MILTON, JOHN (1608-1674), poet, Secretary for the Foreign Tongues to the Council of State from the Protectorate until 1669, and the nearest thing the Commonwealth possesses to a national prophet. He had defended the execution of the first Charles in Latin prose read across every chancellery in Europe before the Settlement was so much as contemplated, and lived to see, in his own long tenure of office under a government his own pen had helped to justify, a vindication few controversialists of any age have been granted in this world. Blindness overtook him in the early sixteen-fifties, and it was in that darkness, dictating to daughters and amanuenses through the last two decades of his life, that he composed the epic upon which his enduring fame chiefly rests.
That epic, telling of the rebellion of the fallen angels and the loss and promised recovery of Eden, is read by this Commonwealth as it was surely intended to be read: as the sacred companion-piece to the republic's own history. The rebellion of the proud angel against a rightful and established order, and its ignominious defeat, is not a difficult text for a schoolboy of this nation to construe against the Descent of the Stuart pretender a dozen years after the poem's completion; and the poem's own closing promise, that a fortunate fall may open onto "a paradise within thee, happier far," has been read from a hundred pulpits, on the Sabbath nearest Commonwealth Day, as a prophecy of the settlement his own century achieved. It is not, perhaps, the only reading his verse will bear; the poet gave his adversary a great deal of eloquence to be merely defeated by it, and there are lines given to the rebel angel that a less devotional criticism than the general reader is accustomed to might find troublingly persuasive. This contributor does not propose to dwell on that difficulty here. A poem of such acknowledged genius may surely be allowed more than one face to more than one reader, and the face the Commonwealth has chosen to see in it — steadfastness rewarded, rebellion chastised, and a fortunate fall redeemed by a republic that did not, after all, have to wait for Providence to set it right — has done this nation more good, in the pulpit and in the schoolroom, than a more anxious reading would be likely to do.
Milton lived to see the Second Dutch War, corresponded to the end of his life with the learned of half the Continent, and died at his house in Bunhill in 1674, honoured by a Senate resolution and buried, at the Commonwealth's expense, within sight of the Legislator's own tomb at Westminster — the poet and the lawgiver, as more than one eulogist observed at the time, resting at last within a stone's throw of one another, the one having furnished the Commonwealth its constitution and the other, in verse this contributor is happy to commend to every household in the republic, its scripture. (W. R. S.)