66 Mercurius Politicus. As it was, in fact, a Government organ, conducted by Mr. Marchamount Needham, who had formerly been a Royalist pamphleteer and journalist, the censorship may be supposed to have implied a superintending editorship. To Milton's Secretaryship was also attached an inspection into the State Paper Office in Whitehall, i.e. a kind of keepership of the Records. Nor was this all. When the Council of State had chosen Milton as their Secretary for Foreign Tongues, they had secured, as they knew, a man fit to be the Literary Champion of the still struggling Commonwealth. Three publications of Milton, accordingly, all done at the order or by the request of the Council of State, have to be especially mentioned as feats of the first three years of his Secretaryship. Observations on Ormond's Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels and on a Representation of the Scotch Presbytery of Belfast," is the title (somewhat abbreviated) of a pamphlet of Milton's published by authority in May 1649, when Charles ÎI. had been proclaimed in Ireland, and the Marquis of Ormond was trying to unite in his cause the native Irish Roman Catholics, the English settlers, and the Ulster Presbyterians. Of far greater importance was the Eikonoklastes (ie. Image-Breaker), published in October 1649 in answer to the famous “ Eikon Basilike (i.e. Royal Image) or Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings," professing to be meditations and prayers written by Charles I. in his last years. The "King's Book," as it was called, then all but universally believed to be really by Charles, though the evidence that it was a fabrication in his interest has long been regarded as conclusive, had appeared immediately after Charles's death, had circulated in different forms and in thousands of copies, and had become a kind of Bible with the Royalists. Milton's answer to it, in which he criticised both the book and the dead king with merciless severity, was received, therefore, as a signal service to the Commonwealth. More momentous still was his Latin " Defensio pro Populo Anglicano ("Defence for the People of England "), published in April 1651 in reply to the defence of Charles I. and attack upon the English Commonwealth which had been published in Holland more than a year before by the great Leyden Professor, Salmasius, at the instance and at the expense of Charles II. (see Introduction to the Latin Epigrams on Salmasius). Never in the world had one human being inflicted on another a more ruthless or appalling castigation than Milton here inflicted on perhaps the most renowned scholar of his day in all Europe, the veteran whom his learned contemporaries called "The Wonderful," and for the honour of possessing whom Princes and Courts contended; and just in proportion to the celebrity of the victim so murdered, trampled on, and gashed, was the amazement over the man that had done the deed. The book had been out little more than two months when the Council of State, after offering a money reward to Milton, which he declined, passed and inserted in their Minutes (June 17, 1651) this vote of thanks to him: "The Council, taking notice of the many good services performed by Mr. John Milton, "their Secretary for Foreign Tongues, to this State "and Commonwealth, particularly of his Book in vin"dication of the Parliament and People of England 66 against the calumnies and invectives of Salmasius, "have thought fit to declare their resentment and good acceptance of the same, and that the thanks of "the Council be returned to Mr. Milton, and their sense represented in that behalf." But it was abroad, and among foreigners in London, that the Reply to Salmasius excited the most lively interest. From all the embassies in London Milton received formal calls or speedy messages of compliment expressly on account of the book; and in Holland, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and elsewhere, copies were in extraordinary demand, and a topic of talk among scholars for months was the mangling which the great 66 66 66 Salmasius had received from one of "the English mastiffs." It is not too much to say that before the end of the year 1651, in consequence of this one book, Milton's name was more widely known on the Continent than that of any other Englishman then living, except Oliver Cromwell. Though Cromwell had been, of course, a member of the Council of State from the first, his labours through the greater part of the years 1649-1651 had been elsewhere than at Whitehall. From August 1649 to June 1650 he had been in Ireland, as Lord Lieutenant for the Commonwealth, crushing the Royalist confederacy there, and reconquering the country after its eight years of Rebellion. From July 1650 to August 1651 he had been in Scotland, where Charles II. had meanwhile been received as King, and whence the the Scots threatened to bring him into England. The battle of Dunbar (Sept. 3, 1650) and subsequent successes had already made Cromwell master of all the South of Scotland, when by a sudden movement Charles and the Scottish Army escaped his vigilance and burst into England, obliging him to follow in pursuit. Having beaten them in the great battle of Worcester (Sept. 3, 1651), he was back at Whitehall at last, the acknowledged saviour of the Commonwealth and supreme chief of England. The young King was again in exile, and the Commonwealth, now including Scotland, Ireland, and the English colonies and dominions, was to all appearance one of the most stable, as it was certainly one of the most powerful, of the European States. Such foreign Princes and Governments as had hitherto stood aloof hastened to send their embassies and apologies, and Milton's duties in the special work of his Secretaryship for Foreign Tongues were likely to be more burdensome than they had been. It is significant that the only pieces of verse known to have come from Milton's pen during the three years of his life just sketched are these :— Scrap of Verse from Seneca, inculcating Tyrannicide, translated in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (now appended to Minor English Poems). 1649. In Salmasii Hundredam: Scrap of Latin parody in PETTY FRANCE, WESTMINSTER. In the beginning of 1652, for some reason or other, Milton removed from the official rooms in Whitehall into a house which he had taken close at hand. It was "a pretty garden-house in Petty France, Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. James's Park." It still exists, and is, I believe, the only one of Milton's many London houses now left. No one looking now at No. 19 York Street, Westminster, a dingy old house, let out in apartments, in a dense and dingy street of poor houses and shops, can imagine without difficulty that it was once the pretty garden-house, opening into St. James's Park, which Milton occupied. That is the house, however; and any one can go and see it. Jeremy Bentham, whose residence was in the neighbourhood, was afterwards its proprietor; and William Hazlitt lived in it from 1811 onwards. Milton was to inhabit it for eight years, the longest term in which we have found him in any one house yet since he left his native Bread Street. This term of eight years, however, subdivides itself biographically into three portions : LAST FIFTEEN MONTHS OF THE COMMONWEALTH (Jan. 1651-2—April 1653):-As the Council of State was itself elected annually by the Parliament, with changes of its personnel every year, Milton's Latin Secretaryship, it will be understood, had also been renewed from year to year by express appointment of each Council. In 1652 he entered on his fourth year of office. There was more to do this year in the way of drafting foreign despatches and attending at meetings with ambassadors than there had been previously; and, accordingly, Milton's preserved Latin despatches of the year, as given in his printed works, are about as numerous as those for the three preceding years put together. Yet it was precisely in the midst of this increase of work that Milton became incapable, as one would suppose, of Secretarial work of any kind. The blindness which had been gradually coming on for some years (one eye having failed before the other), and which had been accelerated by his persistence in his book against Salmasius in spite of the warnings of his physicians, had become serious before his removal to Petty France, and was total about the middle of 1652. With such a calamity added to his almost constant ill-health otherwise, one would have expected the resignation of his Secretaryship. But the Commonwealth had no disposition to part with its literary champion; and arrangements were made for continuing him in office. Mr. Walter Frost, senior, having died in March 1652, Mr. John Thurloe had been appointed his successor in the General Secretaryship to the Council, with a salary of 600l. a year (worth about 2000l. a year now); a naturalized German, Mr. Weckherlin, formerly in the service of Charles I. and of Parliament, was brought in to assist Milton in the Foreign department; and for occasional service in translating documents Mr. Thurloe found other persons as they were wanted. Milton was distinctly retained with his full rank and title as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council; and there is positive evidence that he went on performing some portion of his old duties. What one sees, in fact, from the middle of 1652 onwards, is the blind Milton led across the Park every other day, when his health permitted, from his house in Petty France to Whitehall, sitting in the Council as before when he had to catch the substance of any resolution that had to be embodied in a Latin letter, or perhaps sometimes only |