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Featley had previously mentioned Milton's Divorce Tract as one of the proofs of the tendency of the age to Antinomianism, Familism, and general anarchy; and Edwards and Baillie followed in the same strain. Milton's Doctrine of Divorce, it thus appears, had attracted attention, and had perhaps gained some following.
I can confirm this by saying that his head of Featley really gives one an idea of that obstinate and consequential old divine. I only wish he had done Milton half as well. About Marshall's engraving of Milton see Mr. Mr.
Joseph Caryl, had, in his prefixed "Imprimatur," applauded the sentiments of the tract, and spoken slightingly of Milton. Mr. Caryl, therefore, on his own account, might deserve a word. Finally, in January 1644-5, Dr. John Downam," the very person, by the bye, who had good-naturedly licensed Milton's Bucer pamphlet. Now, Featley, in this book, had been at Milton among others.
Using Edwards and old Ephraim, with hints from Featley, Prynne, and Baillie, but trying to ascertain the facts for ourselves, we venture on the following synoptical view of English Sects and Sectaries in 1644-5: BAPTISTS, OR ANABAPTISTS: These were by far the most numerous of the Sectaries.
There was then living in London a certain William Marshall, an engraver and sketcher of designs for books. He had been some fourteen or fifteen years in this employment; and among the many heads he had done, separately, or as frontispieces to books, ere those of Richard Brathwayte the Poet, Dr. Donne, Archbishop Abbot, Laud, and Dr. Daniel Featley.
Even Featley was struck by it, and called it "a little ratsbane in a great quantity of sugar," and became somewhat more civil in consequence. These fourteen, accordingly, with Praise- God Barebone, were in 1644 the Baptist leaders or chief Baptist preachers in London.
Featley: "Some whose necessary shifts have long inured them to cloak the defects of their unstudied years and hatred now to learn under the appearance of a grave solidity which estimation they have gained among weak perceivers find the ease of slighting what they cannot refute, and are determined, as I hear, to hold it not worth the answering.
But, as he had given up the public prosecution of the Divorce argument, his punishment for Edwards and Baillie came in a different form from that which he had administered in the Tetrachordon and Colasterion to Herbert Palmer, Dr. Featley, Mr. Caryl, Mr. Prynne, and the anonymous attorney. It came in verse, thus
Featley in his Tetrachordon on account of a passage in this treatise, had not allowed the vulgarity of the engraving in Featley's book to escape. "For which I do not commend his marshalling" had been Milton's punning notice of it in a parenthesis of the punishment. When, therefore, Mr. Marshall came to Milton from Moseley, Milton must have remembered him as the caricaturist for Dr. Featley's book.
And yet it is touching to have before me, as I now have in a copy of the Sixth Edition of the Dippers Dipt , not only an elaborate portrait of Featley by the engraver Marshall, done in the ordinary way, but also an engraving representing the old man most painfully as he looked when lying in his winding-sheet before they put him into his coffin.
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