not himself, which he magnifies. The details of his life and nurture
are important, not because they belong to him, but because he belongs,
by dedication, to a high and sacred calling. He is extremely jealous,
not of his own reputation, but of the credit which is due to lofty
endeavour. We have only to compare Milton's magnanimous assumption of
the first place with the paltry conceit with which, in the following
age of Dryden and Pope, men spoke of themselves as authors, to see
the wide difference between the professional vanity of successful
authorship and the proud consciousness of a prophetic mission. Milton
leads a dedicated life, and has laid down for himself the law that
"he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in
laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."

If Milton had not been the author of _Lycidas_ and _Paradise Lost_,
his political pamphlets would have been as forgotten as are the
thousand civil war tracts preserved in the Thomason collection in
the Museum, or have served, at most, as philological landmarks. One,
however, of his prose tracts has continued to enjoy some degree of
credit down to the present time, for its matter as well as for its
words, _Areopagitica_. This tract belongs to the year 1644, the most
fertile year in Milton's life, as in it he "brought out two of his
divorce tracts, the _Tractate of Education_, and the _Areopagitica_.
As Milton's moving principle was not any preconceived system of
doctrine but the passion for liberty in general, it was natural that
he should plead, when occasion called, for liberty of the press, among
others. The occasion was one personal to himself.

It is well known that, early in the history of printing, governments
became jealous of this new instrument for influencing opinion. In
England, in 1556, under Mary, the Stationers' Company was invested