“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642her bottomlesse gorge may be satisfi’d with the blood of the Kings daughter the
Church; and may, as she was wont, fill her dark and infamous den with the bones of
the Saints. (857)The second is a biblical allegory of the king as Samson, the laws as his strength-
giving hair, and the prelates as the Delilah that shaved his locks and delivered him to
his enemies. It ends with some hope that the king will return to the laws and
destroy the prelates, at whatever painful cost to himself:
I cannot better liken the state and person of a King then to that mighty Nazarite
Samson; who... grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious
and sunny locks the laws waving and curling about his god like shoulders. And while
he keeps them about him undimisht and unshorn, he may with the jaw-bone of an
Asse, that is, with the word of his meanest officer suppresse and put to confusion
thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his head among
the strumpet flatteries of Prelats, while he sleeps and thinks no harme, they wickedly
shaving off all those bright and waighty tresses of his laws and... deliver him over to
indirect and violent councels, which as those Philistims put out the fair, and farre-
sighted eyes of his natural discerning, and make him grinde in the prison house of
their sinister ends and practices upon him. Till he knowing his prelatical rasor to have
bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the golden beames of
Law and Right; and they sternly shook, thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his
evil cousellors, but not without great affliction to himselfe. (858–9)Then Milton adapts the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to the choice the Lords
must make about Root and Branch. Let them spare prelacy if it contains even one
good thing but if, “as nothing can be surer,” it is found wholly “malignant, hostile,
[and] destructive,”
Then let your severe and impartial doom imitate the divine vengeance [on Sodom]:
rain down your punishing force upon this godlesse and oppressing government: and
bring such a dead Sea of subversion upon her, that she may never in this Land rise
more to afflict the holy reformed Church, and the elect people of God. (861)In this, the first work to bear his full name, Milton used the “Preface” to the
second book to draw an elaborate and multifaceted self-portrait to introduce him-
self to the “intelligent and equal [impartial] auditor.”^98 He did not place his long
autobiographical statement where we might expect it, at the beginning of his tract,
choosing to focus attention first on his argument, not himself. Placed as it is, it can
serve Milton’s personal agenda and also act as a forceful “ethical proof,” displaying
the author’s knowledge, virtue, and authority to speak to the question at issue.
Though he was 33 years old in 1642, Milton presents himself as a youth, open to
criticism for contesting “with men of high estimation” while his years were green
(806); that conventional modesty topos has some validity in that Milton was un-