“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660reject the idolatry and servility he saw as endemic to monarchy.
In the sections apparently added last, the preface and the much-expanded pero-
ration, Milton’s strained effort to sustain some hope in a miracle is all but over-
whelmed by his anguished recognition that the depraved multitude, like the Israelites
in the wilderness, meant to return to their Egyptian captivity. Milton’s fundamental
political insight is that only those who have attained to a personal experience of
freedom and who continually exercise a morally responsible independence of thought
and action can properly value or long maintain political freedom. The fierce invec-
tive and tragic vision that inform these passages mix with lamentation and a bitter,
prophetic jeremiad as, absent enough such lovers of liberty, he foresees the certain
collapse of all his political hopes and projects. In the peroration the Miltonic phrases
tumble over each other and the metaphors jumble together in a passionate mimesis
of the popular torrent sweeping all before it toward the precipice of Restoration:
Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only
to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth!
to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay though what
I have spoke, should happ’n (which Thou suffer not, who didst create mankinde free;
nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words
of our expiring libertie. But I trust I shall have spoken perswasion to abundance of
sensible and ingenuous men: to som perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to
become children of reviving libertie; and may reclaim, though they seem now chusing
them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little and consider whether
they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people, not to be so impetuos, but
to keep their due channell; and at length recovering and uniting thir better resolu-
tions, now that they see alreadie how open and unbounded the insolence and rage is
of our common enemies, to stay these ruinous proceedings; justly and timely fearing
to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurrie
us through the general defection of a misguided and abus’d multitude. (462–3)