“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649[They] bawl for freedom in their senseles mood,
And still revolt when Truth would set them free.
Licence they mean, when they cry liberty,
For who loves that, must first be wise, & good;
but from that mark how farr they roav, we see
for all this wast of wealth, & loss of blood. (ll. 9–14)The audience has, however, to parse those lines, which point somewhat elliptically
to concepts central to Milton’s thinking.^33 The principle that only the wise and
good can truly understand and value liberty looks back to those political theorists –
Cicero, Livy, Machiavelli – who insisted that falling off from virtue opens the way
to tyranny. Later, in the Tenure and the “Digression” to his History of Britain Milton
charges the Presbyterian leadership with corruption, fraud, mismanagement, ambi-
tion, self-aggrandizement, hunger for power, theological ignorance, and a disposi-
tion to persecute; but here he assumes all that as common knowledge. The line
“License they mean, when they cry liberty” echoes Livy’s somewhat comparable
charge against aristocratic youth corrupted by wealth who sought their own license
(freedom and privileges) rather than the liberty of all. Milton implies here, as he
often did later, that since only the good can love liberty, the goodness of people or
leaders (for political purposes) can be measured by whether they love liberty and
further its cause.
The second sonnet on the divorce tracts, “A Book was writ of late call’d
Tetrachordon,” complains of the opposite problem. This tract is being ignored by
common stall-readers who are put off by its Greek title that promises serious schol-
arship. The tone is mostly light, social, at times self-deprecating, with some bur-
lesque rhyme. The octave contains a scene of wry comedy as the personified book
- “wov’n close, both matter, form, & stile” – is said to have “walk’d the Town a
while” attracting “good intellects,” but now is “seldom pour’d on.” A dialogue
develops in which stall-readers complain of the book’s hard title and Milton pro-
tests that they seem able to put their tongues around the barbarous Scots names of
the royalist General Montrose’s officers.
Cries the stall-reader, bless us! what a word on
a title page is this! and som in file
stand spelling fals, while one might walk to Mile-
End Green. Why is it harder, Sirs, then Gordon,
Colkitto, or Macdonnell, or Galasp?^34The sonnet voices, however wittily, Milton’s irritation and dismay that his most
scholarly and densely argued tract has been all but ignored. Implicit in this retort is
his challenge to English citizens to attend to something besides the latest war news,
and to resist Scottish influence on English affairs. It also makes the stall-readers’
resistance to Greek signify a hatred of learning that threatens the revolution as