The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII

by Will Durant

bold men dared to think that God had not predestined the majority of mankind to everlasting hell.

yet he managed to die as peaceably as a general.

No one has yet reconciled Christianity with government.

Revolutions eat their fathers.

We are told that a large proportion of the population under Cromwell became hypocrites, sinning as usual, pursuing money, women, and power, but always with a long face, a nasal twang, and religious phrases dripping from the tongue.

The Puritan regimen narrowed the mind but stengthened the will and the character. It helped to prepare Englishmen for self-rule.

He loved music, composed madrigals, had many musical instruments, including an organ, in his home; and this feeling for music passed down to the poet, who would have agreed that to write well one must have music in his soul and in his mental ear.

Soon Mary’s parents, impoverished by the collapse of the Royalist cause, came also to live with the poet, making such a household as must have made for madness or philosophy.

Censorship was now more severe than at any time in England’s history, following the general rule that censorship increases with the insecurity of the government.

amanuensis.

“wanted to be milked.”

Probably no poem was ever written with such toil and courage.

We have so little leisure now that we have invented so many labor-saving devices.

But never has nonsense been made more sublime.

these are some of the reasons why Paradise Lost remains the greatest poem in the English language.

Milton indulges a passion for oratory; everyone from God to Eve makes speeches, and Satan finds hellfire no impediment to rhetoric. It is disturbing to learn that even in hell we shall have to listen to lectures.

We may pardon his vanity and egotism as the crutch on which genius leans when it gets little support from the applause of the world.

We need not relish him as a man to admire him as a poet, and as one of England’s greatest writers of prose.

His soul was like a monument, and dwelt apart even from those nearest to him; but his mind spread like the majestic heavens over all the concerns of men, and his voice still sounds like Homer’s polyphloisboio thalasses, the “many-billowed sea.”

His mind was not profound, but there was remarkably little nonsense in it.

His life suggests the same attitude that we find in many contemporary Frenchmen, who lived as atheists and died as Catholics; this seemed to get the best of both worlds, and to be a great improvement on Pascal’s “wager.”

“My Lord, my Lord,” said a preacher to a dozing peer in the congregation, “you snore so loud you will wake the King.”

acknowledged a Supreme Being, more or less impersonal, and interpreted the remainder of the religious creeds as popular poetry;

“Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman, and Anglicanism is no religion for a Christian.”

“We need not desire any better evidence that a man is in the wrong,” he said, “than to hear him declare against reason, and thereby to acknowledge that reason is against him.”

It was in this clamor of entrepreneurs to be freed from legal and moral restraints that the modern ideology of liberty began.

Christopher Wren was born in religion, nurtured in science, and completed in art.

Circumstances alter careers.

the melted lead of its roof ran in the streets.

St. Paul’s remains the finest church ever built by Protestants.

English painting continued to import its masters and discourage its sons.

He knew that a mature face is an autobiography; he could read its lines, and between them, with patient insight, he revealed its secrets with unprofitable courage.

Religion had literally lost caste; it belonged to tradesmen and peasants; most preachers were put down as long-faced, long-eared, long-winded hypocrites and bores.

There were doubtless others, lost to history because virtue makes no news.

The law struggled to discourage crime with what seems to us barbarous punishments; but perhaps sharp measures had to be used to penetrate dull minds.

It was the gayest and most rotten society in history.

Her teeth were made in the Blackfriars, her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair on Silver Street. . . . She takes herself asunder, when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes, and about noon the next day is put together again like a great German clock.

“I thank your Majesty for the explanation; I thought they were begging your pardon for serving you so bad a dinner.”

“learning superficial, . . . his vanity ridiculous, . . . his reasoning loose”;

“wise men are of but one religion.” When a lady asked which one that was, he answered, “Wise men never tell.”143

“God has left nations unto the liberty of setting up such governments as please themselves.”

But this hath all of my fears, little of my hopes, and less of my reason.”

between politics and statesmanship is philosophy—the ability to see the moment and the part in the light of the lasting and the whole.

“There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured . . . The angry buzz of a multitude is one of the bloodiest noises in the world.”

he was a Christian in submission; he believed as much as he could.”

“Ignorance,” he wrote in Thoughts and Reflexions, “maketh most men go into a party, and shame keepeth them from getting out of

He condemned so many dramatists, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Congreve and Dryden, that all the indicted might feel acquitted by their company.

it is remarkable that he seeks to marry Millamant, instead of seducing her—but she had a fortune worth a dozen adulteries.

Dryden matured slowly, like a man climbing laboriously over a hundred obstacles to successively higher ledges of income.

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin, When man on many multiplied his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly confined, When nature prompted and no law denied Promiscuous use of concubine and bride, When Israel’s monarch after Heaven’s own heart