BECAUSE 1646? ET. 38. On the new forcers of conscience, you have thrown off your prelate lord, And with stiff vows renounced his liturgy, To seize the widowed whore Plurality From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred; To force our consciences that Christ set free, Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford? Men, whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent, Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, Must now be named and printed heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d'ye call: But we do hope to find out all your tricks, Your plots and packing, worse than those of Trent; That so the parliament May, with their wholesome and preventive shears, Clip your phylacteries, though balk your ears, And succour our just fears, When they shall read this clearly in your charge, New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large. тбо SONNET 13. In the two last lines of the preceding sonnet we see Milton distinctly breaking with the Presbyterians; in the present sonnet he declares for the principle of Independency, viz., liberty of conscience. Milton was among the first to find out that intellectual liberty was no more to be allowed by the rigid Presbyterianism of the Westminster Assembly than it had been by Laud and the bishops. In point of form this sonnet has been sometimes treated as though it were a monstrous and misshapen birth, and not a sonnet at all. Todd, ed. 1809, does not place it among the sonnets. Masson, ed. 1874, though placing it after Sonnet 12, does not number it; 13 in his numeration being the number of the following sonnet, 'Harry, whose tuneful,' &c. The forcers of 'conscience,' however, is as regular a sonnet, and as strictly conformed to the Italian model, as any of the other twenty-three. It is of the form called colla coda,' a form which seems to have been introduced as early as the fifteenth century, and was much used by a Rabelaisian Florentine satirist who went by the name of Burchiello. From him was derived the denomination Burchielleschi, applied to a species of homely and familiar verse. This form went out of fashion during the sixteenth century, but was revived at the beginning of the seventeenth, and Milton may have met with sonnets of this burlesque form in circulation at Florence. At any rate, in this sonnet alone we have sufficient evidence that Milton went to Italian models for his sonnets. The rules for the construction of the coda' are as precise as those for the body of the sonnet itself. The coda' may consist of one or any greater number of tercets. The first line of each tercet must be shorter than, but bear a definite proportion to, the length of the lines in the body of the sonnet; e.g., if the sonnet is in decasyllable lines, the first line of the tercet must be a sixsyllable line. The first dwarf line must rime with the fourteenth line of the sonnet itself, but the rime in the remaining two lines of the tercet must be different from any which have been employed in the sonnet. The sonnet may be prolonged by any number of tercets constructed |