was the source of all Royalist arguments against the Commonwealth.  In 1649 appeared Milton’s Eikonoklastes (Image Breaker), which demolished the flimsy arguments of the Eikon Basilike as a charge of Cromwell’s Ironsides had overwhelmed the king’s followers.  After the execution of the king appeared another famous attack upon the Puritans, Defensio Regia pro Carlo I, instigated by Charles II, who was then living in exile.  It was written in Latin by Salmasius, a Dutch professor at Leyden, and was hailed by the Royalists as an invincible argument.  By order of the Council of State Milton prepared a reply.  His eyesight had sadly failed, and he was warned that any further strain would be disastrous.  His reply was characteristic of the man and the Puritan.  As he had once sacrificed his poetry, so he was now ready, he said, to sacrifice his eyes also on the altar of English liberty.  His magnificent Defensio pro Populo Anglicano is one of the most masterly controversial works in literature.  The power of the press was already strongly felt in England, and the new Commonwealth owed its standing partly to Milton’s prose, and partly to Cromwell’s policy.  The Defensio was the last work that Milton saw.  Blindness fell upon him ere it was finished, and from 1652 until his death he labored in total darkness.

The last part of Milton’s life is a picture of solitary grandeur unequaled in literary history.  With the Restoration all his labors and sacrifices for humanity were apparently wasted.  From his retirement he could hear the bells and the shouts that welcomed back a vicious monarch, whose first act was to set his foot upon his people’s neck.  Milton was immediately marked for persecution; he remained for months in hiding; he was reduced to poverty, and his books were burned by the public hangman.  His daughters, upon whom he depended in his blindness, rebelled at the task of reading to him and recording his thoughts.  In the midst of all these sorrows we understand, in Samson, the cry of the blind champion of Israel: 

    Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, quelled,
    To what can I be useful? wherein serve
    My nation, and the work from Heaven imposed? 
    But to sit idle on the household hearth,
    A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze,
    Or pitied object.

Milton’s answer is worthy of his own great life.  Without envy or bitterness he goes back to the early dream of an immortal poem and begins with superb consciousness of power to dictate his great epic.

Paradise Lost was finished in 1665, after seven years’ labor in darkness.  With great difficulty he found a publisher, and for the great work, now the most honored poem in our literature, he received less than certain verse makers of our day receive for a little song in one of our popular magazines.  Its success was immediate, though, like all his work, it met with venomous criticism.  Dryden summed up the impression made on thoughtful minds of his time when he said, “This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too.”  Thereafter a bit of sunshine came into his darkened home, for the work stamped him as one of the world’s great writers, and from England and the Continent pilgrims came in increasing numbers to speak their gratitude.