If fiction is truer than fact, fact is
more tragic than fiction. In the course of the long struggle of human
liberty against the church, there had been terrible catastrophes.
But the St. Bartholomew, the Revocation of the Edict, the Spanish
Inquisition, the rule of Alva in the Low Countries,--these and other
days of suffering and rebuke have been left to the dull pen of the
annalist, who has variously diluted their story in his literary
circumlocution office. The triumphant royalist reaction of 1680,
when the old serpent bruised the heel of freedom by totally crushing
Puritanism, is singular in this, that the agonised cry of the beaten
party has been preserved in a cotemporary monument, the intensest
utterance of the most intense of English poets--the _Samson
Agonistes_.
In the covert representation, which we have in this drama, of the
actual wreck of Milton, his party, and his cause, is supplied that
real basis of truth which was necessary to inspire him to write. It
is of little moment that the incidents of Samson's life do not form
a strict parallel to those of Milton's life, or to the career of the
Puritan cause.
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