He now retired from public life forever; and when an offer was afterward made to him by the king, to return to his old post of secretary, he refused it, although pressed by his wife to accept it, and to her entreaties answered thus: “Thou art in the right; you and other women would ride in your coach; for me, my aim is to live and die an honest man.”
This offer has been denied by Doctor Johnson, in his life of Milton, and that, too, without sufficient foundation, for the contradiction is made without proof; and when Dr. Newton, in his admirable account of Milton, published in his splendid edition of the Poetical Works of Milton, confirms it, and asserts that these very words were from Milton’s wife only twenty years before the publication of his edition. The Doctor has in this, as in other instances, displayed a malicious desire to detract from his merits; his envy no doubt being excited by this unbending integrity of one, whose political opinions were serious enough in the Doctor’s eyes to affect even his merits as a poet. For this, as for other offenses, has he received again and again that censure which he so richly deserved; but from no one with more force than from Mr. St. John, in his able Preliminary Discourse to these volumes. We quote a passage.
“Another sore point with Johnson was, that Milton should be said to have rejected, after the Restoration, the place of Latin Secretary to Charles the Second. Few men heartily believe in the existence of virtue above their own reach. He knew what he would have done under similar circumstances; he knew that had he lived during the period of the Commonwealth, a similar offer from the Regicides would have met with no ‘sturdy refusal’ from him; he knew it was in his eyes no sin to accept of a pension from one whom he considered an usurper; how, then, could he believe, what must have humiliated him in his own esteem, that the old blind republican, bending beneath the weight of years and indigence, still cherished heroic virtues in his soul, and spurned the offer of a tyrant! Oh, but he had filled the same office under Oliver Cromwell!
“Milton regarded ‘Old Noll’ as a greater and better ‘Sylla,’ to whom, in the motto to his work against the restoration of kingship, he compares him, and evidently hoped to the last, what was always, perhaps, intended by the Protector, and understood between them, that as soon as the troubles of the times should be properly appeased, he would establish the Republic. In this Milton consented to serve with him, not to serve him; for Cromwell always professed to be the servant of the people. And after all, there was some difference between Cromwell and Charles the Second. With the former the author of Paradise Lost had something in common; they were both great men, they were both enemies to that remnant of feudal barbarism, which, supported by prejudice and ignorance, had for ages exerted so fatal an influence over the destinies of their country. Minds of such an order—in some things, though not in all, resembling—might naturally enough coöperate; for they could respect each other. But with what sense of decorum, or reverence for his own character, remembering the glorious cause for which he had struggled, could Milton have reconciled his conscience to taking office under the returned Stuart, to mingle daily with the crowd of atheists who blasphemed the Almighty, and with swinish vices debased his Image in the polluted chambers of Whitehall. The poet regarded them with contemptuous abhorrence; and, if I am not exceedingly mistaken, described them under the names of devils, in the court of their patron and inspirer below. Besides, even had they possessed the few virtues compatible with servitude, it would have been a matter of constant chagrin, of taunt and reviling on one side, and silent hatred on the other, to have brought together republican and slave in the same bureau, and to have compelled a democratic pen to mould correct phrases for a despicable master. So far, however, was the biographer from comprehending the character of the man whose life he undertook to write, that he seems to have thought it an imputation on him, and a circumstance for which it is necessary to pity his lot, that the dissolute nobles of the age seldom resorted to his humble dwelling! The sentiment is worthy of Salmasius. But was there then living a man who would not have been honored by passing under the shadow of that roof? by listening to the accents of those inspired lips? by being greeted and remembered by him whose slightest commendation was immortality? Elijah, or Elisha, or Moses, or David, or Paul of Tarsus, would have sat down with Milton and found in him a kindred spirit. But the slave of Lady Castlemain, or the traitor Monk, or Rochester, or the husband of Miss Hyde, or that Lord Chesterfield, who saw what Hamilton describes, and dared not with his sword revenge the insult, might forsooth have thought it a piece of condescension to be seen in the Delphic Cavern in England, whence proceeded those sacred verses which in literature have raised her above all other nations, to the level of Greece herself!”
Upon his release from arrest he retired to the obscurity and solitude of his own dwelling, where he passed his time in the composition of his Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. During this time he also produced a History of Britain, with several other prose works. In 1674 he expired, worn out with illness and a life of toil; he died without a groan, and so gentle and placid was his departure, that they who were round him did not perceive it.
Although all of his political writings were called forth by the events that were passing before him, and were for that reason local in their immediate application, yet they are so catholic and elemental in their spirit, that we can hardly believe that they were written in an age when feudal tenures were not abolished, and before any people had as yet secured their own freedom.
His Areopagitica was his first political work; and although it was written for a special purpose, and with a view to a then existing evil, it is still a pamphlet that might very well be published at this day, as the declaration of our opinions upon this subject of the liberty of the press.
The very motto of the book, taken from Euripides, and translated by himself, indicates the whole spirit and intent of it.
“This is true liberty when freeborn men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free,