But what justification did Milton offer for setting himself up as the judge of those so high above his station and venting upon them what he called a “sanctified bitterness”? Who was he—a perpetual student who had written a masque on chastity and taken a Grand Tour to Italy—to weigh in on the fate of the nation? His answer, in a work he published in April 1642, lay in the same deep reading and moral discipline on which he hoped to found his career as a great poet. His authority and inspiration, he asserted, came not solely from his intellectual rigor but from his purity. He had never been
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