“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665tians and family members (741–2). The virtues required are humanity, which in-
volves “the common courtesies of life in our dealings with our fellow men”; kind-
ness, which involves wishing all men well and avoiding envy or jealousy; pitifulness,
which is sympathy for the misfortunes of others; brotherly or Christian charity,
whereby fellow Christians love and help one another; and friendship, defined as
“the intimate conjunction of two or more people who perform every virtuous or at
least every courteous service for one another.”^176 However, Milton looks to his
own valued friendships and to the Renaissance cult of friendship more than to
scripture texts when he claims that friendship “takes precedence over all blood-
relationships” (750). Virtues pertaining to the neighbor’s life and honor include
doing him no harm, gentleness, forgiving injuries, and respecting his chastity, the
last of which dictates refraining from “homosexuality, fornication, violation, adul-
tery, incest, rape, prostitution, and offenses of a similar kind” (756). Among the
virtues respecting the neighbor’s reputation is veracity; its opposites include delib-
erate lies, falsehood, and giving false evidence, but not falsehoods intended to save
or help others. Milton the poet and rhetorician also excludes from the category of
lies “parables, hyperboles, fables and the various uses of irony,” since those are
intended to instruct, not to deceive (761). Milton’s delight in learned conversation
is reflected in his definition of urbanity, an aspect of the virtue of candor, as “not
only elegance and wit (of a decent kind) in conversation, but also the ability to
discourse and to reply in an acute and apposite way” (769–70).^177 The primary
virtue pertaining to the neighbor’s fortune is honesty, which involves commutative
justice in buying and selling, hiring, lending, and borrowing. In this context Milton
the scrivener’s son, who himself lent money at interest, defends usury on the same
basis as every kind of profit-making transaction: it is wrong only if practiced “at the
expense of the poor, or solely out of avarice, or to an uncharitable and unjust
extent.”^178
Chapters 15–16 deal with reciprocal duties arising from various special relation-
ships. Turning first to the household, Milton adduces the expected biblical texts to
define, in conventional terms, the reciprocal duties of husband and wife, parent and
child, brothers or other kinsfolk toward each other, tutor and pupil, superior and
inferior, master and servant, and master and slave. We hear Milton the erstwhile
aggrieved husband in the gratuitous comment as to what woman’s creation from a
rib implies about her subjection: “it is wrong for one single part of the body – and
not one of the most important parts – to disobey the rest of the body, and even the
head.”^179 We also hear Milton the proud bourgeois in the comment that “nobility
of birth and exalted rank are not things to be proud of” (786). He treats the master–
slave relation simply by citing biblical texts: he evidently accepted that institution as
a given, but made no reference whatever to contemporary practice. Duties to those
outside the household include almsgiving according to or even beyond our means
to widows, orphans, the weak and helpless, as well as hospitality to travelers and the
homeless. But Milton does not condone idleness or social leveling: alms should not