“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645him, with a few thrusts at the licenser-cum-collaborator Caryl. Milton claims to
have heard rumors for months that some group of writers was preparing a confutation
of his Doctrine and Discipline, “but it lay... half a year after unfinisht in the press”;
betimes he met with the occasional “by-blow” from the Presbyterian pulpit, and
with the “jolly slander” (CPW II, 727, 722) of Prynne. The Answerer’s summary
argument and condescending tone obviously infuriated Milton, and he responds in
kind, with a barrage of insults and rhetorical abuse justified by the title page epi-
graph from Proverbs 26:5: “Answer a Fool according to his folly, lest hee bee wise
in his own conceit.” In passing, Milton also challenges Prynne, who misrepresented
him as sanctioning “Divorce at pleasure” (722), to answer him without recourse to
“old and stale suppositions” and his usual “gout and dropsy of a big margent, litter’d
and overlaid with crude and huddl’d quotations” (724). He also reproves the li-
censer, Joseph Caryl, for his gratuitous commendation and his reputed help to the
ignorant Answerer, extending that reproof to his former Presbyterian colleagues
who have forgotten his aid to Smectymnuus:
When you suffer’d this nameles hangman to cast into public such a despightfull con-
tumely upon a name and person deserving of the Church and State equally to your
self, and one who hath don more to the present advancement of your own Tribe,
then you or many of them have don for themselvs, you forgot to bee either honest,
Religious, or discreet. (753)Milton’s rhetoric of abuse serves here, as other strategies do elsewhere, to divide
the audience into those of gentle spirit who can comprehend his view of marriage,
and those of servile mind who cannot. By designating the answerer as a “Serving-
man... turned Sollicitor” (726–7), Milton turns class prejudice into an effective
rhetorical weapon to force that division. However, its basis is not class as such, but
the qualities of mind that should accompany birth and station. When the servingman
rose to be a solicitor he did not elevate his mind, whereas Milton’s “gentle” readers
should identify with his “gentle” sentiments:
For how should hee, a Servingman both by nature and by function, an Idiot by
breeding, and a Solliciter by presumption, ever come to know, or feel within himself,
what the meaning is of gentle?... The Servitor would know what I mean by conver-
sation, declaring his capacity nothing refin’d since his Law-puddering, but still the
same it was in the Pantry, and at the Dresser.... To men of quality I have said
anough, and experience confirms by daily example, that wisest, sobrest, justest men
are somtimes miserably mistak’n in their chois. (741–2)Milton’s scathing tirades reveal that he takes the man’s “illiterat and arrogant” trea-
tise as a personal affront to his own status as learned scholar and gentleman. The
answerer is a “Pork” unfit for disputations of Philosophy (737), an “illiterat” who
misspells his Greek, Latin, and Hebrew quotations (II, 724–5), a “fleamy clodd”