That he might shake the foundations of these debasing sentiments more effectually, he always selected for himself the boldest literary services.  He never came up in the rear, when the outworks had been carried and the breach entered.  He pressed into the forlorn hope.  At the beginning of the changes, he wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against the bishops.  But, when his opinion seemed likely to prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to insult a falling party.  There is no more hazardous enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into those dark and infected recesses in which no light has ever shone.  But it was the choice and the pleasure of Milton to penetrate the noisome vapours, and to brave the terrible explosion.  Those who most disapprove of his opinions must respect the hardihood with which he maintained them.  He, in general, left to others the credit of expounding and defending the popular parts of his religious and political creed.  He took his own stand upon those which the great body of his countrymen reprobated as criminal, or derided as paradoxical.  He stood up for divorce and regicide.  He attacked the prevailing systems of education.  His radiant and beneficent career resembled that of the god of light and fertility.

“Nitor in adversum; nec me, qui caetera, vincit Impetus, et rapido contrarius evehor orbi.”

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read.  As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language.  They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance.  They are a perfect field of cloth-of-gold.  The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery.  Not even in the earlier books of the Paradise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture.  It is, to borrow his own majestic language, “a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.”

We had intended to look more closely at these performances, to analyse the peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast, and to point out some of those magnificent passages which occur in the Treatise of Reformation, and the Animadversions on the Remonstrant.  But the length to which our remarks have already extended renders this impossible.