commendable, nor the intention of this discourse.”  The intention it may not have been, but it was necessarily the performance.  The scheme of the “Eikon” required the respondent to take up the case article by article, a thing impossible to be done without abundant “descant” of the kind which Milton deprecates.  He is compelled to fight the adversary on the latter’s chosen ground, and the eloquence which might have swept all before it in a discussion of general principles is frittered away in tiresome wrangling over a multitude of minutiae.  His vigorous blows avail but little against the impalpable ideal with which he is contending; his arguments might frequently convince a court of justice, but could do nothing to dispel the sorcery which enthralled the popular imagination.  Milton’s “Eikonoklastes” had only three editions, including a translation, within the year; the “Eikon Basilike” is said to have had fifty.

Milton’s reputation as a political controversialist, however, was not to rest upon “Eikonoklastes,” or to be determined by a merely English public.  The Royalists had felt the necessity of appealing to the general verdict of Europe, and had entrusted their cause to the most eminent classical scholar of the age.  To us the idea of commissioning a political manifesto from a philologist seems eccentric; but erudition and the erudite were never so highly prized as in the seventeenth century.  Men’s minds were still enchained by authority, and the precedents of Agis, or Brutus, or Nehemiah, weighed like dicta of Solomon or Justinian.  The man of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew learning was, therefore, a person of much greater consequence than he is now, and so much the more if he enjoyed a high reputation and wrote good Latin.  All these qualifications were combined in Claudius Salmasius, a Frenchman, who had laid scholars under an eternal obligation by his discovery of the Palatine MS. of the Anthology at Heidelberg, and who, having embraced Protestantism from conviction, lived in splendid style at Leyden, where the mere light of his countenance—­for he did not teach—­was valued by the University at three thousand livres a year.  It seems marvellous that a man should become dictator of the republic of letters by editing “Solinus” and “The Augustan History,” however ably; but an achievement like this, not a “Paradise Lost” or a “Werther” was the sic itur ad astra of the time.  On the strength of such Salmasius had pronounced ex cathedra on a multiplicity of topics, from episcopacy to hair-powder, and there was no bishop and no perfumer between the Black Sea and the Irish who would not rather have the scholar for him than against him.  A man, too, to be named with respect; no mere annotator, but a most sagacious critic; peevish, it might be, but had he not seven grievous disorders at once?  One who had shown such independence and integrity in various transactions of his life, that we may be very sure that Charles II.’s hundred Jacobuses, if ever given or even promised, were the very least of the inducements that called him into the field against the executioners of Charles I.