appearance of the "Eikon Basilike," he op

reason and the If he took an

posed the warning voice of high, clear strains of duty. untenable position in some particulars, he nevertheless put the half-hearted to shame and enrolled his own name high among the sons of liberty. The popular leaders could overlook him no longer, and he was offered the post of Latin Secretary to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The salary was ample,about $5250 in our present money, and the position such as even a Milton could accept, for he was not merely to carry on diplomatic correspondence in the language of scholars, but also to be the recognized spokesman of his party. In his own eyes it was the spokesman of liberty and his native land that he aspired to be, and the proffered office gave him an opportunity of realizing his aspiration. There could be little or no thought of a refusal, and he thus became, as Dr. Garnett happily puts it, "the Orpheus among the Argonauts of the Commonwealth."

His first work as Secretary that need be noticed here was his "Eikonoklastes," written in

answer to the "Eikon Basilike" of Bishop Gauden, then generally believed to be the work of the "Royal Martyr" himself. Milton seems to have shirked the task, knowing that to accomplish it effectively would necessitate depreciation of the dead king and much chaffering over straws. In spite of this known reluctance on his part and of the obvious fact that much of his matter and manner was determined by the nature and arrangement of the treatise he was answering, critics have not ceased to search his book minutely for data on which to rest charges against his personal integrity, his consistency, even his taste in literature. But he was soon to undertake a greater task, and one that was to bring him more fame, since he did little with “Eikonoklastes to stem the tide in favor of the pseudo-religious martyr. The learned Frenchman, Claude de Saumaise, better known as Salmasius, the discoverer of the Palatine Ms. of the Greek Anthology, had been employed to unmask the batteries of his ponderous erudition, so valued at the time, in defence of Charles I. His "Defensio Regia".

appeared in the latter part of 1649, and Milton was directed by the Council to answer it. He did at the cost of his sight. For some years his eyes had been failing, and one was already gone. He was advised that any further strain would speedily induce total blindness, yet he never wavered in the performance of his duty. He calmly faced the loss of a sense that every true scholar must value more than life itself; he put from him all anticipation of the noble pleasure he had looked forward to deriving from the first sight of his great poem in print; he may even have despaired of ever composing the poem at all; he looked forward to the miseries of a cheerless old age, and without repining accepted a commission that could not under any circumstances have been specially grateful to him- all because he deemed it right that his country and party should make a proper reply to the charges that had been laid against them in the forum of European opinion. If a sublimer act of patriotic self-sacrifice has ever been performed, it has surely never been recorded. And yet readers have been found who could calmly

dissect the "Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio contra Salmasium" and argue from it that its author had not merely a bad cause, but a bad temper and a worse taste. There have been critics who have imagined that it is proper to judge a seventeenth century controversialist by standards more talked about than acted upon in the nineteenth. There have even been friends of Milton who, forgetting that the man is and ought to be greater than the poet, have wished that he had never performed this act of self-sacrifice that makes him the true Milton of song and history,

And now by the spring of 1652 the Milton who had won the plaudits of cultivated Italians for his beauty and his grace, the Milton who had looked on nature's face and found her fair, the Milton who had at last been brought to mingle with the affairs of men at a critical juncture in his country's history, was totally blind, an object of pity, a man who was apparently without a future. It was due to the fact that he was Milton and no one else that he did not succumb but became the poet of "Paradise Lost." And as if to complete his

misfortunes, the death of his wife left him the blind father of three little girls. Under such circumstances he can have thought little of his sudden leap into European fame through the complete victory he had gained over Salmasius. That victory, like all partisan victories, was dearly bought, for the price paid was nothing less than the consciousness that he was execrated by hundreds of thousands of his fellow-countrymen.

The literary duel which cost Milton his sight and Salmasius his life, according to the doubtless exaggerated story, was followed by a sorry squabble which would be regrettable but for the fact that it led Milton to make certain autobiographical confessions of great value. A scurrilous tract was written against him by a broken-down parson, Peter du Moulin by name, who managed to keep his identity well concealed. Milton was led by plausible reasons to believe that his reviler was one Alexander Morus, a Scoto-Frenchman, pastor and professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, and a resident in Salmasius's household, in which he did not conduct him