“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674case for Catholics, save to dismiss the brouhaha about the popish danger as a red
herring created by the Anglican establishment. His famous statement that the Good
Old Cause “was too good to have been fought for” is preceded by a long passage
assigning responsibility for the revolution to Charles I’s Laudian advisers who led
him to claim absolute prerogative and to exercise power without parliament.^57 His
treatise is calculated to separate the king from the Anglican clerics who bid fair to
mislead him as they did his father. Answers to Marvell by Parker and his supporters
charged that Milton was his source or collaborator. One treatise claims that Marvell
plagiarized Milton’s Defensio: “Come, you had all this out of the Answerer of
Salmasius.”^58 Parker links his satirical treatment of press censorship with the “fustian
bumbast” of Milton’s Areopagitica, and also points out, shrewdly, that the thrust of
Marvell’s central argument is akin to that of Milton’s political tracts:
If we take away some simpering phrases, and timorous introductions, your Collection
will afford as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-killing, as any we meet with in
the writings of J. M., in defence of the Rebellion and Murther of the King.^59The author of The Transproser Rehears’d, perhaps Samuel Butler, links Milton’s
works with Marvell’s satire both in form and matter: “the odds betwixt a Transproser
and a Blank Verse Poet, is not great.”^60 His witty barbs are couched in terms that
seem intended to draw Milton himself into the quarrel. He attacks Paradise Lost for
defying the boundaries of rhyme and relying on literary inspiration – analogues, he
suggests, of the political rebellion and religious “enthusiasm” of the dissenters.
Emphasizing the political–religious–aesthetic linkage, he denounces Milton as a
“Leveller,” both as a dispenser of political poison and “a Schismatick in Poetry ...
nonconformable in point of Rhyme.”^61 Ridiculing the “blind Author... groping for
a beam of Light” in his apostrophe to light in Book III, he links that appeal for
inspiration to religious enthusiasm – “No doubt but the thought of this Vital Lamp
lighted a Christmas Candle in his brain” – and to Milton’s “inventive Divinity, in
making Light contemporary with its Creator.”^62 Marvell, he claims, owes his repre-
hensible political and ecclesiastical ideas to Milton: “This Doctrine of killing Kings
... if I understand not amiss, is nothing but Iconoclastes drawn in Little, and Defensio
Populi Anglicani in Miniature.” Marvell’s discourse “of the Liberty of Unlicens’d
Printing, p. 6... is little else but Milton’s Areopagitica in short hand.” Marvell
concurs “with your Dear Friend Mr. Milton: who says, that the only true Religion if
commanded by the Civil Magistrate, becomes Unchristian, Inhumain, and Barba-
rous.” And Marvell’s “Malicious and Disloyal Reflections on the late Kings Raign”
indicate that he “clubb’d with” Milton, “made use of Miltons pen,” and sucked
poison from Milton’s “most virulent Pamphlets.”^63 The author obviously knows
the entire corpus of Milton’s work; if it is Butler, he may have felt a special animos-
ity for the poet whose sublime, “inspired” epic is the polar opposite of his mock-
epic Hudibras, which thoroughly debunks all varieties of “enthusiasm” – religious,