In masque, elegy, and sonnet he
set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed
one great literary era.
In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton
back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for
amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for
liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest,
and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the
various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had
what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed
grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval
discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and
philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.
He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the
traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when England
had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back
the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his
left hand only. There are passages of fervid eloquence, where the style
swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rhythmical rise and fall to
it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer.
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