personal safety if occasion had presented itself in which to strike another real blow for liberty. Meanwhile he must have watched the progress of affairs almost as closely as before, and, when the three poems were written, he found a last opportunity to exercise in a limited way an influence on public opinion in one of the old issues with which he had been concerned. Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence, granting freedom of worship to the NonConformists, was issued in March, 1672. The evident fact that it was mainly intended as a relief for Catholics raised a cry against it from Dissenters and Anglicans alike and it was rescinded by Parliament in the following year. The Non-Conformists hoped for the passage of an act which without benefiting the Papists would free themselves from their disabilities. Some of them advocated a recomprehension within the establishment. Milton's tract, published along with many others in 1673, was entitled Of True Religion, Heresy, Toleration, and the growth of Papery. It is an attempt to bring the Protestant sects together in mutual charity and to induce them to take a tolerant attitude toward differences in the nonessential points of doctrine. Any creed based on the word of God, however variously interpreted, is true religion. Heresy is a religion taken up and believed from the traditions of men. Catholicism, therefore, is the essential heresy, and it alone, though rather because of its political pretensions than of its doctrinal errors, is not to be allowed. Milton deprecates the exercise of violence even toward the Romanists, but is firm in advocating the suppression of their public worship. The pamphlet is, as Masson says, a rather tame one, compared with the two ecclesiastical tracts written in the last days of the Republic.

One further document remains. In the spring of 1674, Milton wrote and published a translation from the Latin of a Polish manifesto entitled A Declaration of the Election of this present King of Poland, John the III, i. e., the national hero Sobieski, who had manfully defended his country against the Turks. Milton's interest in the event was because of the instance it afforded of the true ideal of monarchy, when a man universally acknowledged the strongest and most virtuous is elected king by the sovereign people. The implied contrast between the courageous patriot Sobieski and the traitorous idler Charles II was too sharp to be mistaken. With this final recommendation of right reason to his supine countrymen John Milton, weary with approaching death, laid down

his pen.

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS OF UNCERTAIN DATE

At some interval of leisure during the Commonwealth or early Protectorate, at any rate before his blindness, Milton composed a popular account of Russia-the land, the government, and the people-based on the stories of various explorers which had been printed in Hakluyt's Voyages, Purchas's Pilgrimages and elsewhere. Such narratives were one of the favorite branches of Milton's reading and the subject of geography was full of appeal to his curiosity and his imagination. He speaks in his preface as though he had projected a series of descriptions of various countries. As in the History of Britain he proposes to give a readable and veracious account in small compass, purged of "long stories of absurd superstition, ceremonies, quaint habits, and other petty circumstances

little to the purpose." The work was published after his death in 1682. The poetic fruits of his study of the voyages had already been garnered in Paradise Lost. Two school textbooks-a Latin Grammar in English, and a treatise on logic in Latin-close the list of Milton's original prose works. The first of these, Accedence Commenced Grammar, Supply'd with sufficient Rules, For the use of such (Younger or Elder) as are desirous, without more trouble than needs to learn the Latin Tongue, is a fruit of Milton's interest in pedagogy and of his conviction, expressed in the tractate Of Education, that an immense amount of time was wasted by the cumbersome methods of Latin instruction then in vogue. It was published in 1669. The Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, published three years later, was a digest of the system of Peter Ramus which had been welcomed by the Protestant universities in opposition to the traditional logic of Aristotle, which was felt to be too much identified with Catholicism. Both works were presumably written in the days when Milton was occupied with the practical work of education.

In 1658 Milton published the first edition of a work on government by Sir Walter Raleigh entitled The Cabinet Council; containing The Chief Arts of Empire and Mysteries of State. The manuscript, he says in a foreword, had been given to him by a learned man at his death and had been in his hands many years. Milton was keenly interested in the principles and maxims of civic leadership, as set forth by the statesmen of the Renaissance, witness his careful study of Machiavelli.25

There are other records of Milton's intellectual activities 25 Recorded in the Commonplace Book.

in the form of annotations to volumes which have been preserved from his library, some of them perhaps designed as materials for scholarly editions. We have also his Commonplace Book, consisting of quotations and references from his reading in the fields chiefly of political and ecclesiastical history, arranged under appropriate headings. These notes were, of course, intended for his own use only. The manuscript was discovered and published in 1874.26 The entries, which date from the Horton period to 1652, or later, are an interesting index of Milton's changing interests and opinions. When arranged chronologically they show him to have been following a consistent program of historical study from the fall of Rome to his own day.27

26 By A. J. Horwood. 27 Hanford, Chronology.

CHAPTER III

THE MINOR POEMS

'ILTON'S minor poems in English, Latin, and

M1

Cover a

Italian cover a period of his life from the last year of his attendance at St. Paul's School to the moment at which he undertook the actual composition of Paradise Lost (i. e., circa 1655). We are told by Aubrey that he was already a poet at the age of ten, but the earliest verses which have been preserved are two Psalm paraphrases done when he was fifteen years old.

The total body of this work is not large; to Milton himself, who felt, with his contemporaries, that tragedy and epic were the great literary forms, and who deliberately shaped his life toward the highest poetic achievement, this experimental and occasional verse was probably trifling. He cherished it sufficiently, however, to publish the bulk of it in an independent volume in 1645, as an evidence of his youthful poetic promise. A second edition, which appeared in 1673, contained a few additional early pieces and the subsequently composed translations and sonnets.

Though this part of Milton's poetical activity is fairly continuous for the period which it covers, we may observe that there are in it some especially prolific years and some rather notable gaps. Thus, in his eighteenth year, his second at the University, Milton gave himself eagerly to the composition of Latin verse, writing not less than