JOHN MILTON.

JOHN MILTON, the great epic poet of England (A.D. 1608–1674), is no less distinguished for the vigour and dignity of his prose, as in his Iconoclastes, Prelatical Episcopacy, Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty, and especially in Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, from which our extracts are taken. His poetical pieces are Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained, Comus, Samson Agonistes, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and many noble sonnets.

ORIGIN OF BOOK-LICENSING LAWS.

I DENY not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye and spy how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living thing which bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true no age can restore a life, whereof there is perhaps no great loss; but revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we make against the living labours of public men, how we

spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and sixth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life. But lest I should be condemned of introducing licence, while I oppose licensing, I refuse not the pains to be so much historical as will serve to show what hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealths against this disorder, till the very time that this project of licensing came out of the inquisition, was catched up by our prelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters.

The Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition, engendering together, brought forth or perfected those catalogues and expurgating indexes that rake through the entrails of many a good old author with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory of an index. To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press as well as of paradise) unless it were approved and licensed of two or more friars. Sometimes five imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the piazza of one title page, complimenting and ducking to each other with their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall go to the press or to the spunge.

These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies that so bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made, and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from St. Paul's, so apishly romanizing that the word of command was still

writ down in Latin, as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; or, perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an imprimatur ; but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enough to spell such a dictatory presumption.

CHARACTER OF ITS AUTHORS.

AND thus ye have the inventors and the original of book licensing ripped up and drawn out as literally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state or polity or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors, older or later; but from the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb; no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring: but if it proved a monster, who denies but it was justly burnt or sunk into the sea?

But that a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should have to stand before a jury ere it be born into the world, and undergo, yet in darkness, the judgment of Rhadamanth and his colleagues ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard of before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of reformation, sought out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books also within the number of the damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up and so ill-favouredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorities, their chaplains.

That ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order, and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts when ye were importuned

the passing of it, all men who know the integrity of your actions, and how you honour truth, will clear ye readily.

But some will say, what though the inventors be bad, the thing for all that may be good. It may so; yet if that thing be no such deep invention, but obvious and easy for any man to light on, and if yet best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forsworn to use it, and false seducers and oppressors were the first who took it up, and for no other purpose than to obstruct and hinder the approach of reformation, I am of those who believe that it will be a harder alchemy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet only this is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves to be for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect, one by one, its parts and properties.

KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL.

SOLOMON informs us that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; but neither he nor other inspired author tells us that such and such reading is unlawful: yet certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much more expedient to have told us what was unlawful than what was wearisome. As for the burning of those Ephesian books by Paul's converts, it is replied that those books were magic; the Syriac so renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary imitation; the men in remorse burnt the books which were their own: the magistrate by this example is not appointed; the men practised the books, another might have read them, perhaps, in some sort usefully.

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed

upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.

It was from out of the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil?

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, yet distinguish, and prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, and not without dust and heat.

Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas), describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain.

Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and frailty, than by reading all manner of books, and hearing all manner of reason.

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