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Updated: May 23, 2025
The Areopagitica is now by far the best-known of Milton's pamphlets, and indeed the only one of his prose-works generally read. Knowing his other prose-writings, I have sometimes been angry at this choice of one of his pamphlets by which to recollect him as an English prose-writer.
This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and at first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon developed an assurance of special protection "the favour of the love of Heaven," wrote Milton in his "Areopagitica," "we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us" was tempered by that humility still to be seen in the liturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might of the English arm, but to the favour of God.
Besides, his eyes, through the pince-nez, had a gimlet, goosefleshing quality; he recited "Straits of Dover" to a class of young women with rapt adenoidal expression when he should have been inoculating them with the bitter serum of Burke's Conciliation Speech, and walked to school of wintry mornings without an overcoat; skates and the Areopagitica under his arm.
And all through our history it had led the nation in politics as well as in commerce. Yet of the best of all tributes to greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little. There is Milton's noble burst of eloquence in the Areopagitica, but that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and politics of London at a particular moment.
Here was a hit for some of the good people about Paternoster Row. It might have been safer for Milton to let the Stationers alone. For, within five weeks after the publication of the Areopagitica, I find him again in trouble, and all by the doing of the Stationers' Company, in revenge for his past offences and this new insult.
Men like Harrington in his Oceana, and Milton in his Areopagitica, really belong to the same band; but life for them had changed very greatly, and already become something far more complex than the earlier writers had had to consider. There seemed no possibility of reforming it by the simple justice which St.
Paul's School and Camb., and while at the latter wrote earlier poems including The Nativity and Sonnets, lived for 6 years at Horton and wrote L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas, travelled in France and Italy 1638, settled in London, entered on his political and controversial labours, and wrote inter alia on Reform of Discipline 1641, Divorce 1643-45, Education 1644, Areopagitica 1644, and the two Defences 1650 and 1654, appointed Latin Sec. 1649, this period closed by Restoration 1660, Paradise Lost written 1658-64, pub. 1667, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes 1671, d. 1674, m. first 1643 Mary Powell, second 1652 Katharine Woodcock, third 1663 Eliz.
Here is a list of some books which were given to William on the whaler the other day: Plutarch's Lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus; Trips to the Moon, by Lucian; Voyagers' Tales, by Richard Hakluyt; Areopagitica, by Milton; Lives of English Poets, Banquet of Plato, and the Light of Asia, by Sir E. Arnold. One would hardly expect to find such books on a whaler. Friday, December 20.
The vagueness and confusion of the thoughts finds a vehicle in language which is too often overcrowded and obscure. I think the Areopagitica has few or no offences against taste; on the other hand, it has few or none of those grand passages which redeem the scurrility of his political pamphlets.
Some that they had most loved to read were likewise there: "Pollock's Course of Time"; the slow outpourings of Young, sad sectary; Milton, with the passages on Hell approvingly underscored not as great poetry, but as great doctrine; nowhere in the bookcases a sign of the "Areopagitica," of "Comus," and "L'Allegro"; but most prominent the writings of Jonathan Edwards, hoarsest of the whole flock of New World theological ravens.
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