Through all these stages Milton passed in the space of twenty
years--Church-Puritan, Presbyterian, Royalist, Independent,
Commonwealth's man, Oliverian. These political phases were not the
acquiescence of a placeman, or indifferentist, in mutations for which
he does not care; still less were they changes either of party or of
opinion. Whatever he thought, Milton thought and felt intensely, and
expressed emphatically; and even his enemies could not accuse him of
a shadow of inconsistency or wavering in his principles. On the
contrary, tenacity, or persistence of idea, amounted in him to a
serious defect of character. A conviction once formed dominated him,
so that, as in the controversy with Morus, he could not be persuaded
that he had made a mistake. No mind, the history of which we have an
opportunity of intimately studying, could be more of one piece and
texture than was that of Milton from youth to age. The names, which
we are obliged to give to his successive political stages, do not
indicate shades of colour adopted from the prevailing political
ground, but the genuine development of the public consciousness of
Puritan England repeated in an individual.
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