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It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is. I never realized the greatness of the human spirit, the indomitable grandeur of man's mind, until I read Milton's Areopagitica. To read that great outburst of splendid anger ennobles the meanest of us simply because we belong to the same species of animal as Milton.
Milton wrote his treatise on divorce as a result of his troubles with his seventeen-year-old wife, and when he was accused of being the leading spirit in a new sect, the Divorcers, he wrote his noble Areopagitica to prove his right to say what he thought fit, and incidentally to establish the advantage of a free press in the promotion of Truth.
We had intended to look more closely at these performances, to analyze the peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast and to point out some of those magnificent passages which occur in the Treatise of Reformation, and the Animadversions on the Remonstrant.
Could nourish in the sun's domain Her mighty youth with morning. This phrase seems to have some analogy to that of Milton in his Areopagitica: 'Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks.
Blount concluded, as Milton had done, by recommending that any book might be printed without a license, provided that the name of the author or publisher were registered. The Just Vindication was well received. The blow was speedily followed up. There still remained in the Areopagitica many fine passages which Blount had not used in his first pamphlet.
Farther, in the month of November, or while the Areopagitica was in the press, there had appeared the first distinct Reply to Milton's original Divorce Treatise.
Bishop Butler and Richard Hooker especially the latter, the first book of whose "Ecclesiastical Polity" is a truly noble piece of writing stand, perhaps, at the head of the weighty class of writers in our language; but going beyond these to the "Areopagitica" of Milton, or even to the powerful prose of Raleigh, you pass the boundary-line, and are touched with the buoyant influences of the Muse.
Masson, that the author of the Areopagitica, at a later time, acted himself in the capacity of licenser. It was in 1651, under the Commonwealth, Marchmont Needham being editor of the weekly paper called Mercurius Politicus, that Milton was associated with him as his censor or supervising editor. Mr.
There remains one tract of which the subject is of a more general and permanent nature, the best known of all the series, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England.
The only merit of this decree is that it led Milton to write his Areopagitica. The Puritan belief that Laud aimed at the restoration of Popery has long since been proved erroneous.
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