“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649into two parts, Etymology and Syntax, omitting the other usual topics, orthography
and prosody.^56 He also excluded exceptional cases, compressed rules and examples,
and replaced formal definitions of terms with semantic definitions based on mean-
ing. Moreover, he deleted from Lily examples which reinforce structures of royal
and ecclesiastical authority: prayers, expressions of loyalty to the monarch, responses
from the catechism, and virtually all examples using the word “rex.” And he added
some two hundred new examples, among them several quotations from Cicero
dealing with the struggle for liberty and justice against oppressive power.^57 As Lily’s
grammar had helped form monarchical principles in generation after generation of
schoolboys, Milton’s grammar would subtly insinuate the values of a republican
culture.
In all likelihood, Milton also drafted most of his Ramist logic, in Latin, while he
was teaching the subject; it was published in 1672, with some later additions,^58
under the title Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio ad Petri Rami Methodum Concinnata. It
coalesces and abridges in one continuous text (219 pages) the famous 95-page
Dialecticae libri duo (1572) by Petrus Ramus and an 800-page commentary by George
Downame, adding also an exercise in logical analysis taken from Downame.^59 Ra-
mus’s revisionist logic and “method,” based on the dichotomized division of all
subjects into axioms proceeding from the general to the particular, challenged Ar-
istotle’s Organon, still the foundation of the Scholastic trivium taught in schools and
universities. Ramism was especially influential in the Protestant nations of northern
Europe where Ramus was perceived as both scholar and martyr, having met his
death in the notorious massacre of some 3,000 Protestants on St Bartholomew’s
Day (August 24, 1572). Milton knew Ramist logic from Christ’s College, which
had a long tradition of distinguished Ramist fellows: Laurence Chaderton, William
Perkins, and Downame himself, who had been University Professor of Logic from
1590 to 1616.
Like his Grammar, Milton’s Logic is a relatively brief volume designed to be useful
to students. As a teacher, Milton evidently found Ramist simplification and codifi-
cation of Aristotelian logic helpful, though he insists on using the more inclusive
term “logic” – defined as “the art of reasoning well” – instead of Ramus’s preferred
term “dialectic” with its connotations of question and answer or debate (CPW
VIII, 217). He offers an approving, though much condensed, discussion of Ram-
us’s method, using it in this treatise and in his Grammar. However, by restricting it
to teaching knowledge already attained he implies that other methods may be use-
ful for discovering new knowledge. As a poet, Milton no doubt approved of Ram-
us’s use of poetic examples. But while Ramus made logic the basis for poetry as for
all other knowledge,^60 Milton refused that simple equation, stating that poets and
orators, when they seek to evoke pleasure or other emotions, use methods best
known to themselves (391–5).
Late in 1646 Milton wrote an epigraph-sonnet titled in the Trinity manuscript
“On ye religious memory of Mrs. Catharine Thomason, my christian freind deceas’d