But through them all
runs the one redeeming characteristic--that they are all written
on the side of liberty. He defended religious liberty against the
prelates, civil liberty against the crown, the liberty of the
press against the executive, liberty of conscience against the
Presbyterians, and domestic liberty against the tyranny of canon law.
Milton's pamphlets might have been stamped with the motto which Selden
inscribed (in Greek) in all his books, "Liberty before everything."
One virtue these pamphlets possess, the virtue of style. They are
monuments of our language so remarkable that Milton's prose works must
always be resorted to by students, as long as English remains a medium
of ideas. Yet even on the score of style, Milton's prose is subject to
serious deductions. His negligence is such as to amount to an absence
of construction. He who, in his verse, trained the sentence with
delicate sensibility to follow his guiding hand into exquisite syntax,
seems in his prose writing to abandon his meaning to shift for itself.
Here Milton compares disadvantageously with Hooker. Hooker's elaborate
sentence, like the sentence of Demosthenes, is composed of parts
so hinged, of clauses so subordinated to the main thought, that we
foresee the end from the beginning, and close the period with a sense
of perfect roundness and totality.
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