abroad somewhat depended; the foreign chanceries were full of accomplished Latinists, and when Blake’s cannon was not to be the mouthpiece, the Commonwealth’s message needed a silver trumpet.  It was also as likely as any employment to make a scholar a statesman.  If in some respects it opposed new obstacles to the fulfilment of Milton’s aspirations as a poet, he might still feel that it would help him to the experience which he had declared to be essential:  “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things, not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have within himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.”  Up to this time Milton’s experience of public affairs had been slight; he does not seem to have enjoyed the intimate acquaintance of any man then active in the making of history.  In our day he would probably have entered Parliament, but that was impossible under a dispensation which allowed a Parliament to sit till a Protector turned it out of doors.  He was, therefore, only acting upon his own theory, and he seems to us to have been acting wisely as well as courageously, when he consented to become a humble but necessary wheel of the machinery of administration, the Orpheus among the Argonauts of the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER V.

Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649.  He removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which but a fragment now remains.  His first performance was in some measure a false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg, clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded by that body that the English envoy never formally delivered it.  An epistle to the Dutch on the murder of the Commonwealth’s ambassador, Dorislaus, by refugee Cavaliers, had a better reception; and Milton was soon engaged in drafting, not merely translating, a State paper designed for the press—­observations on the peace concluded by Ormond, the Royalist commander in Ireland, with the confederated Catholics in that country, and on the protest against the execution of Charles I. volunteered by the Presbytery of Belfast.  The commentary was published in May, along with the documents.  It is a spirited manifesto, cogent in enforcing the necessity of the campaign about to be undertaken by Cromwell.  Ireland had at the moment exactly as many factions as provinces; and never, perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter confusion.  Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be “an eagle towering in his pride of place,” but he may seem to have degenerated into the “mousing owl”