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Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate one
jot

Of heart or hope; but still bear up and

steer

Right onward. What supports me, doɛt ther ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them
overplied

In liberty's defence, my noble task;
Of which all Europe rings from side to ride.
This thought might lead me through thi
world's vain mask

Content though blind, had I no othe
guide.'

That thought was indeed his guide; he was "armed in himself," and that "breastplate of diamond"† which had protected him in his prime against the wounds in battle, protected him in his old age against the temptations and doubts of defeat and adversity.

IV.

threw itself at the feet of a young incapable and treacherous libertine. The glorious leaders of the Puritan faith were condemned, executed, cut down alive from the gallows, quartered amidst insults; others, whom death had saved from the hangman, were dug up and exposed on the gibbet; others, exiles in foreign lands, lived, threatened and attacked by royalist bullies; others again, more unfortunate, had sold their cause for money and titles, and sat amid the executioners of their former friends. The most pious and austere citizens of England filled the prisons, or wandered about in poverty and shame; and gross vice, impudently seated on the throne, rallied around it a herd of unbridled lusts and sensualities. Milton himself had been constrained to hide; his books had been burned by the hand of the hangman; even after the general act of indemnity he was imprisoned; when Milton lived in a small house in Lonset at liberty, he lived in the expecta- don, or in the country, at Horton, in tion of being assassinated, for private Buckinghamshire, published his Histofanaticism might seize the weapon re-ry of Britain, his Logic, a Treatise on linquished by public revenge. Other True Religion and Heresy, meditated smaller misfortunes came to aggravate his great Treatise on Christian Doctrine. by their stings the great wounds which Of all consolations, work is the most afflicted him. Confiscations, a bank- fortifying and the most healthy, because ruptcy, finally, the great fire of London, it solaces a man not by bringing him had robbed him of three-fourths of his ease, but by requiring him to exert fortune;* his daughters neither esteem- himself. Every morning he had a chaped nor respected him; he sold his ter of the Bible read to him in Hebrew, books, knowing that his family could and remained for some time in silence, not profit by them after his death; and grave, in order to meditate on what he amidst so many private and public mis- had heard. He never went to a place eries, he continued calm. Instead of of worship. Independent in religion repudiating what he had done, he glo- as in all else, he was sufficient to himried in it: instead of being cast down, self; finding in no sect the marks of he increased in firmness. He says, in the true church, he prayed to God alone, his 22d sonnet: without needing others' help. He stud. ied till mid-day; then, after an hour's exercise, he played the organ or the bassviolin. Then he resumed his studies till six, and in the evening enjoyed the When any on: society of his friends. came to visit him, he was usually found in a room hung with old green hangings, seated in an arm-chair, and dressed neatly in black; his complexion was pale, says one of his visitors, but not sallow; his hands and feel were gouty; his hair, of a light brown was parted in the midst and fell in long curls; his eyes, gray and clear, showed * Milton's Portical Works, Mitford, i. Som net xxii. + Italian SonALES.

Cyriack, this three years day these eyes,
though clear,

To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of sight, their seeing have forgot;
Nor to their idle orbs doth day appear
Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the

year,

* A scrivener caused him to lose £2000. A the Restoration he was refused payment of £2000 which he had put into the Excise Office, and deprived of an estate of £50 a year, bought by him from the property of the Chapter of Westminster. His house in Bread Street was burnt in the great fire. When he died he is said to have left about £1500 in money (equivalent to about £5000 now), besides household goods. [I am indebted to the indness of Professor Masson for the collation of this note.--TR.]

no sign of blindness. He had been very | beautiful in his youth, and his English cheeks, once delicate as a young girl's, retained their color almost to the end. His face, we are told, was pleasing; his straight and manly gait bore witness to intrepidity and courage. Something great and proud breathes out yet from all his portraits; and certainly few men have done so much honor to their kind. Thus went out this noble life, like a setting sun, bright and calm. Amid so many trials, a pure and lofty joy, altogether worthy of him, had been granted to him: the poet, buried under the Puritan, had reappeared, more sublime than ever, to give to Christianity its second Homer. The dazzling dreams of his youth and the reminiscences of his ripe age were found in him, side by by side with Calvinistic dogmas and the visions of Saint John, to create the Protestant epic of damnation and grace; and the vastness of primitive horizons, the flames of the infernal dungeon, the splendors of the celestial court, opened to the inner eye of the soul unknown regions beyond the sights which the eyes of the flesh had lost.

V.

I have before me the formidable volume in which some time after Milton's

death, his prose works were collected. What a book! The chairs creak when you place it upon them, and a man who had turned its leaves over for an hour, would have less pain in his head than in his arm. As the book, so were the men; from the mere outsides we might gather some notion of the controversialists and theologians whose doctrines they contain. Yet we must conclude that the author was eminently learned, gant, travelled, philosophic, and a man of the world for his age. hink involuntarily of the portraits of he theologians of those days, severe faces engraved on metal by the hard

We

#3 Fuls. folio, 1697-8. The titles of Milton's nief writings in prose are these:Reformation in England; The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty; Animadversions upon the Remonstrants De fence; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; Tetrichor don; Tractate on Education; Areopagitica; Tenure of Kings and Magis tates; Eikonoklastes; History of Britain; Defence of the People of England.

artists' tool, whose square brows and steady eyes stand out in startling prom inence against a dark oak panel. We compare them to modern countenances, in which the delicate and complex fea tures seem to quiver at the varied con tact of hardly begun sensations and ir numerable ideas. We try to imagine the heavy classical education, the phys ical exercises, the rude treatment, the rare ideas, the imposed dogmas, which formerly occupied, oppressed, fortified, and hardened the young; and we might fancy ourselves looking at an anatomy of megatheria and mastodons, recon structed by Cuvier.

The race of living men is changed. Our mind fails us now-a-days at the idea of this greatness and this barbar ism; but we discover that the barbarism was then the cause of the greatness As in other times we might have seen, in the primitive slime and among the colossal ferns, ponderous monsters slowly wind their scaly backs, and tear the flesh from one another's sides with their misshapen talons; so now, at a distance, from the height of our calm civilization, we see the battles of the theologians, who, armed with syllo gisms, bristling with texts, covered one another with filth, and labored to de

vour each other.

ordained to barbarism and greatness Milton fought in the front rank, preby his individual nature and the manin high prominence the logic, style, and ners of the time, capable of displaying life which trims men into shape: the spirit of his age. It is drawing-room society of ladies, the lack of serious interests, idleness, vanity, security, are needed to bring men to elegance, urban desire to please, the fear to become ity, fine and light humor, to teach the wearisome, a perfect clearness, a finishtions and delicate tact, a taste for suit. ed precision, the art of gradual transi able images, continual ease, and choice diversity. Seek nothing like this in Milton. The old scholastic system was not far off; it still weighed on those who were destroying it. Under this secular armor discussion proceeded pedantically, with measured steps. The first thing was to propound a thesis; and Milton writes, in large characters, at the head of his Treatis

66

on Divorce, “that indisposition, unfit- | apostle, can catch nothing; see what ness, or contrariety of mind, arising you can catch with Simon Magus; foi from a cause in nature unchangeable, all his hooks and fishing implements hindering, and ever likely to hinder he bequeathed among you." Here a the main benefits of conjugal society, great savage laugh would break out. which are solace and peace, is a greater The spectators saw a charm in this way reason of divorce than natural frigidity, of insinuating that his adversary was especially if there be no children, and simoniacal. A little before, the latter that there be mutual consent." And says: "Tell me, is this liturgy good or then follow, legion after legion, the evil?" Answer: "It is evil: repair disciplined army of the arguments. the acheloian horn of your dilemma, Battalion after battalion they pass by, how you can, against the next push numbered very distinctly. There is a The doctors wondered at the fine dozen of them together, each with its mythological simile, and rejoiced to see title in clear characters, and the little the adversary so neatly compared to brigade of subdivisions which it com- an ox, a beaten ox, a pagan ox. On mands. Sacred texts hold the post of the next page the Remonstrant said, honor. Every word of them is dis- by way of a spiritual and mocking recussed, the substantive after the adjec- proach: "Truly, brethren, you have tive, the verb after the substantive, the not well taken the heighth of the pole." preposition after the verb; interpreta- Answer: "No marvel; there be many tions, authorities, illustrations, are sum- more that do not take well the height moned up, and ranged between pali- of your pole, but will take better the sades of new divisions. And yet there declination of your altitude." Three is a lack of order, the question is not quips of the same savor follow one upon reduced to a single idea; we cannot the other; all this looked pretty. Elsesee our way; proofs succeed proofs where, Salmasius exclaiming that the without logical sequence; we are rather sun itself never beheld a more outragetired out than convinced. We remem- ous action" than the murder of the king, ber that the author speaks to Oxford Milton cleverly answers, "The sun has men, lay or cleric, trained in pretended | beheld many things that blind Bernard discussions, capable of obstinate atten- never saw. But we are content you tion, accustomed to digest indigestible should mention the sun over and over. books. They are at home in this And it will be a piece of prudence in thorny thicket of scholastic brambles; you so to do. For though our wickedthey beat a path through, somewhat at ness does not require it, the coldness hazard, hardened against the hurts of the defence that you are making which repulse us, and not having the does." The marvellous heaviness of smallest idea of the daylight which we these conceits betrays minds yet enrequire everywhere now. tangled in the swaddling-clothes of learning. The Reformation was the inauguration of free thought, but oniy the inauguration. Criticism was yet unborn; authority, still presses with a full half of its weight upon the freest and boldest minds. Milton, to prove that it was lawful to put a king to death, quotes Orestes, the laws of Publicola, and the death of Nero. His History of Britain is a farrago of all the traditions and fables. Under every circumstance he adduces a text of Scripture for proof; his boldness consists in showing himself a bold grammarian, a valorous commentator He is blindly Protestant as others were

With such ponderous reasoners, you must not look for wit. Wit is the nimbleness of victorious reason; here, because every thing is powerful, all is heavy. When Milton wishes to joke, he looks like one of Cromwell's pikemen, who, entering a room to dance, shou d fall upon the floor, and that with the extra weight of his armor. Few things could be more stupid than nis Animadversions upon the Remonstrants' Defence. At the end of an argument his adversary concludes with this specimen of theological wit: "In the meanwhile see, brethren, how you have with Simon fished all night, and caught nothing." And Milton boastfully replies: "If we, fishing with Simon the

*A Defence of the People of England, Mit ford, vi. 21.

Windly Catholic. He leaves in its bondage the higher reason, the mother of principles; he has but emancipated a subordinate reason, an interpreter of cexts. Like the vast half shapeless creatures, the birth of early times, he is vet but half man and half mud.

Can we expect urbanity here? Urbanity is the elegant dignity which answers insult by calm irony, and respects man whilst piercing a dogma. Milton coarsely knocks his adversary down. A bristling pedant, born from a Greek lexicon and a Syriac grammar, Salmasius had disgorged upon the English people a vocabulary of insults and a folio of quotations. Milton replies to him in the same style; calling him a buffoon, a mountebank, "professor triobolaris," a hired pedant, a nobody, a rogue, a heartless being, a wretch, an idiot, sacrilegious, a slave worthy of rods and a pitchfork. A dictionary of big Latin words passed between them. "You, who know so many tongues, who read so many books, who write so much about them, you are yet but an ass.' Finding the epithet good, he repeats and sanctifies it. "Oh most drivelling of asses, you come ridden by a woman, with the cured heads of bishops whom you had wounded, a little image of the great beast of the Apocalypse! He ends by calling him savage beast, apostate and devil. "Doubt not that you are reserved for the same end as Judas, and that, driven by despair rather than repentance, self-disgusted, you must one day hang yourself, and like your rival, burst asunder in your belly." * We fancy we are listening to the bellowing of two bulls.

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They had all a bull's ferocity. Milton was a good hater. He fought with his pen, as the Ironsides with the sword, inch by inch, with a concen

Mitford, vi. 250. Salmasius said of the death of the king: "Horribilis nuntius aures nostias atroci vulnere, sed magis mentes perCulit." Milton replied: "Profecto nuntius iste horribilis aut gladium multo longiorem eo quem strinxit Petrus habuerit oportet, aut aures istæ auritissimæ fuerint, quas tam longinquo vulnere perculerit."

"Oratorem tam insipidum et insulsum ut ne ex lacrymis quidem ejus mica salis exiguissima rossit exprimi."

"Salmasius nova quadam metamorphosi salmacis factus est."

trated rancor and a fierce obstinacy The bishops and the king then suf fered for eleven years of despotism. Each man recalled the banishments, confiscations, punishments, the law violated systematically and relentless ly, the liberty of the subject attacked by a well-laid plot, Episcopa idolatry imposed on Christian consciences, the faithful preachers driven into the wilds of America, or given up to the execu tioner and the stocks. Such remin iscences arising in powerful minds stamped them with inexpiable hatred, and the writings of Milton bear witness

*I copy from Neal's History of the Puri tans, ii. ch. vii. 367, one of these sorrows and the reader can judge of the intensity of the complaints. By the greatness of the outrage hatred:

"The humble petition of (Dr.) Alexander Leighton, Priscaer in the Fleet,-Humbly

Sheweth,

e

"That on Feb. 17, 1630, he was apprehended coming from sermon by a high commission wa: rant, and dragged along the street with bills and Newgate being sent for, clapt him in irons, and staves to London-house. That the gaoler of carried him with a strong power into a loath some and ruinous dog, full of rats and mice, and that had no light but a grate. rain beat in upon him, having no bedding, nor and the roof being uncovered, the snow and place to make a fire, but the ruins of an old smoaky chimney. In this woeful lace he was shut us for fifteen weeks, nobody being suffered to come near him, tiii at length his wife only was admitted. That the fourth day after his commitment the persuivant, with a mighty mul. titude, came to his house to search for jesuits books, and used his wife in such a barbarous and inhuman manner as he is ashamed to express; that they rifled every person and place, holding a pistol to the breast of a child of five years old, threatening to kill him if he did not discover the books: that they broke pen chests, presses, boxes, and carried away every thing, even household stuff, apparel, arms, and other things; that at the end of fifteen weeks he was served with a subpoena, on an inHeath, attorney-general, whose dealing with formation laid against him by Sir Robert him was full of cruelty and deceit; but he was then sick, and, in the opinion of four physicians thought to be poisoned, because all his hair and skin came off; that in the height of this sick. ness the cruel sentence was passed upon him mentioned in the year 1630, and executed Nov. 26 following, when he received thirty-six stripes upon his naked back with a threefold cord, his hands being tied to a stake, and then stood almost two hours in the pillory in the frost and snow, before he was branded in the face, his nose slit, and his ears cut off; that after this he was carried by water to the Fleet, and shut up in such a room that he was never well, and after eight years was turned into the commoN gaol."

itself without shackles. It claimed for humanity what it coveted for itself, and championed every liberty in his every work. From the first he attacked the corpulent bishops, scholastic upstarts, persecutors of free discussion, pensioned tyrants of Christian conscience.* Above the clamor of the Protestant Revolution, his voice was heard thundering against tradition and obedience. He sourly railed at the pedantic theologians, devoted worshippers of old texts, who mistook a mouldy martyrology for a solid argument, and answered a demonstration with a quotation. He de

to a rancor which is now unknown. in Milton, displayed in his opinions The impression left by his Eikonoklas- and his style, the sources of his benef tes is oppressive. Phrase by phrase, and his talent. This proud reason asharshly, bitterly, the king is refuted pired to unfold itself without shackles; and accused to the last, without a min-it demanded that reason might unfold ute's respite of accusation, the accused being credited with not the slightest good intention, the slightest excuse, the least show of justice, the accuser never for an instant digressirgo or resting upon a general idea. I is a hand to hand fight, where every word takes effect, prolonged, obstinate, without dash and without weakness, full of a harsh and fixed hostility, where the only thought is how to wound most severely and to kill surely. Against the bishops, who were alive and pow. erful, his hatred flowed more violently still, and the fierceness of his envenomed mataphors hardly suffices to ex-clared that most of the Fathers were press it. Milton points to them "basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion," like a brood of foul reptiles. "The sour leaven of human traditions, mixed in one putrified mass with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisie in the hearts of Prelates,... is the serpent's egg that will hatch an antichrist wheresoever, and ingender the same monster as big or little as the lump is which breeds him."†

turbulent and babbling intriguers, that they were not worth more collectively than individually, that their councils were but a pack of underhand intrigues and vain disputes; he rejected their authority and their example, and set up logic as the only interpreter of Scripture.† A Puritan as against bishops, an Independent as against Presbyterians, he was always master of his thought and the inventor of his So much coarseness and dulness own faith. No one better loved, pracwas as an outer breastplate, the mark tised, and praised the free and bold and the protection of the super-abun- use of reason. He exercised it even dant force and life which coursed in rashly and scandalously. He revolted those athletic limbs and chests. Now- against custom, the illegitimate queen a-days, the mind being more refined of human belief, the born and relenthas become feebler; convictions, being less enemy of truth, raised his hand less stern, have become less strong. against marriage, and demanded diAttention, freed from the heavy scho- vorce in the case of incompatibility of lastic logic and scriptural tyranny, has temper. He declared that "error supbecome more inert. Belief and the ports custom, custom countenances will, dissolved by universal tolerance error; and these two between them, and by the thousand opposing shocks with the numerous and vulgar of multiplied ideas, have engendered train of their followers, envy and an exact and refined style, an instru- cry down the industry of free reasonment of conversation and pleasure, ing, under the terms of humor and in and have expelled the poetic and rude novation." + He showed that truth style, a weapon of war and enthusiasm." never comes into the world, but like If we have effaced ferocity and dulness, we have diminished force and greatness.

Force and greatness are manifested

* An answer to the Eikon Basilike, a work on the king's side, and attributed to the king.

Of Reformation in England, 4tɔ, 1641, p.

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a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth; till Time, the midwife rather than the mother of truth,

*Of Reformation in England.

†The loss of Cicero's works alone, or those of Livy, could not be repaired by all he Fathers of the church.

+ Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Mit ford, ii. 4.

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