Excerpt from The Complete Poems of John Milton, Vol. 4: With Introduction and Notes Of his prose writings. There are three species of liberty, he says, which are essential to the happiness of social life - religious, domestic, and civil, and for all three he fought. His most important prose works may, indeed, be roughly classed under these heads: under religious, his pamphlets against Episcopacy; under domestic, his works on Education, Divorce, and the Freedom of the Press; under civil, his controversial writings on the overthrow of the monarchy. In all of these he strove for freedom and toleration; and when England became a Republic, he became oficially associated with the new government as Secretary of Foreign Tongues, in which capacity he not only conducted its foreign correspondence, but also acted as its literary adviser and champion in the controversies by pam phlet that arose in connection with the execution of the King and the theory of the Commonwealth. It was in the midst of these activities that a great calamity overtook him. The defence of the late King had been undertaken by the famous Dutch Latinist Salmasius in a Defensio Regis, and to Milton fell the task of replying to it. His eyesight, wealt ened even in childhood by overstudy, was now failing fast, and he was warned by physicians that it would go altogether if he persisted in this work. But to Milton the fight he had entered on was no mere matter of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.