Milton's was of the former kind, and
accordingly the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in
his verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they are
often unconsciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin and combustion
hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause; Philistia
is the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Milton would have done if
he could.
The "Areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that also is a plea
rather than an argument, and his interest in the question is not one of
abstract principle, but of personal relation to himself. He was far more
rhetorician than thinker. The sonorous amplitude of his style was better
fitted to persuade the feelings than to convince the reason. The only
passages from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional,
not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative
beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's power lay in dilation.
Touched by him, the simplest image, the most obvious thought,
"Dilated stood
Like Teneriffe or Atlas....
.... nor wanted in his grasp
What _seemed_ both spear and shield."
But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective weapon than
these fantastic arms of his. He had not the secret of compression that
properly belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of
himself, "nothing but abstract ideas makes any impression.
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