Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Milton's Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church: With a Preface on the Prose Writings of Milton
John milton, undoubtedly One of the very greatest literary or nameute of his country, has owed his celebrity among us hitherto chie?y to his poetry. As a poet, he has merited more than his fame, high as it is. His Comus is the most perfectly beau tiful of dramatic poems; and his Paradise Lost, to say nothing of the extent to which it has contributed to human improvement, by the religious and moral sentiments which it contains, is con fessedly the prince of epics. But the prose works of Milton have as yet been very inadecpliately appreciated they have been won derfully little known. Ow many are there even among what ma be called the reading part of the community, who never heard, tih very recently at least, of Milton as a prose author at all? There are passages in the prose writings of John Milton which want only the form Of verse in order to their equalling, if not surpassing, as poetry, the most admired efi'usions of his genius in the Para dise Lost. But this is their smallest praise: they have merit of a. Difi'erent and, we will venture to add, of a higher order. They are instinct with the noblest spirit, and the most uncompromising principles of civil and religious liberty. Milton may be said to be the p ilosopher of freedom, as Bacon is of physical and mental science. He goes to the core of the subject. He consults only with reason and, especially with' reference to religious liberty, the Word of God. His writings (sure token of truth and greatness) are, after the lapse of nearly two hundred years, useful, applicable, and full of light to the existing generation of mankind. The world is yet onlyi'endeavouring to near his standard with slow, and timorous, and feeble steps.
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