THE struggle between good and evil is salient in Milton, and in Areopagitica his method of setting forth this conflict is to personify books and truth and to show them in unceasing warfare against evil forces. Consequently, images from war predominate, aided by body images (health against sickness), by nature images (fruitfulness against aridity), and by images from daily life. Classical and biblical images and allusions are pervasive. Images drawn from animals' and the arts are negligible. argument is usually more persuasive when it is intuitive rather than discursive. left hand sometimes needed a transfusion from poetic sources to increase vitality. Thus, after a wary and somewhat labored exordium and exposition, Milton begins his proof with a passage of sustained imagery2 which is fused into a whole by the personification of Books. Books can commit crimes; they are vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.3 And yet, in a way, a book is more valuable than a man: Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit. Accordingly, We should be wary. . how we spill that season'd life of man . . . since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre. This is characteristic of method. An image (not a very striking one)4 is created and then developed, its ramifications are explored imaginatively until at the end a reader feels that books partake of the divine nature and that the destroyer of books is a Herod. Books are nearly always presented in terms of humankind: the Catalogues, and expurging Indexes of the Spanish Inquisition rake through the entralls of many old good Author, with a violation wors then any could be offer'd to his tomb. Books are either condemn'd in a prohibition or thrown strait into the new Purgatory of Index. An apt and ingenious image, supported by a classic allusion, continues the process of personification: Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifl'd then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the 1 Except an Eagle muing (see p. 221 below). SThe first really impassioned bit of the Areopagitica, says E. N. S. Thompson in Milton's Prose Style, PQ, XIV (1935), 13. a References are to Works of John Milton, Vol. IV, ed. W. Haller (New York, 1931). 4 Usually the likenesses between objects... are as obvious as the common tropes identifying imitative man with ape and a stupid man with a donkey, says F. E. Ekfelt in The Graphic Diction of English Prose, PQ, XXV (1946), 58.