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All Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, I think, were published by such regular printers or booksellers. But worse and worse. Some of the less scrupulous members of the Stationers' Company had found an undue advantage in this lax conduct of the book-business, and had begun to reprint and vend books the copyright in which belonged to their brethren in the trade.

But that this be not thought a tenet of anti-episcopal writers alone, let us hear what is said by one of our greatest opposites: Neque defendimus ita, &c.: “Neither do we so defend that the right of convocating councils pertaineth to princes, as that the ecclesiastical prelates may no way either assemble themselves together by mutual consent, or be convocated by the authority of the metropolitan, primate, or patriarch.

Then, immediately after the meeting of the Long Parliament, Toleration rushed into the air. Everywhere the word "Toleration" was heard, and with all varieties of meanings. A certain boom of the general principle runs through Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, and through other pamphlets on the same side. But this is not all.

Urged more and more pressingly, Milton complied; and the result was the appearance, on June 5, 1644, on some booksellers' counters, of a thin little quarto tract, of eight pages in rather small type, with no author's name, and no title-page at all, but simply this heading atop of the text on the first page, "OF EDUCATION: TO MASTER SAMUEL HARTLIB." The publication had been duly registered, and the publisher was the same Thomas Underhill, of Wood Street, who had published Milton's first three Anti-Episcopal pamphlets.

The acquaintanceship may have begun some years before that. It may have begun in 1639 when Milton, on his return from abroad, took lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, or in 1640, when he first set up house in Aldersgate Street. At all events, when Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets of the next two years made him a public man, he is not likely to have escaped the cognisance of Hartlib.

He had been one of those "contemners" of it whom the Ordinance itself had taken the precaution of rendering inexcusable by the clause ordering its own publication! The treatise had appeared on or about the 3rd of August, unlicensed and unregistered, just as its predecessors, the Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, had been.

While his five Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, of 1641-42, make together 326 pages of his prose works in Pickering's edition, the four Divorce treatises, of 1643-45, make 378 pages of the same; so that, in mere quantity, Milton was 52 pages more a Divorcer than an Anti-Prelatist.

Milton had been conspicuously careless or bold in this respect. Not one of his five Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, published in 1641 and 1642, had been licensed or registered; nor did any one of them bear his name, though he made no real concealment of that, and though each of them bore the printer's or publisher's name, or the address of the shop where it was on sale.