When Johnson was writing the Rambler essays between 1750 and 1752, he had reached that stage of middle life at which Milton, a century previously, was writing in defence of regicide. The gulf between their literary careers and commitments could scarcely seem wider than at this point. Yet for each of them the flexing of their rhetorical muscles in prose marks very powerfully a shared humanism, a sense of the writer's responsibility in the public domain. The ‘three problems’ which Milton claimed to have addressed in his earlier pamphlets on ‘domestic liberty’ – marriage, education, and ‘the existence of freedom to express oneself’ – are ones that also preoccupy Johnson in the work of his maturity. Both are trained to argue, believing that argument in print is fundamental to public discourse. However greatly they diverge in their political principles, they agree on the moral seriousness of what they are doing, and on the writer's duty to communicate truth as he perceives it. Even if Milton's prose might be rejected as a model (though not entirely, as we shall see), for Johnson, whether he likes it or not, the fact that Milton's poetry is so deeply embedded in his own reading experience and in that of his contemporaries turns Milton himself into an inescapable author/authority figure. In addition, his work on the Dictionary during the same period saturates his verbal memory with Milton's poetic language.