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Updated: May 23, 2025
Again, "He who hears what praying there is for light and clearer knowledge to be sent down among us would think of other matters to be constituted, beyond the discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands." Milton, however, the Areopagitica proves, had not passed away from Presbyterianism only to become an ordinary Congregationalist or Independent.
It would be no disparagement to an educated man, if it were said that he had never read these speeches; but it would be a serious bar to his claim to be considered an English scholar, if he confessed to be ignorant of the great speeches of Burke; for such a confession would be like admitting that he had never read the first book of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Bacon's Essays and Advancement of Learning, Milton's Areopagitica, Butler's Analogy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
Milton has since then in fact, only last month-put forth another pamphlet, called Areopagitica, with his name to it certainly and addressed to your Lordships and the other House, but with no printer's name, and unlicensed and unregistered, like most of its predecessors.
A more special piece of information supplied, or rather only confirmed, by the Areopagitica, is that Milton, when he wrote it, had broken off utterly from the Presbyterians, and regarded the domination of that party in the Westminster Assembly with complete disgust.
But even this is nothing compared with that later attempt to subject the Press to the Church which called forth Milton's Areopagitica; there indeed soon came to be very little to choose between the Inquisition of the High Commission and the more noxious Inquisition of Rome.
The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader: A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation. The most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644.
In such passages Milton's prose is, as Taine suggests, "an outpouring of splendors," which suggests the noblest poetry. On account of their controversial character these prose works are seldom read, and it is probable that Milton never thought of them as worthy of a place in literature. Of them all Areopagitica has perhaps the most permanent interest and is best worth reading.
He avoids a Latinized inversion, such as the following, with which Milton begins the second sentence of his Areopagitica : "And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected ..." Here, the object "me" is eighteen words in advance of its predicate.
I found, too, in the last volume of Milton, a few of his select prose works: the "Areopagitica," the "Defence of the English People," and one or two more, in which I gradually began to take an interest; and, little of them as I could comprehend, I was awed by their tremendous depth and power, as well as excited by the utterly new trains of thought into which they led me.
In Miltons Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing , the freedom of the Press is eloquently sustained by arguments which are valid for freedom of thought in general.
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