own position.  These authorities he deployed at tedious length, and followed them up with heavy scurrilities and “excusations,” by way of attack and defense.  The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous maces.  The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader:  A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation.  The most interesting of Milton’s prose tracts is his Areopagitica:  A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644.  The arguments in this are of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying, with Locke’s Letters on Toleration, he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden.  Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State.  In the diplomatic correspondence which was his official duty, and in the composition of his tract, Defensio pro Popululo Anglicano, he overtaxed his eyes, and in 1654 became totally blind.  The only poetry of Milton’s belonging to the years 1640-1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public occasions.  By the Elizabethans the sonnets had been used mainly in love poetry.  In Milton’s hands, said Wordsworth, “the thing became a trumpet.”  Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, perhaps, the sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants—­“a collect in verse,” it has been called—­which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel.  Two were on his own blindness, and in these there is not one selfish repining, but only a regret that the value of his service is impaired—­

  Will God exact day labor, light denied?

After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while in peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king.  But

  On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
  In darkness and with dangers compassed round
  And solitude,

he bated no jot of heart or hope.  Henceforth he becomes the most heroic and affecting figure in English literary history.  Years before he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur, and again a sacred tragedy on man’s fall and redemption.  These experiments finally took shape in Paradise Lost, which was given to the world in 1667.  This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity.  It was Milton’s purpose to

                 assert eternal Providence
  And justify the ways of God to men,