That from which the public character of Milton derives its great and peculiar splendour, still remains to be mentioned.  If he exerted himself to overthrow a forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted himself in conjunction with others.  But the glory of the battle which he fought for the species of freedom which is the most valuable, and which was then the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, is all his own.  Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised their voices against Ship-money and the Star-Chamber.  But there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which would result from the liberty of the press and the unfettered exercise of private judgment.  These were the objects which Milton justly conceived to be the most important.  He was desirous that the people should think for themselves as well as tax themselves, and should be emancipated from the dominion of prejudice as well as from that of Charles.  He knew that those who, with the best intentions, overlooked these schemes of reform, and contented themselves with pulling down the King and imprisoning the malignants, acted like the heedless brothers in his own poem, who in their eagerness to disperse the train of the sorcerer, neglected the means of liberating the captive.  They thought only of conquering when they should have thought of disenchanting.

“Oh, ye mistook!  Ye should have snatch’d his wand
And bound him fast.  Without the rod reversed,
And backward mutters of dissevering power,
We cannot free the lady that sits here
Bound in strong fetters fix’d and motionless.”

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, to break the ties which bound a stupefied people to the seat of enchantment, was the noble aim of Milton.  To this all his public conduct was directed.  For this he joined the Presbyterians; for this he forsook them.  He fought their perilous battle; but he turned away with disdain from their insolent triumph.  He saw that they, like those whom they had vanquished, were hostile to the liberty of thought.  He therefore joined the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to break the secular chain, and to save free conscience from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf.  With a view to the same great object, he attacked the licensing system, in that sublime treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes.  His attacks were, in general, directed less against particular abuses than against those deeply-seated errors on which almost all abuses are founded, the servile worship of eminent men and the irrational dread of innovation.