It was an honourable post, on the manner of whose discharge the credit of England abroad somewhat depended; the foreign chanceries were full of accomplished Latinists, and when Blake's cannon was not to be the mouthpiece, the Commonwealth's message needed a silver trumpet.

It was also as likely as any employment to make a scholar a statesman.

If in some respects it opposed new obstacles to the fulfilment of Milton's aspirations as a poet, he might still feel that it would help him to the experience which he had declared to be essential: "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things, not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have within himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." Up to this time Milton's experience of public affairs had been slight; he does not seem to have enjoyed the intimate acquaintance of any man then active in the making of history.
In our day he would probably have entered Parliament, but that was impossible under a dispensation which allowed a Parliament to sit till a Protector turned it out of doors.

He was, therefore, only acting upon his own theory, and he seems to us to have been acting wisely as well as courageously, when he consented to become a humble but necessary wheel of the machinery of administration, the Orpheus among the Argonauts of the Commonwealth..