NOTES TO VOLUME FIRST. (continued 4)
Reading edition
Long before the controversy respecting the execution of Charles, Milton had expressed himself in terms of high praise concerning our Reformer. Arguing against the abuses committed by licensers of the press, he says, “Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased author, though never so famous in his lifetime and even to this day, come to their hands for license to be printed or reprinted, if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal, (and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet, not suiting with every low decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost for the fearfulness, or the presumptuous rashness of a prefunctory licenser. And to what an author this violence hath bin lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to be faithfully publisht, I could now instance, but shall forbear till a more convenient season.” Prose Works, vol. i. p. 311. The tract from which this quotation is made, was first published in 1644, the year in which David Buchanan’s edition of Knox’s History appeared; and Milton evidently refers to that work.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
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