Yet hold thou unto old Morality.
It wears better than the new article!
To know Browne's works is no small part of a liberal education. He lived in quiet and opulence, "his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities," says Evelyn; he was much occupied in correspondence with the learned and with his eldest son, and with local history, till his death on 19 October, 1682.
Charles II had dubbed him knight at Norwich in 1671. Charles, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, had skill to discover excellence, and virtue to reward it, with such honorary distinctions, at least, as cost him nothing.
CAROLINE PROSE.
Milton.
The greater part of Milton's prose works is so deeply concerned with politics, mainly religious or concerned with Church government, that it cannot easily be criticized without controversial interruptions, here out of place. His earliest important piece (1641) treats of the Reformation in England. It had never come up to Strafford's standard, Thorough, never shaken off "the rags of Rome"—that is Milton's theme. Nor, in Scotland, had reformation really been more successful, for the preachers claimed at least all the powers of the priests over the liberties of the subject.
Milton at once attacks that which, to Laud, was part of "the beauty of Holiness," Jewish and Catholic survivals of "fantastic dresses, palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe". "The piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies" the Church styled "decency"; Henry VIII "stuck where he did". Under Edward VI, if his sister Mary were not to be persecuted most righteously, who were the slaves that interfered to secure for her liberty of conscience? Who but Bishops! Bishops were therefore "followers of this world," they always were and always will be. You reply that they, Cranmer and Latimer, were also martyrs? Well, says Milton, "What then?" A man may "give his body to the burning and yet not have charity". The Bishops had not charity, clearly, or they would have aided in depriving the Princess of freedom of conscience. Elizabeth, aided by Bishops, persecuted Puritans, but then Puritans have a right to freedom of conscience, for themselves, and a right to prevent other people from exercising the same privilege. If there are to be Bishops they must be of popular election, but when preachers with powers in some respects greater were elected by the people in Scotland, Milton did not approve of them either.
His next important tract, The Apology for Smectymnuus (five preachers, Marshal, Calamy, Young, Newcomen and Spurstow, who had attacked Episcopacy), is of 1642. Bishop Hall, who, in youth, had boasted that he was the first English satirist, had replied to the Five in his Defence of the Remonstrance; Milton had answered; Hall in his turn published "A Modest Confutation," and Milton's Apology for Smectymnuus ensued. The adversary had made scurrilous remarks, had attacked Milton's manners and morals, quite causelessly, in the controversial fashion of the age. Milton replied that his adversary was a "rude scavenger," and then gave that account of his own way of life in youth which lends its value to this passage in the discussion. He had never haunted "bordelloes," houses of ill-fame; he calls the women who keep them "prelatesses". A Bishop, to Milton, is a male of the same species. As for the theatre he had seen his fellow-students act at college, "prostituting the shame of that ministry, which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies...." He had always, he declares, been a remarkably pure young man; hence his life-long love of romances of chivalry, where every knight is bound by oath to defend, with his life if need be, the chastity of ladies. "The first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul," he says nobly.