foure winds, and in their choice preferring the gay rankness: of Apuleius, Arnobius, or any moderne fustianist, before the native Latinisms of Cicero. In the Greek tongue most of them unletter’d, or unenter’d to any sound proficiency in those Attick maisters of morall wisdome and eloquence[.]⁴⁷

The origins of such polemical rhetoric stretch back to the attacks on the barbarity instilled under Catholicism from the original English humanists, such as John Colet, who wrote such language into the very statutes of St Paul’s School. The Protestant humanist identification of tyrannical Catholic rule with the decline of English letters, vividly exemplified by Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster, is turned by Milton against Protestant episcopacy. Milton had turned such polemic against his Protestant countrymen before, but in the semi-public space of his Cambridge exercises, where the tone of such language tended rather to the serio-comic. His excoriation in The Reason of Church-government of the education received by the English gentry at the universities echoes the Latin of the Prolusions:

[studious men] coming to the Universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else, but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry, were sent home again with such a scholastical burre in their throats, as hath stopt and hinderd all true and generous philosophy from entring, crackt their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms, and hath made them admire a sort of formal outside men prelatically addicted[.]⁴⁸

‘Gargarisms’, or gargling sounds, recall the opening of Milton’s first Prolusion, in which he declares he would rather have the appreciation of an erudite few than that of ‘countless legions of ignorant fellows who have no mind, no reasoning faculties, no sound judgment’ and who are compared to frogs who can barely muster a croak.

The attack on the ‘metaphysical’ scholastic curriculum would be continued by Milton in Of Education, but it had also been a repeated feature of his university exercises: we have seen how such attacks on scholastic method did not authentically represent the content of the university curriculum in Milton’s time but were well-established tropes of humanist rhetoric. The representations of university education in Milton’s prose, in particular the Apology, have often been taken as evidence of his own extreme unhappiness with his time at Cambridge; but he was redirecting a familiar rhetoric of anti-Catholic and anti-scholastic abuse against the Laudian Church that should not be taken as an accurate account of his own education. At the same time, Milton had expressed his concerns in his private correspondence with Alexander Gil as early as 1628 about the inadequacy of his fellow students in ‘Philology and Philosophy alike’, and had worried that eventually ‘the priestly Ignorance of a former age may gradually attack our Clergy’. The anti-episcopal tracts depict such a world, in which the ‘priestly Ignorance’ of pre-Reformation and Marian England has returned in a supposedly Protestant country and can only be dispelled by further and truer reformation. In the Defensio Secunda, Milton explained that he published Of Education in 1644 because ‘nothing can be more efficacious than education in moulding the minds of men to virtue (whence arises true and internal liberty), in governing the state effectively, and preserving it for the longest space of time’.⁴⁹

The confuter and those he represents are scorned in the Apology as not having ‘so much learning as to reade what in Greek APEIROKALIOI is’.⁵⁰ The Greek term, meaning ‘want of taste’ or ‘ignorance of the beautiful’, is taken from the discussion of the ‘Aim of Education in Poetry and Music’ in Plato’s Republic (403 C). The damage done to English society by episcopal tyranny is aesthetic as well as intellectual and spiritual—Milton inverts the Laudian mantra of the ‘beauty of holiness’. In his November 1637 letter to Diodati, with whom he had always shared a bond through their common experience of learning Greek at St Paul’s, Milton had expressed his constant desire (shifting from Latin to Greek) to seek out ‘the idea of the beautiful’ wherever it may be found, quoting the Euripidean motto, ‘many are the shapes of things daemonic’. The association for Milton of Euripidean tragedy with the earthly manifestation of the daemonic in beautiful forms is evident in the invocation of Euripides in the sonnet that Milton likely composed in November 1642, and which is his most notable poem of the early 1640s. By this point, civil war had fully broken out in England: the king had raised his standard at Nottingham in August, and the first major battle had taken place at Edgehill in late October, with the Parliamentarian army coming off worst. The royalist army marched towards London, eventually retreating when only a few miles from Milton’s house at Aldersgate Street.

Milton began annotating his copy of Euripides again after 1639 and it seems likely that he did so because of pedagogical reasons, employing the texts and making further emendations to them in his role as private tutor, initially to his nephews.⁵¹ In the sonnet published in the 1645 Poems as ‘Sonnet VIII’, and entitled ‘When the assault was intended to the City’ in the Trinity manuscript, the Euripidean example emboldens the poet to proclaim the power of his art to persuade men from destructive violence:

Captain or Colonel, or knight in arms,
    Whose chance on these defenceless doors may sieze,
    If deed of honour did thee ever please,
    Guard them, and him within protect from harms,
He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
    That call fame on such gentle acts as these,
    And he can spread thy name o’er lands and seas,
    Whatever clime the sun’s bright circle warms.
Lift not they spear against the muses’ bower.
    The great Emathian conqueror did spare
    The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground: and the repeated air
    Of sad Electra’s poet had the power
    To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.

The story, recounted in Plutarch, of how the singing of the first chorus from Euripides’s Electra by a defeated Athenian moved the victorious Spartans to halt their planned destruction of the city, would seem to exemplify the power of the divine beauty given material form in poetry to have a real, transformative effect in the world. This can be considered as the first occasion on which Milton puts the sonnet to political work, although the tone is very different from the model of anti-papal polemic that he knew from the model of Petrarch’s ‘Babylon’ sonnets and from that of his later sonnets praising military and political leaders such as Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Milton chose to follow the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet rather than the Shakespearian adaptation of the form. Yet the concluding echo of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 58— ‘Bare ruined choirs were late the sweet birds sang’ (line 4)—retains the threat of destruction and loss even as the poet ostensibly celebrates the capacity of art to save itself, conveying the precarious future of civility in a world of division, polemic, and war.