when chosen for biographical detail the following is the most extraordinary instance that I have ever met with. It is taken from a Life of the admirable Crichton, written by Sir Thomas Urquhart. Crichton had composed a drama in the Italian language, which included fifteen characters, all of which he himself personated; his success in the attempt Sir Thomas thus describes :

"The logofascinated spirits of the beholding hearers and auricularie spectators, were so on a sudden seized upon, in the risible faculties of the soul, and all their vital motions so universally affected in this extremity of agitation, that, to avoid the inevitable charms of his intoxicating ejaculations, and the accumulative influences of so powerful a transportation, one of my lady dutchess chief maids of honor, by the vehemence of the shocks of these incomprehensible raptures, burste forth into a laughter, to the rupture of a veine in her bodie, &c."-Another young lady "not being able to support the well beloved burthen of so excessive delight and intransing joyes of such mercurial exhilarations, through the ineffable extasie of an overmastered apprehension, fell back in a swoon, without the ap pearance of any other life in her than what, by the most refined wits of theological speculators, is conceived to be exerced by the purest parts of

the separated entelechies of blessed saints, in their sublimest conversations with the celestial hierarchies *."

From this intolerable affectation let us turn to the manly and majestic diction of MILTON, whose prose works, owing to the controversial nature of their contents, have been too much neglected. Than the style of Milton, however, in these his polemic writings, nothing frequently can be more lofty, sonorous, and strong; his words are pure and of native growth, and his only fault appears to have arisen from an indiscriminate adoption of classical arrangement in the structure of his sentences. This, though it impart an air of dignity and forced splendour to his composition, has too often rendered his pages to the mere English reader, stiff, obscure, and harsh. Notwithstanding this objection, it may without fear of contradiction be asserted, that no author previous to the restoration has written with greater energy or purity.

Milton early commenced his ecclesiastical warfare, and, in 1642, published The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy. In this production he nobly declares, and in the spirit of sincerity and truth, his motives for the undertaking. The passage is forcible and eloquent,

* Urquhart's Vindication of Scotland.

and proves that for conscience sake alone, relinquishing the pleasures of fancy and of taste, he embraced a task which might expose him to obloquy and reproach.

"Concerning this wayward subject against prelaty," he remarks, "the touching whereof is so distasteful and disquietous to a number of men, as by what hath been said I may deserve of charitable readers to be credited, that neither envy nor gall hath entered me upon this controversy, but the enforcement of conscience only, and a preventive fear, lest the omitting of this duty should be against me, when I would store up to myself the good provision of peaceful hours so lest it should be still imputed to be, as I have found it hath been, that some self-pleasing humour of vain glory has incited me to contest with men of high estimation, now while green years are upon my head; from this needless surmisal I shall hope to dissuade the intelligent and equal auditor, if I can but say successfully, that which in this exigent behoves me, although I would be heard, only if it might be, by the elegant and learned reader, to whom principally for a while I shall beg leave I may address myself: to him it will be no new thing, though I tell him, that if I hunted after praise by the ostentation of wit and learning, I should not write

thus out of mine own season, when I have neither yet completed to my mind the full circle of my private studies (although I complain not of any insufficiency to the matter in hand) or were I ready to my wishes, it were a folly to commit any thing elaborately composed to the careless and interrupted listening of these tumultuous times. Next, if I were wise only to my own ends, I would certainly take such a subject, as of itself might catch applause; whereas this has all the disadvantages on the contrary; and such a subject, as the publishing whereof might be delayed at pleasure, and time enough to pencil it over with all the curious touches of art, even to the perfection of a faultless picture; when, as in this argument, the not deferring is of great moment to the good speeding, that if solidity have leisure to do her office, art cannot have much. Lastly, I should not chuse this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand."

The ardent spirit of Milton, and the malignant accusations of his opponents, not unfrequently brought forth in his controversial publications a warmth and asperity of expression not probably well calculated to promote his views. In ex

tenuation of this zeal, he has, in his Treatise of Reformation, thus solemnly appealed to heaven in favour of his integrity:

"Here withal," says he, " I invoke the immortal deity, revealer and judge of secrets, that wherever I have in this book plainly and roundly, though worthily and truly, laid open the faults and blemishes of fathers, martyrs, or christian emperors, or have otherways inveighed against error and superstition with vehement expressions, I have done it neither out of malice, nor list to speak evil, nor any vain glory, but of mere necessity, to vindicate the spotless truth from an ignominious bondage."

A still more interesting example of Milton's style, which breathes all that devotional enthusiasm, and that high confidence in his own powers, which elevated this great poet so far above the ordinary sons of men, may be selected from his work on the Reason of Church Government :

"Time serves not now, and, perhaps, I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief,