Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

John Milton

Seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning; therefore we are taught the languages of those people who have been most industrious after wisdom.

The Scripture affords us a divine pastoral drama in the Song of Solomon, consisting of two persons and a double chorus, as Origen rightly judges; and the Apocalypse of St. John is a majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies. And this my opinion, the grave authority of Pareus, commenting that book, is sufficient to confirm. Or, if occasion shall lead, to imitate those magnific odes and hymns, wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy, some others in their frame judicious, in their matter most an end faulty. But those frequent songs, throughout the laws and prophets, beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very original art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy to be incomparable.

It is not hard for any man who hath a Bible in his hands, to borrow good words and holy sayings in abundance; but to make them his own is a work of grace only from above.

There are no songs comparable to the songs of Zion; no orations equal to those of the Prophets; and no politics like those which the Scriptures teach.

In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writing which the magistrate cared to take notice of; those either blasphemous and atheistical, or libellous.

I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors.

There is no Christian duty that is not to be seasoned and set off with cheerishness,—which in a thousand outward and intermitting crosses may yet be done well, as in this vale of tears.

Forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations.

To season them, and win them early to the love of virtue and true labour, ere any flattering seducement or vain principle seize them wandering, some easy and delightful book of education should be read to them.

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true way-faring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised, and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

We do not see that while we still affect, by all means, a rigid external formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of “wood, hay, and stubble,” forced and frozen together; which is more to the sudden degenerating of a church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.

There is no learned man but will confess he hath much profited by reading controversies,—his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds more firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic, they teach that contraries laid together more evidently appear: it follows, then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.

Having newly left those grammatic shallows, where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words, on the sudden are transported to be tost and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy.

From grammatic flats and shallows they are on the sudden transported to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits, in fathomless and unquiet depths of controversy.

In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is soft and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake of her rejoicings with heaven and earth.

The circumscription of time wherein the whole drama begins and ends is, according to ancient rule and best example, within the space of twenty-four hours.

This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be.

Scaliger defines a mime to be a poem imitating any action to stir up laughter.

There is a certain scale of duties … which for want of studying in right order, all the world is in confusion.

The main skill and groundwork will be to temper them such lectures and explanations, upon every opportunity, as may lead and draw them in willing obedience.

Now will be the right season of forming them to be able writers, when they shall be thus fraught with an universal insight into things.

A complete and generous education fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices of peace and war.

The ill habit which they get of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms.

Evil news rides fast, while good news baits.

Among the writers of all ages, some deserve fame, and have it; others neither have nor deserve it; some have it, not deserving; others, though deserving, yet totally miss it, or have it not equal to their deserts.

Infuse into their young breasts such an ingenuous and noble ardour as would not fail to make many of them renowned.

Put conditions and take oaths from all kings and magistrates at their first instalment, to do impartial justice by law.

In supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, [they] shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure forever.

Methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears; and the sweet odour of the returning gospel imbathe his soul with the fragrance of heaven.

But when a king sets himself to bandy against the highest court and residence of all his regal powers, he then, in the single person of a man, fights against his own majesty and kingship.

No worthy enterprise can be done by us without continual plodding and wearisomeness to our faint and sensitive abilities.

Some are allured to law, not on the contemplation of equity, but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees.

An unwritten law of common right, so engraven in the hearts of our ancestors, and by them so constantly enjoyed and claimed, as that it needed not enrolling.

It was not a moral, but a judicial, law, and so was abrogated;… which law the ministry of Christ came not to deal with.

Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely, according to conscience, above all other liberties.

None can love freedom heartily but good men: the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope or more indulgence than under tyrants. Hence it is that tyrants are not oft offended by, nor stand much in doubt of, bad men, as being all naturally servile; but in whom virtue and true worth is most eminent them they fear in earnest, as by right their masters; against them lies all their hatred and corruption.

He who writes himself martyr by his own inscription is like an ill painter, who, by writing on a shapeless picture which he hath drawn, is fain to tell passengers what shape it is, which else no man could imagine.

The solitariness of man … God hath namely and principally ordered to prevent by marriage.

Marriage is a human society, and … all human society must proceed from the mind rather than the body.

Far be it from me to possess so little spirit as not to be able without difficulty to despise the revilers of my blindness, or so little placability as not to be able, with still less difficulty, to forgive them.

I might, perhaps, leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.

Music would not be unexpedient after meat to assist and cherish nature in her first concoction, and send their minds back to study in good tune.

In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake of her rejoicing with heaven and earth.

A poet soaring in the high regions of his fancy, with his garland and singing robes about him.

Rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre.

A private conscience sorts not with a public calling, but declares that person rather meant by nature for a private fortune.

Praises in an enemy are superfluous, or smell of craft.

A good principle, not rightly understood, may prove as hurtful as a bad.

Good Providence! that curbs the raging of proud monarchs, as well as of mad multitudes.

I shall distinguish such as I esteem to be the hinderers of reformation into three sorts: 1. Antiquarians (for so I had rather call them than antiquaries, whose labours are useful and laudable); 2. Libertines; 3. Politicians.

He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and fears, is more than a king.

Sin can have no tenure by law at all, but is rather an eternal outlaw, and in hostility with law past all atonement: both diagonal contraries, as much allowing one another as day and night together in one hemisphere.

It is not good for man to be alone. Hitherto all things that have been named were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named not good.

I shall believe that there cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation, than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances at home, are enforced by heaps to forsake their native country.

Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.

The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world,—we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength.

Truth, in some age or other, will find her witness, and shall be justified at last by her own children.

Agricola had this excellence in him, so providently to choose his places where to fortify, as not another general then alive.

That mind must needs be irrecoverably depraved which,… tasting but once of one just deed, spatters at it, and abhors the relish ever after.

The studies wherein our noble and gentle youth ought to bestow their time.

It will require no great labour of exposition to unfold what is here meant by matters of religion; being as soon apprehended as defined, such things as belong chiefly to the knowledge and service of God; and are either above the reach and light of nature without revelation from above, and therefore liable to be variously understood by human reason, or such things as are enjoined or forbidden by divine precept which else by the light of reason would seem indifferent to be done or not done; and so likewise must needs appear to every man as the precept is understood. Whence I here mean by conscience or religion that full persuasion whereby we are assured that our belief and practice, as far as we are able to apprehend and probably make appear, is according to the will of God and his Holy Spirit within us, which we ought to follow much rather than any law of man, as not only his word everywhere bids us, but the very dictate of reason tells us.

Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught.

Truth indeed came into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do till her Master’s second coming: he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.

Hoping that his name may deserve to appear not among the mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end than the service of God and truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons’ teeth; and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature,—God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself,—kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house: they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies, must be thought on; there are shrewd books with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale: who shall prohibit these? Shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebec reads, even to the ballatry and the gamat of every municipal fiddler: for these are the countryman’s Arcadias and his Monte Mayors.

Next, what more national corruption, for which England hears ill abroad, than household gluttony?

Who shall be the rectors of our daily rioting?… Who shall regulate all the mixed conversation of our youth, male and female together, as is the fashion of this country?… How can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching; how can he be a doctor in his book, as he ought to be, or else had better be silent, whereas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction, of his patriarchal licenser, to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the hide-bound humour which he calls his judgment?

Let this stand then as a settled maxim of the law of nature, never to be shaken by any artifices of flatterers, that the senate, or the people, are superior to kings, be they good or bad: which is but what you yourself do in effect confess when you tell us that the authority of kings was derived from the people. For that power which they transferred to princes doth yet naturally, or, as I may say, virtually, reside in themselves notwithstanding.

Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters; as, by a certain fate, great acts and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honouring each other in the same ages.

When the esteem of science and liberal study waxes low in the commonwealth, we may presume that also there all civil virtue and worthy action is grown as low to a decline: and then eloquence, as it were consorted in the same destiny, with the decrease and fall of virtue, corrupts also and fades; at least resigns her office of relating to illiterate and frivolous historians, such as the persons themselves both deserve and are best pleased with; whilst they want either the understanding to choose better, or the innocence to dare invite the examining and searching style of an intelligent and faithful writer to the survey of their unsound exploits, better befriended by obscurity than fame.

For stories teach us that liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate age, brought Rome itself to a farther slavery: for liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need.

As he [Sallust] in the beginning of his Catilinarian War asserted that there was the greatest difficulty in historical composition, because the style should correspond with the nature of the narrative, you ask me how a writer of history may best attain that excellence. My opinion is that he who would describe actions and events in a way suited to their dignity and importance might to write with a mind endued with a spirit, and enlarged by an experience, as extensive as the actors in the scene, that he may have a capacity properly to comprehend and to estimate the most momentous affairs, and to relate them, when comprehended, with energy and distinctness, with purity and perspicuity of diction. The decorations of style I do not greatly heed: for I require an historian, and not a rhetorician. I do not want frequent interspersions of sentiment, or prolix dissertations on transactions, which interrupt the series of events, and cause the historian to intrench on the office of the politician, who, if, in explaining counsels and explaining facts, he follows truth rather than his own partialities and conjectures, excites the disgust or the aversion of his party. I will add a remark of Sallust, and which was one of the excellencies of Cato, that he should be able to say much in a few words: a perfection which I think no one can attain without the most discriminating judgment and a peculiar degree of moderation. There are many in whom you have not to regret either elegance of diction or copiousness of narrative, who have yet united copiousness with brevity. And among these Sallust is, in my opinion, the chief of the Latin writers.

Our country is wherever we are well off.

And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy (and those be such as are most obvious to the sense) they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics.

The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own. The wisdom of God created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the eye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glisterings, what is that to truth?

True religion is the true worship and service of God, learned and believed from the word of God only. No man or angel can know how God would be worshipped and served unless God reveal it: he hath revealed and taught it us in the Holy Scriptures by inspired ministers, and in the Gospel by his own Son and his Apostles, with strictest command to reject all other traditions or additions whatsoever.

Public preaching indeed is the gift of the Spirit, working as best seems to his secret will; but discipline is the practic work of preaching directed and applied, as is most requisite, to particular duty: without which it were all one to the benefit of souls, as it would be to the cure of bodies, if all the physicians in London should get into the several pulpits of the city, and, assembling all the diseased in every parish, should begin a learned lecture of pleurisies, palsies, lethargies, to which perhaps none then present were inclined; and so, without so much as feeling one pulse, or giving the least order to any skilful apothecary, should dismiss them from time to time, some groaning, some languishing, some expiring, with this only charge, to look well to themselves, and do as they hear.

He alone is worthy of the appellation [great] who does great things, or teaches how they may be done, or describes them with a suitable majesty when they have been done; but those only are great things which tend to render life more happy, which increase the innocent enjoyments and comforts of existence, or which pave the way to a state of future bliss more permanent and more pure.

For who would vindicate your right of unrestrained suffrage, or of choosing what representatives you liked best, merely that you might elect the creatures of your own faction, whoever they might be, or him, however small might be his worth, who would give you the most lavish feasts and enable you to drink to the greatest excess?… For, should the management of the republic be intrusted to persons to whom no one would willingly intrust the management of his private concerns: and the treasury of the state be left to the care of those who had lavished their own fortunes in an infamous prodigality? Should they have the charge of the public purse, which they would soon convert into a private, by their unprincipled peculations? Are they fit to be the legislators of a whole people who themselves know not what law, what reason, what right and wrong, what crooked and straight, what licit and illicit means? who think that all power consists in outrage, all dignity in the parade of insolence?

But God himself is truth; in propagating which, as men display a greater integrity and zeal they approach nearer to the similitude of God, and possess a greater portion of his love.

The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty. As for spiritual, who can be at rest, who can enjoy anything in this world with contentment, who hath not liberty to serve God, and to save his own soul, according to the best light which God hath planted in him to that purpose, by the reading of his revealed will, and the guidance of his Holy Spirit?… The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advancements of every person according to his merit: the enjoyment of those never more certain, and the access to these never more open, than in a free commonwealth.

He that holds himself in reverence and due esteem, both for the dignity of God’s image upon him, and for the price of his redemption, which he thinks is visibly marked upon his forehead, accounts himself both a fit person to do the noblest and godliest deeds, and much better worth than to deject and defile, with such a debasement and such a pollution as sin is, himself so highly reasoned and ennobled to a new friendship and filial relation with God. Nor can he fear so much the offence and reproach of others, as he dreads and would blush at the reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should see him doing or imagining that which is sinful, though in the deepest secrecy.

I hold him to deserve the highest praise who fixes the principles and forms the manners of a state, and makes the wisdom of his administration conspicuous both at home and abroad. But I assign the second place to him who endeavours by precepts and by rules to perpetuate that style and idiom of speech and composition which have flourished in the purest periods of the language, and who, as it were, throws up such a trench around it that people may be prevented from going beyond the boundary almost by the terrors of a Romulean prohibition.

Nor do I think it a matter of little moment whether the language of a people he vitiated or refined, whether the popular idiom be erroneous or correct. This consideration was more than once found salutary at Athens. It is the opinion of Plato that changes in the dress and habits of the citizens portend great commotions and changes in the state; and I am inclined to believe, that when the language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin or their degradation. For what do terms used without skill or meaning, which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote, but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude? On the contrary, we have never heard of any people or state which has not flourished in some degree of prosperity as long as their language has retained its elegance and its purity.

And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.

Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful: first, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching.

And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy, (and those be so which are most obvious to the sense,) they present their young unmatriculated novices, at first coming, with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics; so that they having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate, to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge; till poverty or youthful years call them importunately their several ways.

We must conclude, therefore, that God decreed nothing absolutely, which he left in the power of free agents,—a doctrine which is shown by the whole canon of Scripture…. For if those decrees of God which have been referred to above, and such others of the same class as occur perpetually, were to be understood in an absolute sense, without any implied condition, God would contradict himself, and appear inconsistent.

It is argued, however, that in such instances not only was the ultimate purpose predestinated, but even the means themselves were predestinated with a view to it.

So, indeed, it is asserted, but not on the authority of Scripture; and the silence of Scripture would alone be a sufficient reason for rejecting the doctrine. But it is also attended by this additional inconvenience, that it would entirely take away from human affairs all liberty of action, all endeavour and desire to do right. For we might argue thus,—If God have at all events decreed my salvation, however I may act, I shall not perish. But God has also decreed as the means of salvation that you should act rightly.

I cannot, therefore, but act rightly at some time or other, since God has so decreed,—in the mean time I will act as I please: if I never act rightly, it will be seen that I was never predestinated to salvation, and that whatever good I might have done would have been to no purpose.