Agonistes_.

This other element in Milton is not accurately named Puritanism. Even
the term republicanism is a coarse and conventional description of
that sentiment which dominated his whole being, and which is the
inspiration at once of his poetry and of his prose. To give a name
to this sentiment, I must call it the love of liberty. It was an
aspiration at once real and vague, after a new order of things, an
order in which the old injustices and oppressions should cease; after
a new Jerusalem, a millennium, a Utopia, an Oceana. Its aim was to
realise in political institutions that great instauration of which
Bacon dreamed in the world of intelligence. It was much more negative
than affirmative, and knew better, as we all do, how good was hindered
than how it should be promoted. "I did but prompt the age to _quit
their clogs_." Milton embodied, more perfectly than any of his
cotemporaries, this spirit of the age. It is the ardent aspiration,
after the pure and noble life, the aspiration which stamps every line
he wrote, verse or prose, with a dignity as of an heroic age. This
gives consistency to all his utterances. The doctrinaire republican of
to-day cannot understand how the man who approved the execution of the
would-be despot Charles Stuart, should have been the hearty supporter
of the real autocrat Oliver Cromwell. Milton was not the slave of a
name. He cared not for the word republic, so as it was well with the
commonwealth. Parliaments or single rulers, he knew, are "but means
to an end; if that end was obtained, no matter if the constitutional
guarantees exist or not. Many of Milton's pamphlets are certainly
party pleadings, choleric, one-sided, personal. But through them all
runs the one redeeming characteristic--that they are all written
on the side of liberty. He defended religious liberty against the
prelates, civil liberty against the crown, the liberty of the