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Eikon should be answered by that consummate jurist, and it was only on his declining the task that it came into Milton's hands. That he also would have declined it but for his official position may be inferred from his own words:
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I take it on me as a work assigned, rather than by me chosen or affected. His distaste may further be gauged by his tardiness; while
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The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates had been written in little more than a week, his
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Eikonoklastes, a reply to a book published in February, did not appear until October 6th. His reluctance may be partly explained by his feeling that
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The intention it may not have been, but it was necessarily the performance. The scheme of the
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Eikon required the respondent to take up the case article by article, a thing impossible to be done without abundant
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of the kind which Milton deprecates. He is compelled to fight the adversary on the latter's chosen ground, and the eloquence which might have swept all before it in a discussion of general principles is frittered away in tiresome wrangling over a multitude of minutiæ. His vigorous blows avail but little against the impalpable ideal with which he is contending; his arguments might frequently convince a court of justice, but could do nothing to dispel the sorcery which enthralled the popular imagination. Milton's
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Eikonoklastes had only three editions, including a translation, within the year; the
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Eikon Basilike
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Eikonoklastes, or to be determined by a merely English public. The Royalists had felt the necessity of appealing to the general verdict of Europe, and had entrusted their cause to the most eminent classical scholar of the age. To us the idea of commissioning a political manifesto from a philologist seems eccentric; but erudition and the erudite were never so highly prized as in the seventeenth century. Men's minds were still enchained by authority, and the precedents of Agis, or Brutus, or Nehemiah, weighed like dicta of Solomon or Justinian. The man of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew learning was, therefore, a person of much greater consequence than he is now, and so much the more if he enjoyed a high reputation and wrote good Latin. All these qualifications were combined in Claudius Salmasius, a Frenchman, who had laid scholars under an eternal obligation by his discovery of the Palatine MS. of the Anthology at Heidelberg, and who, having embraced Protestantism from conviction, lived in splendid style at Leyden, where the mere light of his countenance--for he did not teach--was valued by the University at three thousand livres a year. It seems marvellous that a man should become dictator of the republic of letters by editing
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Solinus and
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The Augustan History, however ably; but an achievement like this, not a
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Paradise Lost or a
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Werther