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Masson conjectures, with some probability, that the leading articles of the Mercurius, during part of the year 1651, received touches from Milton's hand. But this was, after all, rather in the character of editor, whose business it is to see that nothing improper goes into the paper, than in that of press licenser in the sense in which the Areopagitica had denounced it.
My father wrote and published a defence of us, entitled To Think or not to Think, with two noble mottoes, one from Milton's Areopagitica and the other some lines from In Memoriam, which was read in those days by people who were not sentimental fools, and who, strange to say, got out of it something solid which was worth having.
This view is maintained and in great measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his Liberty, the Areopagitica of the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on The Sphere and Duties of Government. These writers are followed with various reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill writes:
For example, one finds that John Lilburne had been a reader of the Areopagitica, and had imbibed its lesson, and even its phraseology. It became a common form of jest, indeed, in putting forth an unlicensed pamphlet, to prefix to it a mock licence.
One only of his prose works is still remembered and still read for its splendid English. That is Areopagitica, a passionate appeal for a free press. Milton desired that a man should have not only freedom of thought, but freedom to write down and print and publish these thoughts.
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