of Athens, the other to the Parliament of England.

Milton's _Speech_ is in his own best style; a copious flood of
majestic eloquence, the outpouring of a noble soul with a divine
scorn of narrow dogma and paltry aims. But it is a mere pamphlet,
extemporised in, at most, a month or two, without research or special
knowledge, with no attempt to ascertain general principles, and more
than Milton's usual disregard of method. A jurist's question, is here
handled by a rhetorician. He has preached a noble and heart-stirring
sermon on his text, but the problem for the legislator remains where
it was. The vagueness and confusion of the thoughts finds a vehicle
in language which is too often overcrowded and obscure. I think the
_Areopagitica_ has few or no offences against taste; on the other
hand, it has few or none of those grand passages which redeem the
scurrility of his political pamphlets. The passage in which Milton's
visit to Galileo "grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition," is
mentioned, is often quoted for its biographical interest; and the
terse dictum, "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book," has
passed into a current axiom. A paragraph at the close, where he hints
that the time may be come to suppress the suppressors, intimates, but
so obscurely as to be likely to escape notice, that Milton had already
made up his mind that a struggle with the Presbyterian party was to be
the sequel of the overthrow of the Royalists. He has not yet arrived
at the point he will hereafter reach, of rejecting the very idea of
a minister of religion, but he is already aggrieved by the implicit
faith which the Puritan laity, who had cast out bishops, were
beginning to bestow upon their pastor; "a factor to whose care and
credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs."
Finally, it must be noted, that Milton, though he had come to see
round Presbyterianism, had not, in 1644, shaken off all dogmatic