TABLE OF CONTENTS From Second Defence of the People of England To Charles Diodati (Elegia Prima) . xiii-xxxii I-103 2-6 6-27 28-30 30, 31 31 31-33 33-35 35-40 English letter to a friend (unknown) who, it appears, had been calling him to account for his apparent indiffer- Sonnet: On his having arrived at the age of twenty-three To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. V.) From Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence, etc. 56-65 To the most distinguished Leonard Philaras, of Athens, Am- To Henry Oldenburg, agent for the city of Bremen in Lower . 87, 88 Hirelings out of the Church (August, 1659) . Autobiographic passages in the Paradise Lost To the very distinguished Peter Heimbach, Councillor to the Elector of Brandenburg (Familiar Letters, No. XXXI.) 102, 103 Passages in Milton's prose and poetical works in which his idea of true liberty, individual, domestic, civil, political, and re- INTRODUCTION MILTON's prose works are perhaps not read, at the present day, to the extent demanded by their great and varied merits, among which may be named their uncompromising advocacy of whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; their eloquent assertion of the inalienable rights of men to a wholesome exercise of their intellectual faculties, the right to determine for themselves, with all the aids they can command, what is truth and what is error; the right freely to communicate their honest thoughts from one to another, rights which constitute the only sure and lasting foundation of individual, civil, political, and religious liberty; the ever-conscious sentiment which they exhibit, on the part of the poet, of an entire dependence upon 'that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases'; the ever-present consciousness they exhibit of that stewardship which every man as a probationer of immortality must render an account, according to the full measure of the talents with which he has been intrusted-of the sacred obligation, incumbent upon every one, of acting throughout the details of life, private or public, trivial or momentous, 'as ever in his great TaskMaster's eye.' Some of his poetical works are extensively 'studied' in the schools, and a style study of some of his prose works is made in departments of rhetoric; but his prose works cannot be said to be much read in the best sense of the word, that is, |