OTHER PROSE WORKS.—­Milton’s prose works are almost all of them of an historical character.  Appointed Latin Secretary to the Council, he wrote foreign dispatches and treatises upon the persons and events of the day.  In 1644 he published his Areopagitica, a noble paper in favor of Unlicensed Printing, and boldly directed against the Presbyterian party, then in power, which had continued and even increased the restraints upon the press.  No stouter appeal for the freedom of the press was ever heard, even in America.  But in the main, his prose pen was employed against the crown and the Church, while they still existed; against the king’s memory, after the unfortunate monarch had fallen, and in favor of the parliament and all its acts.  Milton was no trimmer; he gave forth no uncertain sound; he was partisan to the extreme, and left himself no loop-hole of retreat in the change that was to come.

A famous book appeared in 1649, not long after Charles’s execution, proclaimed to have been written by King Charles while in prison, and entitled Eikon Basilike, or The Kingly Image, being the portraiture of his majesty in his solitude and suffering.  It was supposed that it might influence the people in favor of royalty, and so Milton was employed to answer it in a bitter invective, an unnecessary and heartless attack upon the dead king, entitled Eikonoklastes, or The Image-breaker.  The Eikon was probably in part written by the king, and in part by Bishop Gauden, who indeed claimed its authorship after the Restoration.

Salmasius having defended Charles in a work of dignified and moderate tone, Milton answered in his first Defensio pro Populo Anglicano; in which he traverses the whole ground of popular rights and kingly prerogative, in a masterly and eloquent manner.  This was followed by a second Defensio.  For the two he received L1,000, and by his own account accelerated the disease of the eyes which ended in complete blindness.

No pen in England worked more powerfully than his in behalf of the parliament and the protectorate, or to stay the flood tide of loyalty, which bore upon its sweeping heart the restoration of the second Charles.  He wrote the last foreign despatches of Richard Cromwell, the weak successor of the powerful Oliver; but nothing could now avail to check the return of monarchy.  The people were tired of turmoil and sick of blood; they wanted rest, at any cost.  The powerful hand of Cromwell was removed, and astute Monk used his army to secure his reward.  The army, concurring with the popular sentiment, restored the Stuarts.  The conduct of the English people in bringing Charles back stamped Cromwell as a usurper, and they have steadily ignored in their list of governors—­called monarchs—­the man through whose efforts much of their liberty had been achieved; but history asserts itself, and the benefits of the “Great Rebellion” are gratefully acknowledged by the people, whether the protectorate appears in the court list or not.