'The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty' was published in 1641, nearly eight years before Charles I. was beheaded, and just thirty years before the publication of 'Samson Agonistes.' He little dreamed that the reigning king would, in less than eight years, be put to death, and that he should play such a rôle in the subsequent state of things, should have such experiences and such disappointments and sorrows as would make the fortunes of Samson the prototype of a great final creation embodying allegorically his own strangely similar fortunes.
In Milton's MS. jottings of subjects for a tragedy or an epic poem, in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, made in 1640 and some time following, and occupying seven pages of folio-sized paper, is included (No. 19 of the list of Old Testament
subjects) 'Samson Pursophorus or Hybristes' [i.e. Samson the Firebrand-bringer or Violent, as Masson explains], 'or Samson Marrying, or Ramath-Lechi: Judges xv.'
Nothing, of course, could have been more remote from Milton's mind than that thirty years after this jotting, his swan-song would be given to the world, in which Samson, blind and among the Philistines, would allegorically reflect his own condition, in the last years of his life.
'The parallelisms in the fortunes of Samson and Milton have been noticed by almost every editor and every critic of the 'Samson Agonistes.' They are too obvious to escape the notice of the most careless reader who knows anything of the life of Milton. Samson is Milton in the polemic and in the post-Restoration period of his life. In all literature there is not a nobler, more exalting and pathetic egotism, than the 'Samson Agonistes' exhibits—an egotism for which every lover of the great poet must be abundantly thankful. 'How very much,' Walter Savage Landor justly remarks, 'would literature have lost, if this marvellously great and admirable man had omitted the various references to himself and his contemporaries!'
Of the numerous autobiographical passages in the 'Samson Agonistes,' which editors have noted, those most distinctly so are the following: vv. 40, 41; 67-109; 191-193; 219-226; 241-255; 268-276; 563-572; 590-598; 695-702; 760, 761; 1025-1060; 1418-1422; 1461-1471; 1687-1707.
These passages show that the allegorical significance of the 'Samson Agonistes' bears not only upon Milton's individual life and experiences, but also upon the backsliding of the English people, in their restoration of monarchy. The misgivings to which Milton gave expression in his 'Ready and easy way to establish a free commonwealth, and the excellence thereof, compared with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting kingship in this nation,' were realized in less than three months
after its publication late in February or early in March, 1660. Charles II. entered London May 29, 1660. These misgivings are expressed, or, at least, implied, in the following passage of 'The ready and easy way.' The involved construction of the language in this pamphlet shows that it must have been very hastily dictated by the blind poet:
'After our liberty and religion thus prosperously fought for, gained, and many years possessed, except in those unhappy interruptions, which God hath removed; now that nothing remains, but in all reason the certain hopes of a speedy and immediate settlement for ever in a firm and free commonwealth, for this extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed from heaven, to fall back, or rather to creep back so poorly, as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship, to be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds, though done by some to covetous and ambitious ends, yet not therefore to be stained with their infamy, or they to asperse the integrity of others; and yet these now by revolting from the conscience of deeds well done, both in church and state, to throw away and forsake, or rather to betray, a just and noble cause for the mixture of bad men who have ill-managed and abused it (which had our fathers done heretofore, and on the same pretence deserted true religion, what had long ere this become of our gospel, and all protestant reformation so much intermixed with the avarice and ambition of some reformers?), and by thus relapsing, to verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured both us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious; not only argues a strange, degenerate contagion suddenly spread among us, fitted and prepared for new slavery, but will render us a scorn and derision to all our neighbours.'