to England, and answers the various accusations made by the Belfast Presbyterians against the acts of the republicans. This is Milton's contribution to the Irish question. It prepares the way for the merciless suppression of the rebellion a few months later by Cromwell.

The next commission given to Milton by the Council was far more momentous. It was that of writing a work to counteract the menacing effect on public opinion of the famous Eikon Basilike or King's Book, which had appeared almost immediately after the king's death (i.e., in February, 1649) and was achieving an enormous circulation. The Eikon, or, to employ its subtitle, The True ↑ Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, purports to be a private record of the selfcommunings of Charles through the last years, almost the last hours, of his life, revealing him as a model of conscientiousness and piety, tender of his family, solicitous for the good of his people, loyally protestant, and given to earnest prayer. The book was suspected from the moment of its appearance and is now believed to be a pious fraud, the work not of Charles at all but of one of his adherents, Bishop Gauden, who took this means of winning public sympathy for his memory and cause by setting up his image as that of a martyred saint. This object it signally accomplished and the popularity of the work was rightly felt by the leaders of the Commonwealth to constitute a danger of the first magnitude.

Milton called his answer Eikonoklastes (i. e., the imagebreaker). It is a lengthy examination of the Eikon, chapter by chapter, as was the manner of seventeenth century controversy. He deprecates the idea of assailing the memory of one who has paid his debt to nature, but,

accepting the necessity of meeting such a challenge, proceeds to demonstrate the worthlessness of Charles's defense of his conduct at every point. The personal indictment which he had avoided making in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is now drawn with a vengeance. The pious passages, which constituted the most popular feature of the work, he assails as mere hypocrisy, instancing Shakespeare's Richard III as an example of a tyrant who masked his evil purposes with religious cant. The most damaging point in the entire statement was his demonstration that one of the rhetorical prayers had been plagiarized word for word from that "vain and amatorious poem," Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. It was subsequently charged against Milton that he himself, in collaboration with Bradshaw, had caused this prayer to be inserted in some of the editions of the Eikon for the purpose of discrediting the king's sincerity, and the reliability of this charge has been vigorously maintained in a recent study.18 The balance of evidence is, however, strongly against it.19

A newly discovered fact of much interest is Milton's indebtedness for many of his arguments, allusions, and turns of phrase, to an earlier answer to the Eikon Basilike, viz., a pamphlet entitled Eikon Alethine which had appeared anonymously on or before August 26, 1649, assailing among other things the genuineness of the royal authorship.20 This work, which had also, perhaps, been written at the direction of the Council, was itself a reply to a royalist book The Princely Pelican, “containing satisfac

18 Liljegren, Studies in Milton.

19 The arguments of J. S. Smart in Milton and the King's Prayer appear decisive against Liljegren's case.

20 Loewenhaupt, The Writing of Milton's "Eikonoklastes.”

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tory reasons that his sacred person was the sole author," and it was followed in turn by the Eikon Episte, another argument to the same effect. Milton's tract was, therefore, the fifth in the controversial series. It was evidently felt that the proper step in the strategy of combating the King's Book was now to abandon the issue of its authenticity and to attack it on other grounds, and this accordingly was what Milton did. It is not certain. whether he had seen the Eikon Episte before writing Eikonoklastes, but in any case he must have composed it very rapidly between August 26, the date of the Eikon Alethine, and October 6, when his own pamphlet was on sale.

POLITICAL TRACTS IN THE CONTROVERSY WITH SALMASIUS

AND MORUS (1651-1655)

In 1650, the next year after the publication of Eikonoklastes, Milton began the last and greatest battle of his controversial career. Charles II, now in exile in France, had engaged Salmasius (Claude Saumaise), a French scholar resident in Holland, to prepare an elaborate Latin tract, addressed to the intellectual leaders of Europe and designed to hold up to public execration the men who had voted the death of the king. This work, which appeared in 1649 with the title Defensio Regia pro Carolo I, though less insidious in its effects in England than the Eikon Basilike, was even more dangerous to the Commonwealth in its international relations. It had the prestige of a great name behind it, for Salmasius was universally recognized as one of the foremost men of learning in an age in which scholarly distinction was still supposed to vouch for the validity of a public utterance of this sort.

Milton, in his official capacity and as the most learned and eloquent controversialist on the republican side, was ordered to compose the answer to this attack. The result was the longest of his prose works hitherto the Defence of the English People Against Salmasius (Ioannis Miltoni Angli Pro populo anglicano defensio contra Claudii anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem regiam). It was published by the printer Dugard in March, 1651. Since Milton's tract was addressed to a continental rather than an English audience it was composed in Latin. Its author inevitably felt the thrill of this first appearance before the wider court of European opinion and he put into the work his maximum effort. Later he spoke with pride of his "noble task with which all Europe rings from side to side." Yet the Defensio can hardly be called to-day a noble work. It is filled from beginning to end with personalities, assailing in abusive phrase the scholarship, the mercenary motives, and the private character of Salmasius, as if to discredit him as a man and a grammarian were the best means of discrediting the cause which he was pleading. There is also argument in abundance, but Milton seldom rises to principles, confining himself rather to point by point replies to his opponent, demonstrating again and again that the action of the regicides was justified by English law, by ancient and modern learned authority, by the precedent of other peoples, by the tyrannical character of Charles, and by public necessity. The materials of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and of Eikonoklastes are repeated and elaborated. The Presbyterians are scored anew. Such eloquence as the piece can show is the eloquence of scorn. Above all Milton denounces the intrusion of a foreigner into the affairs of

his countrymen and he shows at length the inconsistency of Salmasius' point of view with ideas expressed in his previous writings.

The Defense of the English People made such a stir abroad as Milton could have wished. Salmasius left the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, where he had been living in great honor, discredited and disgraced, according to report, by Milton's scathing treatment of his work and character. The reply to which he was goaded was written, but for some reason withheld from publication until 1659. He died in 1663. Meanwhile several minor continental royalists entered the field, leveling their attack at Milton personally. It was not, however, until the appearance in 1652 of an anonymous answer of real power (Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos, The Cry of the King's Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides) that he undertook an answer. This new work, The Second Defense of the English People by John Milton, Englishman, in reply to an Infamous Book entitled 'Cry of the King's Blood,' did not appear until the spring of 1654, though it had been ordered by the Council long before. Milton was waiting, he said, for the rumored reply of Salmasius. Besides this he was now blind, the complete ruin of his eyesight having followed in 1652 the composition of the First Defense, caused according to Milton's own statement by his unremitting application to that task.

The Second Defense, like the first, contains an abundance of virulent and undignified personalities, directed now against Alexander More or Morus, a Scottish-French scholar domiciled in Holland and closely associated with Salmasius. The actual author was Peter Du Moulin but