and not a divorce, which he designed. In each successive pamphlet he
reiterates his undertaking to redeem his pledge of a great work, as
soon as liberty shall be consolidated in the realm. Meanwhile, as an
earnest of what should be hereafter, he permitted the publication of a
collection of his early poems.

This little volume of some 200 pages, rude in execution as it is,
ranks among the highest prizes of the book collector, very few copies
being extant, and those mostly in public libraries. It appeared in
1645, and owed its appearance, not to the vanity of the author, but
to the zeal of a publisher. Humphrey Moseley, at the sign, of the
Prince's Arms, in St. Paul's Churchyard, suggested the collection to
Milton, and undertook the risk of it, though knowing, as he says
in the prefixed address of The Stationer to the Reader, that "the
slightest pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of
learnedest men." It may create some surprise that, in 1645, there
should have been any public in England for a volume of verse. Naseby
had been fought in June, Philiphaugh in September, Fairfax and
Cromwell were continuing their victorious career in the west, Chester,
Worcester, and the stronghold of Oxford, alone holding out for the
King. It was clear that the conflict was decided in favour of the
Parliament, but men's minds must have been strung to a pitch of
intense expectation as to what kind of settlement was to come. Yet, at
the very crisis of the civil strife, we find a London publisher able
to bring out the Poems of Waller (1644), and sufficiently encouraged
by their reception to follow them up, in the next year, with the Poems
of Mr. John Milton. Are we warranted in inferring that a finer public
was beginning to loathe the dreary theological polemic of which it had
had a surfeit, and turned to a book of poetry as that which was
most unlike the daily garbage, just as a later public absorbed five