The supposition is founded upon a
certain passage in Milton's pamphlet.
If the early date of the pamphlet be the true date; if the _Doctrine
and Discipline_ was in the hands of the public on August 1 if Milton
was brooding over this seething agony of passion all through July,
with the young bride, to whom he had been barely wedded a month, in
the house where he was writing, then the only apology for this outrage
upon the charities, not to say decencies, of home is that which is
suggested by the passage referred to. Then the pamphlet, however
imprudent, becomes pardonable. It is a passionate cry from the depths
of a great despair; another evidence of the noble purity of a nature
which refused to console itself as other men would have consoled
themselves; a nature which, instead of an egotistical whine for its
own deliverance, sets itself to plead the common cause of man and of
society. He gives no intimation of any individual interest, but his
argument throughout glows with a white heat of concealed emotion, such
as could only he stirred by the sting of some personal and present
misery.
Notwithstanding the amount of free opinion abroad in England, or at
least in London, at this date, Milton's divorce pamphlets created a
sensation of that sort which Gibbon is fond of calling a scandal.
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