“I looked about to see if I could get any place that would hold myself and my books, and so I took a house of sufficient size in the city; and there with no small delight I resumed my intermitted studies; cheerfully leaving the event of public affairs, first to God, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task.”

But this was before the convocation of the Long Parliament.  When it had met,

“Perceiving that the true way to liberty followed on from these beginnings, inasmuch also as I had so prepared myself from my youth that, above all things, I could not be ignorant what is of Divine and what of human right, I resolved, though I was then meditating certain other matters, to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry.”

Milton’s note-books, to be referred to in another place, prove that he did not even then cease to meditate themes for poetry, but practically he for eighteen years ceased to be a poet.

There is no doubt something grating and unwelcome in the descent of the scholar from regions of serene culture to fierce political and religious broils.  But to regret with Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned aside from poetry to controversy is to regret that “Paradise Lost” should exist.  Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent to the public weal, and if Milton had been capable of forgetting the citizen in the man of letters we may be sure that “a little grain of conscience” would ere long have “made him sour.”  It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with Pattison of “the prostitution of genius to political party.”  Milton is as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor.  He himself tells us that controversy is highly repugnant to him.

“I trust to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies, to come in to the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk.”

But he felt that if he allowed such motives to prevail with him, it would be said to him: 

“Timorous and ungrateful, the Church of God is now again at the foot of her insulting enemies, and thou bewailest, What matters it for thee or thy bewailing?  When time was, thou would’st not find a syllable of all that thou hast read or studied to utter on her behalf.  Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired thoughts, but of the sweat of other men.  Thou hast the diligence, the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were