“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal
licencer to blot or alter... I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructer that
comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist. (532–3)He invokes some authorities here, especially those calculated to impress parliament:
Paolo Sarpi, Lord Brooke, Bacon, and especially Selden – “one of your own now
sitting in Parlament, the chief of learned men reputed in this Land” (II, 513) –
noting that Selden’s De Juri Naturali defends the Talmudic method of collating all
opinions, including errors.^127 Also, by emphasizing his exchanges with the Italian
literati and Galileo he reinforces his own status as a respected scholar who can speak
to the censorship issue from a cosmopolitan perspective (537–9).
The tract retains the parts of a deliberative oration: an exordium praising parlia-
ment for its reformations to date and its willingness to accept advice, a partition,
four arguments, and a long peroration. The first argument – the evil origins of
censorship – is historical and often satiric. Representing censorship as papist in
origin and in essence because it suppresses liberty of conscience, he links to Roman
Catholicism not only the “apishly Romanizing” Laud and Charles I, but also the
Presbyterian supporters of the new censorship law. At one point he turns the cen-
sorship process into a satiric pantomime played out on the title pages of licensed
treatises, in sharp contrast to his own title page and its Euripidean celebration of free
speech: “Sometimes 5 Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the Piatza of
one Title page, complementing and ducking each to other with their shav’n rever-
ences, whether the Author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his Epistle,
shall to the Press or to the spunge” (504). But he begins this argument in the heroic
register, personifying books as living author–heroes, the prodigiously active and
admittedly sometimes dangerous essence of master-spirits:
Books... 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 unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book;
who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a
good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye... a
good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on
purpose to a life beyond life. (492–3)He warns against subjecting such spirits to “persecution” or “martyrdom,” or even
- should the whole impression be distroyed – to “a kinde of massacre.” Sharon
Achinstein notes that by offering two versions of the trial of books – by censors or
by the public – Milton builds choice into his very rhetoric, helping thereby to
construct the readers and citizens he wants and the republic needs.^128
The second argument, that the virtuous can only profit by reading all kinds of
books, begins with a comparison of books to food, which is freed from all legal
restrictions under the gospel and regulated only by reason and temperance. Milton