The elaborate education was now formally complete; and what ordinary men call practical life was at last to begin for Milton. Now for the first time he had an abode of his own, a lodging in St. Bride's, Fleet Street, and soon afterwards a house in Aldersgate Street where he settled with a young nephew whom he undertook to educate. But the real work which he had in view was that of a poet, not of a schoolmaster. The high expectations which he knew he had excited among Italian men of letters had reinforced those of his English friends; and he was now more than ever inclined to follow that "inward prompting which now grew daily upon me that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might {47} perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." So, as his extant notes show, he was weighing a large number of subjects for the great poem, slowly settling on a Biblical one, and indeed on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps writing some earliest lines of what we now know as _Paradise Lost_. But in November 1640 occurred an event which governed Milton's life for the next twenty years. The Long Parliament met, and, from that time forward till its final meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare the way for Charles II, politics were the dominant interest of Milton's mind. It is his age of prose; during it he wrote very little verse of any kind, and none of importance except the finer of his eighteen Sonnets which nearly all belong to these years. On the other hand, most of his prose works were written between 1640 and 1660. Of these it is enough to say that they are perhaps the most curious of all illustrations of the great things which a poet alone can bring to prose and of the dangers which he runs in bringing them. A poet of the stature of Milton is ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, not only the fires of faith and zeal and enthusiasm, but also, as a rule, those of a scorn {48} that knows no limit and a hatred that knows no mercy. Such a man needs a strongly made vessel to control his boiling ardours. Prose is not such a vessel: and they too often overflow from it in extravagance and violence. Poetry in all its severer forms places a restraint upon the poet from which as the mood of art gains upon him he has no desire to escape. Law and limitation, willing obedience to the prescribed conditions, are of the very essence of art. And this is as true of the greatest of the arts as of any other. It is not merely that the poet accepts the bondage of rhymes, or stanzas, or numbered syllables, as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas and the sculptor those of bronze or marble; it is that they all alike submit to the mood of art which is always universal and eternal as well as individual and temporal and therefore disdains such crudities of personal violence as are to be found everywhere in Milton's prose and