There are examples of thought having been influenced by
books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetorical. Milton's
pamphlets are not works of speculation, or philosophy, or learning, or
solid reasoning on facts. They are inflammatory appeals, addressed to
the passions of the hour. He who was meditating the erection of an
enduring creation, such as the world "would not willingly let die,"
was content to occupy himself with the most ephemeral of all hackwork.
His own polemical writings may be justly described in the words he
himself uses of a book by one of his opponents, as calculated "to
gain a short, contemptible, and soon-fading reward, not to stir the
constancy and solid firmness of any wise man ... but to catch the
worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting
rabble."
It would have been not unnatural that the public school and university
man, the admirer of Shakspeare and the old romances, the pet of
Italian academies, the poet-scholar, himself the author of two Masks,
who was nursing his wings for a new flight into the realms of verse,
should have sided with the cavaliers against the Puritans, with the
party of culture and the humanities against the party which shut up
the theatres and despised profane learning.
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