Further evidence of the absorbing interest in the argumentative burden of prose expression may be seen in the way he employs the extended metaphor. Milton grew up in the age of the metaphysical conceit. We now understand that for Elizabethans and Jacobeans a metaphor went far beyond mere ornamentation to enter into the very heart of a predication. Rosemund Tuve in particular has shown that for the poets of the period an image was an argument, so understood and so used.[134] We would hardly expect it to be any less so in prose. When Milton brings in a metaphor, he makes full use of its probative value, and this involved, along with confidence in the architectonic power of the image, a belief that it affirmed something about the case in point. Thus the metaphor was not idle or decorative merely, and it dominated the passage to the eclipse of sentence units. This will explain why, when Milton begins a metaphor, he will scarcely abandon it until the last appropriate application has been made and the similitude established beyond reasonable question. The _Areopagitica_ teems with brilliant extended figures, of which two will be cited. Here is an image of truth, carried through three sentences. Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he had ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made after the body of Osiris, went up and down gathering limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not found them all, lords and commons, nor ever shall do, till her master’s second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mold them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.[135] And here is Milton’s defense of the intellectually free community, rendered in a military metaphor.