“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674267–8). He also declares that fines and corporal punishment of Catholics do not
accord with “the Clemency of the Gospel more then what appertains to the secu-
rity of the State” (CPW VIII, 431) – thereby distancing himself from vengeful
Anglican clerics and parliamentarians who imposed such penalties on those who
refuse the Test. Those who act against “the security of the state” can of course be
punished. In place of penal laws, Milton proposes free inquiry and amendment of
life. Echoing Areopagitica, he urges his countrymen to defend against popery by
diligent study of scripture and by allowing the free circulation and reading (at least
by the learned) of books from all manner of men – “Anabaptists, Arians, Arminians,
& Socinians” – so as to stimulate active rather than implicit faith. And echoing the
Defensio, he urges them to turn away from “Pride, Luxury, Drunkenness, Whore-
dom, Cursing, Swearing, bold and open Atheism,” vices which “oft times bring
the slight professors of true Religion, to gross Idolatry” (437–40). This analysis
invites the conclusion that it is not the toleration of dissenters, but the vices noto-
riously associated with the Restoration court that will subject the nation to the
“worst of superstitions, and the heaviest of all Gods Judgements, Popery” (440).
This emphasis on moral and cultural transformation reprises Milton’s familiar link-
age of inner slavery and national slavery, idolatry and servility. Of True Religion did
not elicit much response, though an anonymous letter two years later stated that “J.
Milton has said more for it [toleration] in two elegant sheets of true religion, heresy
and schism, than all the pre[lates] can refute in 7 years.”^76
Soon after this, Milton prepared a new edition of his shorter poems; the small
octavo, identifying the author as “Mr John Milton,” was published sometime be-
fore November 24.^77 He kept the same format as the 1645 edition – a two-part
book that retained all the poems published in 1645 in the same general order and
even the satiric Greek epigram on William Marshall, though not his despised en-
graving. He added 22 new English poems and two in Latin, supplied a Table of
Contents for both parts, and ended the volume with the treatise Of Education. Hith-
erto unpublished early poems include the elegy “On the Death of a fair Infant” for
his young niece, “At a Vacation Exercise,” the translation of Horace’s “Pyrrha”
ode (published with its Latin original so as to display the excellence of the transla-
tion), and, at the end of the Latin Book of Elegies, “Apologus de Rustico & Hero”
(A Fable of a Peasant and his Landlord) which points a moral against greed.^78 New
post-1645 poems include several sonnets, the psalm sequences he translated in 1648
and 1653, and the Latin verse epistle to Rouse.^79 He could not of course publish his
sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane, or his second sonnet to Cyriack Skinner,
voicing pride in the service for liberty that cost his eyesight.^80
This volume registers Milton’s very different status and authorial self-presenta-
tion in 1673, by contrast with the 1645 Poems.^81 There is now no prefatory matter
in the English section: the poet of Paradise Lost needs and wants no introduction
from a bookseller, no reference to his close association with the royalist musician
Lawes, no reference in A Maske to the Egerton family (the Elder Brother had