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Unit 6: The Puritan Age or Age of Milton: Milton as a Poet and His Contribution

Histriomastix (1632) Prynne made a violent attack in the allesed immorality of the state. Elsewhere, Notes
he lashed at the Anglican bishops. Richard Baxter (1615-91), however, is not so intolerant. He
wrote two manuals of practical religion-TTze Saints’Everlasting Rest (1650) and Call to the
Unconverted (1657) which remained for long very important books in the Puritan tradition in
both England and America. His style is quite simple but has few qualities to recommend itself. The
prose of John Owen, another Puritan divine, is again, as Legouis remarks, “rather dull and
uninviting.”
Milton from the age of thirty one. Jo fifty wrote a number of pamphlets on political and ecclesiastical
themes. In this period his poetic activity remained suspended except for the production of a dozen
sonnets. On his return from the Continent to England he found the country “on a troubled sea of
noises and hoarse disputes.” But he plunged into the “sea” and made his appearance felt. Milton’s
prose is the work of an excellent poet who looked upon prose as something contemptible and the
work of but his “ibft hand.” His prose is generally rhetorical and too highly Latinised, but is not
without its rocky strength and overwhelming grandeur, to one thing, it has the quality of high
seriousness plus sincerity. Milton always has a point to make and does make it, and quite often,
effectively. But some bitterness does become manifest here and there. Areopagitica, a Speech for
the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644) is Milton’s most outstanding prose work. It was an
eloquent plea for the liberty of the press. Regarding Milton’s style, Legouis observes: “The
remorseless length, of his sentences renders them formidable at first to the reader, but’ from their
troubled vehemence breaks forth at times a scathing irony or a sudden splendour. They reveal the
impetuous idealist, unpractical and thorough-going.”

6.5 Philosophy: Hobbes, Harrington

The prose of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) raises above all political and religious controversies.
Hobbes was Bacon’s secretary and Decartes’ correspondent. He combines in his philosophic work
the empiricism of the former and the mechanistic rationalism of the latter. His important work
Leviathan (1651) sets forth his totalitarian, materialistic, and rationalistic philosophy. Leviathan,
says Legouis, “is written in strong, logical, massive prose, exempt from the oratorical vehemence
and ornaments of his great contemporaries, and heralding the prose of the classical period.”
James Harrington in his Utopian work Oceana (1656) offered to controvert the views of Hobbes
favouring absolute monarchy. The Cambridge Platonists, Henry More (1614-87) and Ralph
Cudworth (1617-88) wrote in opposition to Hobbes’s rationalism. The prose of all these writers is
fanciful and devoid of lucidity and exactness-the hallmarks of Hobbes’s style.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. .................... was a quaint figure, though a very typical prose writer of his age.
2. The prose of the .................... is remarkable for its pronounced religious slant.
3. The .................... was dominated by Milton.
4. .................... was Bacon's secretary and Decartes correspondent.
5. Hobbes important work .................... (1651) sets Forth his totalitarian, materialistic, and
rationalistic philosophy.

6.6 The Eccentrics

Lastly, we come across some “eccentrics” who wrote about the middle of the seventeeth century.
Of them Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611-60) translated the first two books of Rabelais
Gargantua (1653). In giving free play to fancy he outdid even Browne Thomas Fuller (1608-61), an
Anglican clergyman, wrote the Church History of Britain (1655-56), Holy and Prophane State
(1642), and The History of the Worthies of England (1662). Fuller’s prose is somewhat quaint, but

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