press against the executive, liberty of conscience against the
Presbyterians, and domestic liberty against the tyranny of canon law.
Milton's pamphlets might have been stamped with the motto which Selden
inscribed (in Greek) in all his books, "Liberty before everything."

One virtue these pamphlets possess, the virtue of style. They are
monuments of our language so remarkable that Milton's prose works must
always be resorted to by students, as long as English remains a medium
of ideas. Yet even on the score of style, Milton's prose is subject to
serious deductions. His negligence is such as to amount to an absence
of construction. He who, in his verse, trained the sentence with
delicate sensibility to follow his guiding hand into exquisite syntax,
seems in his prose writing to abandon his meaning to shift for itself.
Here Milton compares disadvantageously with Hooker. Hooker's elaborate
sentence, like the sentence of Demosthenes, is composed of parts
so hinged, of clauses so subordinated to the main thought, that we
foresee the end from the beginning, and close the period with a sense
of perfect roundness and totality. Milton does not seem to have any
notion of what a period means. He begins anywhere, and leaves off, not
when the sense closes, but when he is out of breath. We might have
thought this pell-mell huddle of his words was explained, if not
excused, by the exigencies of the party pamphlet, which cannot wait.
But the same asyntactle disorder is equally found in the _History of
Britain_, which he had in hand for forty years. Nor is it only the
Miltonic sentence which is incoherent; the whole arrangement of his
topics is equally loose, disjointed, and desultory. His inspiration
comes from impulse. Had he stayed to chastise his emotional writing by
reason and the laws of logic, he would have deprived himself of the
sources of his strength.