Milton's rage blinded him;
he is mad Ajax castigating innocent sheep instead of Achsaeans.
The Latin pamphlets are indispensable to a knowledge of Milton's
disposition. We see in them his grand disdain of his opponents,
reproducing the concentrated intellectual scorn of the Latin Persius;
his certainty of the absolute justice of his own cause, and the purity
of his own motives. This lofty cast of thought is combined with an
eagerness to answer the meanest taunts. The intense subjectivity
of the poet breaks out in these paragraphs, and while he should be
stating the case of the republic, he holds Europe listening to an
account of himself, his accomplishments, his studies and travels,
his stature, the colour of his eyes, his skill in fencing, &c. These
egoistic utterances must have seemed to Milton's contemporaries to be
intrusive and irrelevant vanity. _Paradise Lost_ was not as yet, and
to the Council of State Milton was, what he was to Whitelocke, "a
blind man who wrote Latin." But these paragraphs, in which he talks
of himself, are to us the only living fragments out of many hundred
worthless pages.
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