Some years of travel on the Continent matured his mind, and gave full scope to his poetic genius. At Paris he became acquainted with Grotius, the illustrious writer upon public law; and in Rome, Genoa, Florence, and other Italian cities, he became intimate with the leading minds of the age. He returned to England on account of the political troubles.
Milton's Views of Marriage.—In the consideration of Milton's personality, we do not find in him much to arouse our heart-sympathy. His opinions concerning marriage and divorce, as set forth in several of his prose writings, would, if generally adopted, destroy the sacred character of divinely appointed wedlock. His views may be found in his essay on The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; in his Tetrachordon, or the four chief places in Scripture, which treat of Marriage, or Nullities in Marriage; in his Colasterion, and in his translation of Martin Bucer's Judgment Concerning Divorce, addressed to the Parliament of England. Where women were concerned he was a hard man and a stern master.
In 1643 he married Mary Powell, the daughter of a Cavalier; and, taking her from the gay life of her father's house, he brought her into a gloom and seclusion almost insupportable. He loved his books better than he did his wife. He fed and sheltered her, indeed, but he gave her no tender sympathy. Then was enacted in his household the drama of the rebellion in miniature; and no doubt his domestic troubles had led to his extended discussion of the question of divorce. He speaks, too, almost entirely in the interest of husbands. With him woman is not complementary to man, but his inferior, to be cherished if obedient, to minister to her husband's welfare, but to have her resolute spirit broken after the manner of Petruchio, the shrew-tamer. In all this, however, Milton was eminently a type of the times. It was the canon law of the established Church of England at which he aimed, and he endeavored to lead the parliament to legislation upon the most sacred ties and relations of human life. Happily, English morals were too strong, even in that turbulent period, to yield to this unholy attempt. It was a day when authority was questioned, a day for "extending the area of freedom," but he went too far even for emancipated England; and the mysterious power of the marriage tie has always been reverenced as one of the main bulwarks of that righteousness which exalteth a nation.
His apology for Smectymnuus is one of his pamphlets against Episcopacy, and receives its title from the initial letters of the names of five Puritan ministers, who also engaged in controversy: they were Stephen Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcome, William Spenston. The Church of England never had a more intelligent and relentless enemy than John Milton.
Other Prose Works.—Milton's prose works are almost all of them of an historical character. Appointed Latin Secretary to the Council, he wrote foreign dispatches and treatises upon the persons and events of the day. In 1644 he published his Areopagitica, a noble paper in favor of Unlicensed Printing, and boldly directed against the Presbyterian party, then in power, which had continued and even increased the restraints upon the press. No stouter appeal for the freedom of the press was ever heard, even in America. But in the main, his prose pen was employed against the crown and the Church, while they still existed; against the king's memory, after the unfortunate monarch had fallen, and in favor of the parliament and all its acts. Milton was no trimmer; he gave forth no uncertain sound; he was partisan to the extreme, and left himself no loop-hole of retreat in the change that was to come.
A famous book appeared in 1649, not long after Charles's execution, proclaimed to have been written by King Charles while in prison, and entitled Eikon Basilike, or The Kingly Image, being the portraiture of his majesty in his solitude and suffering. It was supposed that it might influence the people in favor of royalty, and so Milton was employed to answer it in a bitter invective, an unnecessary and heartless attack upon the dead king, entitled Eikonoklastes, or The Image-breaker. The Eikon was probably in part written by the king, and in part by Bishop Gauden, who indeed claimed its authorship after the Restoration.
Salmasius having defended Charles in a work of dignified and moderate tone, Milton answered in his first Defensio pro Populo Anglicano; in which he traverses the whole ground of popular rights and kingly prerogative, in a masterly and eloquent manner. This was followed by a second Defensio. For the two he received £1,000, and by his own account accelerated the disease of the eyes which ended in complete blindness.
No pen in England worked more powerfully than his in behalf of the parliament and the protectorate, or to stay the flood tide of loyalty, which bore upon its sweeping heart the restoration of the second Charles. He wrote the last foreign despatches of Richard Cromwell, the weak successor of the powerful Oliver; but nothing could now avail to check the return of monarchy. The people were tired of turmoil and sick of blood; they wanted rest, at any cost. The powerful hand of Cromwell was removed, and astute Monk used his army to secure his reward. The army, concurring with the popular sentiment, restored the Stuarts. The conduct of the English people in bringing Charles back stamped Cromwell as a usurper, and they have steadily ignored in their list of governors—called monarchs—the man through whose efforts much of their liberty had been achieved; but history asserts itself, and the benefits of the "Great Rebellion" are gratefully acknowledged by the people, whether the protectorate appears in the court list or not.
The Effect of the Restoration.—Charles II. came back to such an overwhelming reception, that he said, in his witty way, it must have been his own fault to stay away so long from a people who were so glad to see him when he did come. This restoration forced Milton into concealment: his public day was over, and yet his remaining history is particularly interesting. Inheriting weak eyes from his mother, he had overtasked their powers, especially in writing the Defensiones, and had become entirely blind. Although his person was included in the general amnesty, his polemical works were burned by the hangman; and the pen that had so powerfully battled for a party, now returned to the service of its first love, poetry. His loss of power and place was the world's gain. In his forced seclusion, he produced the greatest of English poems—religious, romantic, and heroic.
Estimate of His Prose.—Before considering his poems, we may briefly state some estimate of his prose works. They comprise much that is excellent, are full of learning, and contain passages of rarest rhetoric. He said himself, that in prose he had only "the use of his left hand;" but it was the left hand of a Milton. To the English scholar they are chiefly of historical value: many of them are written in Latin, and lose much of their terseness in a translation which retains classical peculiarities of form and phrase.