Reflecting critical fashion of the 1960s, Fierce Equation ties its historical survey of classical-Renaissance decorum to the reigning, "high formalist" emphasis upon organic unity, seeking thereby to "contain" Milton's scurrility within a larger, somehow harmonious "vision" (104): "what emerges from this study of the
prelatical tracts," Kranidas asserts, "is a pervading concept of harmony, radiant unity, decorum which takes life from, and gives life to, the rhetoric of disharmony, illness, excess" (68).
Instead of poetry, Milton now wrote pamphlets arguing for a Presbyterian and against the
prelatical order.
Commenting in the mid-1960s on the Vatican II text, council observer John Oliver Nelson said, "The overall mood is: Come out of your solitary Masses, your
prelatical doting upon rank or affluence, your privileged station at altar or confessional - and identify radiantly, humbly with Everyman.
Max Beerbohm, crossing the road opposite Marble Arch, spotted him in the brougham that was taking him to Paddington Station: 'Irving in his most
prelatical mood had always a touch - a trace here and there - of the old bohemian.
Nostalgia was not confined to Royalists; see the Presbyterian Eleazar Gilbert, The
Prelatical Cavalier Catechized, and the Protestant Souldier Incouraged: By a Missive Sent to King Charles in the Name of the Protestants beyond Seas (London, 1645), p.