IF Milton’s prose is frequently rugged and disconnected, it never loses the essential qualities which distinguish the work of a master; and from time to time it rises above mere dignity to the sublimity he illustrates in his verse. In his verse he is primarily an artist, writing to gratify his sense of beauty through the expression of truth. In his prose he makes the expression of truth the object and art the mere incident of its attainment. His mind was severe, his thoughts weighty, his earnestness intense. His prose expresses all these qualities, and when he is writing on points of politics or theology which have lost their interest, it is hard to follow him with pleasure. When, however, he is dealing with enduring principles, he can at once fire the imagination and convince the judgment. “Eikonoklastes,” one of the most famous of his political pamphlets, appeared in 1649 as an answer to the royalist “Eikon Basilike,” and until his death, November 8th, 1674, he continued to write in Latin and English against the “divine right of kings” to control Church and State. In his prose he was a pamphleteer rather than an essayist; and although his pamphlets are seldom read except for the sake of the history they made, they were one of the great liberalizing forces of the seventeenth century.