pamphlets are not works of speculation, or philosophy, or learning, or
solid reasoning on facts. They are inflammatory appeals, addressed to
the passions of the hour. He who was meditating the erection of an
enduring creation, such as the world "would not willingly let die,"
was content to occupy himself with the most ephemeral of all hackwork.
His own polemical writings may be justly described in the words he
himself uses of a book by one of his opponents, as calculated "to
gain a short, contemptible, and soon-fading reward, not to stir the
constancy and solid firmness of any wise man ... but to catch the
worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting
rabble."

It would have been not unnatural that the public school and university
man, the admirer of Shakspeare and the old romances, the pet of
Italian academies, the poet-scholar, himself the author of two Masks,
who was nursing his wings for a new flight into the realms of verse,
should have sided with the cavaliers against the Puritans, with the
party of culture and the humanities against the party which shut up
the theatres and despised profane learning. But we have seen that
there was another side to Milton's mind. This may be spoken of as his
other self, the Puritan self, and regarded as in internal conflict
with the poet's self. His twenty years' pamphlet warfare may be
presented by his biographer as the expression of the Puritanic Milton,
who shall have been driven back upon his suppressed instincts as a
poet by the ruin of his political hopes. This chart of Milton's life
is at once simple and true. But like all physiological diagrams it
falls short of the subtlety and complexity of human character. A study
of the pamphlets will show that the poet is all there, indeed only too
openly for influence on opinion, and that the blighted hope of
the patriot lends a secret pathos to _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson