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Updated: May 23, 2025
Hence there is something not wholly pleasing in the exclusive rush in our country now-a-days upon the Areopagitica as representative of Milton's prose. And yet the reasons for the fact are perhaps sufficient.
Looking round in English for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton's AREOPAGITICA, and can name no other instance for the moment.
The more modern school, however, of Political Economy while giving due weight to circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it as the force which ought to determine all human life; and our greatest living political economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put in a plea unequalled since the Areopagitica of Milton, for the self-determining power of the individual, and for his right to use that power.
The Areopagitica bites into modern interests and the constitution of the modern intellect; the Tetrachordon, though it must have occupied the author longer, has, I should say, quite lost its bite, except for students of Milton, and for reasoners who would debate his Divorce Doctrine over again by the same method of the interpretation of Biblical texts.
Its title was, "What Does Your Newspaper Mean to You?" headed with the quotation from the Areopagitica: and he compressed into a single column all his dreams and idealities of what a newspaper might be and mean to the public which it sincerely served. Specially typed and embossed, it was arranged as the dinner souvenir. As the day drew near, Banneker had less and less taste for the ovation.
It was with public talk about these matters, and about such contemporary matters as the execution of Laud, the death of Century White, and the abortive Treaty of Uxbridge, that any immediate influence from Milton's Areopagitica must have mingled. In the midst of it all he had other labours on hand. They were still on the woful subject of Divorce.
He never doubted that, the moment she saw them, she would rush to find him; and, when he had done, retreated, therefore, to his study, there to sit in readiness to receive her and her gratitude with gentle kindness; when he would express the hope that she would make real friends of the spirits whose quintessence he had thus stored to her hand; and would introduce her to what Milton says in his "Areopagitica" concerning good books.
Edmund Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's Areopagitica contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length.
Paradise Lost, books 1-2, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and selected Sonnets, all in Standard English Classics; same poems, more or less complete, in various other series; Areopagitica and Treatise on Education, selections, in Manly's English Prose, or Areopagitica in Arber's English Reprints, Clarendon Press Series, Morley's Universal Library, etc. Minor Poets. Bunyan.
Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, Prose Works, folio, 1697, p. 378. I quote the passage as extracted by Mr. Twelve Paladins had the Emperor Charlemagne in his court; and the most wise and famous of them was Orlando.
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