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"Marrineal's familiar," said Banneker. "I wonder how he got here. Certainly I didn't ask him.... Very well, Io. I'll compromise. But ... I don't think I'll put that quotation from the Areopagitica at the head of my column. That will have to wait. Perhaps it will have to wait until I we get a paper of our own." "Poor Ban!" whispered Io.
Fingering his next thunderbolt. Released from all trouble by the Committee of the Commons, and left at leisure in Aldersgate Street, through September, October, and November, 1644, what was Milton doing? Preparing his Areopagitica.
"H'm, what has he here?" soliloquized his Excellency. "'Purchas; His Pilgrimes, of course; 'General History of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles, well and good; 'Good News from Virginia, humph! that must have been before my time; 'Public Good without Private Interest, humph! What's this? 'Areopagitica, John Milton! John Hypocrite and Parricide!
At Whitsuntide, in the year 1643, having reached his thirty-fifth year, he married Mary Powell, a young lady of good extraction in the county of Oxford. In 1644 he wrote his "Areopagitica, a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing." It is the finest specimen extant of generous scorn.
Milton's immortal "Areopagitica, or Plea for Unlicenced Printing," was a pamphlet of only forty pages; Webster's speech for the Union, in reply to Hayne, was a pamphlet; every play of Shakespeare, that was printed in his life-time, was a pamphlet; Charles Sumner's discourse on "The True Grandeur of Nations" was a pamphlet; the "Crisis" and "Common Sense" of Thomas Paine, which fired the American heart in the Revolution, were pamphlets.
He was to outlive Henderson thirty-three years. The effect of Milton's Areopagitica, immediately after its publication in November 1644, and throughout the year 1645, seems to have been very considerable. Parliament, indeed, took no formal notice of the eloquent pleading for a repeal of their Licensing Ordinance of June 1643.
The occurrence had been sufficient to give a new direction to Milton's thoughts. Regardless of the fact that his plea for liberty in marriage had fallen upon deaf ears, he would plead for liberty of speech. The Areopagitica, for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, came out in November, 1644, an unlicensed, unregistered publication, without printer's or bookseller's name.
Every one of these works strikes a blow for fuller liberty in some direction, for more liberty in church, in state, and in home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, and for a system of education which should break away from the leading strings of the inferior methods of the past. His greatest prose work is the Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.
I reviewed rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, and in English literature studied critically Milton's poems and "Areopagitica." I am frequently asked how I overcome the peculiar conditions under which I work in college. In the classroom I am of course practically alone.
Even the Long Parliament laid a heavy hand on the press, and the great remonstrance of Milton in his "Areopagitica" fell dead on the ears of his Puritan associates. But the statute for the regulation of printing which was passed immediately after the Restoration expired finally in 1679 and the temper of the present Parliament at once put an end to any attempt at re-establishing the censorship.
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