Milton, though he knows nothing
more than one of the public, "only what it appears to us without
doors," he says, will yet write about it. The habit of pamphleteering
was on him, and he will write what no one will care to read. The
stiff-necked commonwealth men, with their doctrinaire republicanism,
were standing out for their constitutional ideas, blind to the fact
that the royalists were all the while undermining the ground beneath
the feet alike of Presbyterian and Independent, Parliament and army.
The Greeks of Constantinople denouncing the Azymite, when Mohammed II.
was forming his lines round the doomed city, were not more infatuated
than these pedantic commonwealth men with their parliamentarianism
when Charles II. was at Calais.
Not less inopportune than the public men of the party, Milton chooses
this time for inculcating his views on endowments. A fury of utterance
was upon him, and he poured out, during the death-throes of the
republic, pamphlet upon pamphlet, as fast as he could get them written
to his dictation. These extemporised effusions betray in their style,
hurry and confusion, the restlessness of a coming despair.
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