The Works of Mr. John Milton.

This massive folio volume notably includes Milton's finest prose works: Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Eikonoclastes, and his landmark Areopagitica, in which "the argument for freedom has never, before or since, been so magnificently or forcefully expressed" (PMM 133). Areopagitica, in particular, "was the first Milton book published in America (1774) and its arguments have continued to echo down the centuries in defense of liberal ideas of toleration and intellectual freedom" (Lewalski in Bloom, ed, John Milton, 322). In his lifetime, Milton was renowned more for his rhetoric than poetry: "a fiery pamphleteer in an age of religious and political argument, whose tireless defense of divorce, progressive education, regicide and the Commonwealth marked him out as a natural, and brilliant, English radical" (Robert McCrum). However, "within 25 years of his death, five biographies were in print—an unprecedented number even for a great statesman, which he was not… Milton's reputation, shorn of its denigration and divinity, seems now to rest on grounds more secure than ever" (Ruoff, 294, 298).