Paul's Churchyard, suggested the collection to
Milton, and undertook the risk of it, though knowing, as he says
in the prefixed address of The Stationer to the Reader, that "the
slightest pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of
learnedest men." It may create some surprise that, in 1645, there
should have been any public in England for a volume of verse. Naseby
had been fought in June, Philiphaugh in September, Fairfax and
Cromwell were continuing their victorious career in the west, Chester,
Worcester, and the stronghold of Oxford, alone holding out for the
King. It was clear that the conflict was decided in favour of the
Parliament, but men's minds must have been strung to a pitch of
intense expectation as to what kind of settlement was to come. Yet, at
the very crisis of the civil strife, we find a London publisher able
to bring out the Poems of Waller (1644), and sufficiently encouraged
by their reception to follow them up, in the next year, with the Poems
of Mr. John Milton. Are we warranted in inferring that a finer public
was beginning to loathe the dreary theological polemic of which it had
had a surfeit, and turned to a book of poetry as that which was
most unlike the daily garbage, just as a later public absorbed five
thousand copies of Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ in the year of
Austerlitz? One would like to know who were the purchasers of
Milton and Waller, when the cavalier families were being ruined by
confiscations and compositions, and Puritan families would turn with
pious horror from the very name of a Mask.
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