perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter
confusion. Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be "an
eagle towering in his pride of place," but he may seem to have
degenerated into the "mousing owl" when he pounced upon newswriters and
ferreted unlicensed pamphlets for sedition. True, there was nothing in
this occupation formally inconsistent with anything he had written in
the "Areopagitica"; yet one wishes that the Council of State had
provided otherwise for this particular department of the public service.
Nothing but a sense of duty can have reconciled him to a task so
invidious; and there is some evidence of what might well have been
believed without evidence--that he mitigated the severity of the
censorship as far as in him lay. He was not to want for better
occupation, for the Council of State was about to devolve upon him the
charge of answering the great Royalist manifesto, "Eikon Basilike."

The controversy respecting the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" is a
remarkable instance of the degree in which literary judgment may be
biassed by political prepossession. In the absence of other testimony
one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according
as his verdict inclined to Charles I. or Bishop Gauden. In fact, it is
no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely
different kinds of testimony. The external evidence of Charles's
authorship is worth nothing. It is almost confined to the assertions,
forty years after the publication, of a few aged Cavaliers, who were
all morally certain that Charles wrote the book, and to whom a fiction
supplying the accidental lack of external testimony would have seemed
laudable and pious. The only wonder is that such legends are not far
more numerous. On the other hand, the internal evidence seems at first
sight to make for the king. The style is not dissimilar to that of the
reputed royal author; the sentiments are such as would have well become