62 JOHN MILTON 
tions. Their ideas of toleration and absolute freedom 
were immeasurably above the level of contemporary 
Puritan opinion. The greatest of Milton’s prose 
works is his “ Areopagitica,” a defence of freedom of 
speech and of the press. It is one of the immortal 
glories of English literature. 
In leaving with this scanty mention the subject of 
Milton’s prose writings, a word must be said of his 
style. It is the prose of a poet, impassioned and 
gorgeous, often stiff and heavy with ornament, like 
cloth of gold. In his time the virtue of conciseness 
had not been learned. Milton’s sentences are apt to 
be so long and cumbrous as to tax the attention. The 
command of words is well-nigh unequalled. Urbanity 
is often conspicuously absent. It was a great crisis of 
humanity in which the combatants paid small heed to 
politeness. Epithets were hurled at Milton like 
showers of barbed arrows, and his retorts were quick 
and deadly. Stateliness never deserted him, but, as 
with George Washington, the white heat of his wrath 
was such as to make strong men tremble. Pattison 
somewhere says that in his passionate eloquence the . 
English and Latin sentences creak like the timbers of 
a ship in a storm. 
At that time Milton wrote no poetry save now and 
then some grand sonnets, among which those of Vane 
and Cromwell, and on the Massacre of Piedmont, are 
among the finest. The year 1658, his fiftieth year, 
was a sad one in the poet’s life. His second wife, to 
whom he had been married little more than a year, 
suddenly died. Soon afterward died Cromwell, and 
with him Milton’s dreams for the immediate future of 
England. For a long time Milton’s sight had been 
