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XXVI

discard Mary Powell; Mary Powell deserted Milton, and insult was added to desertion, both by herself and her friends.

It is to be remembered that Milton lived to have three wives. With his second wife his connection was one of unmingled happiness. His beautiful sonnet to her memory warrants us in saying thus much. With his third wife he lived through the last ten years of his life very affectionately; and of the magnanimous conduct of which he was capable both towards Mary Powell and her ungenerous relatives, we shall have evidence presently. Milton, as he approached middle life, was no doubt a man of some quickness and strength of temper, and in his later years had painful thoughts on the infirmity and depravity possible to women. But while firm in his opinion as to the precedence which the stronger sex should take of the weaker, his conception of the charm that may be found in woman's nature, and of the homage that manhood might with fitness render to it, we see in his descriptions of Eve, and of the lady in Comus, and in other portions of his writings. He was evidently of Sheridan's opinion, that women are both worse and better too than men.

But left thus alone-worse than alone-Milton began to meditate on the means of extricating himself from this difficulty. The question came to be, Is the marriage bond indissoluble, except in the cases limited by existing law? And the conclusion to which he came, after a wide course of reading and much thought, was, that divorce might take place on other grounds than those usually acknowledged. In 1644, the year following his marriage, he addressed a treatise to the Parliament, intitled The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. He then found that the opinion he had broached on this subject had been avowed by Martin Bucer, in an address to Edward VI., and he reprinted the judgment of the reformer, with a preface and a postscript. By this time the Presbyterians had become ascendant, and great was the storm which they raised against this new doctrine. They procured that John Milton, as a demoraliser of the community, should be summoned to the bar of the House of Lords; but their lordships shared little in this furor; the accused was honorably dismissed. In 1645 Milton published another treatise on this question, intitled Tetrachorden, being an exposition of the four principal passages of Scripture relating to it. One more publication appeared on this subject, intitled Colasterion. Some anonymous writer had attempted an answer to the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and this last production of Milton on this controversy consisted of a reply to that answer. The opinions he now avowed were never abandoned, and those who accepted them were sometimes called Miltonists. The substance of the doctrine was "that other reasons of divorce besides adultery were by the law of Moses, and are yet to be allowed by the Christian magistrate, as a piece of justice, and that the words of Christ are not hereby contraried; next, that to prohibit absolutely any divorce whatever, except those which Moses excepted, is against the reason of the law. The grand position is this-that indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, hindering, and ever likely to hinder, the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace and peace, is a greater reason of divorce than adultery, provided there be a mutual consent for separation."

But these were not the only publications from the pen of Milton during the two years through which he is present to us as a deserted husband. In 1644, at the request of his friend Hartlib, he sent forth his Tractate on Education, which has been generally regarded as exhibiting a Utopian scheme on that subject, aiming at a fulness of acquisition and culture in youth that can be realised only through years and experience. It rarely happens that men of genius make good

preceptors. They make their own acquisitions easily, almost by intuition, and they are always in danger of measuring the aptitude of others by their own. The slow and bit-by-bit process in which education really consists, is best in the hands of men of more patience, and, we may perhaps add, of duller faculties. Genius is impulsive, routine is equable—the same to-morrow as to-day, and knows how to wait.

But the year in which the Tractate on Education was published was marked by the appearance of a work of a much higher order—The Arcopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. This discourse Milton addressed to the Parliament, and among his prose writings there is not another more eloquent, nor another so pregnant with truths of permanent significance and worth. Men are virtuous, says Milton, when they reject evil from choice, not when barred from it by necessity. "I cannot praise a fugitive and a cloistered virtue," he writes, "unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

The Parliament had issued an order to regulate printing, which said, "That no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed unless the same be first approved and licensed by such, or at least one of such, as shall be thereto appointed." Milton urges the Parliament to re-consider this order; to remember that this subjection of authorship to the ignorance or caprice of a censor owes its origin to recent times; and to guard against the delusion of supposing that any such law will suffice to prevent the printing of bad books. On the contrary, he maintains, that its effect must be "primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in civil and religious wisdom." The principle, he argues, that would put an end to the freedom of the press on the plea that error must not be promulgated, should put an end to controversy altogether, inasmuch as no man can refute an error without publishing the error supposed to be refuted. We do not punish bad men because they are supposed to be capable of doing bad things. We wait until the bad things are done. Let it be so with books. In reasoning thus, Milton must have been aware that full license to print would be an uncertain sign of liberty, if the laws concerning treason, sedition, libel, and alleged blasphemy were not brought more into accordance with that article of freedom. License to print as we please would be a small privilege, if the Government should retain the power to punish for so doing pretty much as it may please. Milton in assuming that his liberty of unlicensed printing would be a real liberty, must have looked to further reformation in these collateral forms. But the nineteenth century was to come before this vision was to be realised in our history.

Milton, however, had many friends, who, knowing his opinions on this vital question, entreated him to print, and many more responded to his utterances when he had so done. The influence of the leaven thus diffused on the course of legislation, if not wholly successful, was not inconsiderable. The action of the licenser under the Long Parliament was checked and limited by opinion as thus enlightened. One functionary resigned the odious office; and under Cromwell it was abolished. With many words like the following did Milton deliver his expostulation and warning:—"I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again, and licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are; if some who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over learning, and will soon put it out of controversy, that bishops and presbyters

^&lt;sup>1</sup> Fletcher. Introduction to Milton's Prose Works.