sanctions, and subsisting so long as certain plain conditions involved in the bond are fulfilled, or may be fulfilled. The State cannot, apart from all higher views of the question, provide for the operation of the varying influences of human temper and feeling, or, as our author would have it, show "some conscionable and tender pity for those who have unwarily, in a thing they never practised before, made themselves the bondmen of a luckless and helpless matrimony."* Men and women must protect themselves in the first instance; and if it be true that "the soberest and best governed men are least practised in these affairs, and that, for all the wariness that can be used, it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice," society is, nevertheless, not bound to make allowance for such mistakes, where they would clearly tend to interfere with its order and stability. It is only when a greater injury and disturbance to this order would arise from the maintenance of the marriage tie than from its dissolution-as in the case of adultery-that society can consent to its dissolution. It is only by some abnegation of man's absolute rights that he enjoys the benefits of social intercourse at all; and a man cannot be free to consult his own mere inclination—which is what is really implied in his argument-in the disruption of so vital a bond as marriage, so long as he remains a member of the community whose sanctions guarantee the sacredness and security of the bond while it lasts. He cannot have the privileges of civilisation and at the same time the license of an unfettered individuality. Milton would, no doubt, have repudiated such an interpretation of his theory-in fact, he does so; still, it seems impossible to distinguish his principle logically * Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.

carried out, from that of an absolute individual liberty to retire from the marriage-contract so soon as any distaste of mind or of nature may spring up between married persons. To a great extent, moreover, the question is argued by him all on one side-that of the man; marriage is regarded especially with a view to his advantage, and its breach with a view to his convenience. There is a haughty and cold indifference to the rights on the other side, as well as to all the grave difficulties and anxieties connected with children, which adds to the unsatisfactoriness of his argument while weakening its interest.

In these few remarks we have merely looked at Milton's argument in its relation to the rights and obligations of society. Its relation to Scripture suggests another view, which he is far from having evaded, but the difficulties of which it cannot be said. that he has any more satisfactorily met and resolved. The truth is, that the question was one of too delicate and practical a character for his genius, which ranged freely among principles, and possessed a grand power of theoretic and eloquent deduction, but which was unaccommodating and unyielding in its application to the problems of practical life.

We see the full force of his genius at this time displayed in a writing of a very different character— viz. his famous Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, published and addressed to the Parliament in the same year, 1644. The subject obviously fell within his great plan of discussing the whole question of liberty, and he had long reflected on it accidentally, as the Areopagitica was called forth by a special Act of the Parliament to which

it was addressed.* Far less complicated than the subject of divorce, and admitting of a far more direct and conclusive appeal to the great principles which lie at the foundation of human freedom, Milton's task, in the present case, if not more congenial to his feelings, was far more suited to his intellect. Starting on that elevated key which was natural to him, which was the appropriate expression of the lofty pitch at which his ideas mostly ranged, he scarcely drops this key throughout the treatise. His thoughts march, from beginning to end, at the same high level, only swelling here and there into a richer and more felicitous fulness. Nothing can be grander or more expressive than many of the separate sayings + which enrich the style of this treatise, and give to it dignity, force, and pregnancy, condensing into a massive gem-like pith wide trains of advancing argument. There are none of his prose writings less temporary, less imbued with the narrowness and accidents of his own personal feeling, or less bound to the mere temper and tendencies of his time; and this is shown in the mere fact of its continued popularity (if we can use such a word in Milton's case at all), while his other prose writings, for the most part, are forgotten and unread, save by the student.

*The Parliament, under the influence of the Presbyterians, had set forth an order "to regulate printing: that no book, pamphlet or paper, shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first licensed by such, or at least one of such, as shall be thereto appointed."

+As, for example, when he defends the reading of all sorts of books by the example of holy Chrysostom, who nightly studied Aristophanes, and "had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon;" or again, when he says, that a man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believes things only because his pastor says, or the 'Assembly' so determine, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes a heresy;" or, when again he tells us that "opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”

The great principles expounded in the Areopagitica are as true and as needful now as they were in Milton's own day; the very illustrations by which he enforces them have, with a slight change of colouring, a vividness of application that, after two centuries, and all our boasted Protestantism, is perfectly startling. Take merely one as a specimen in which he pictures certain "Protestants and professors" in his day: "They live and die," he says, "in as errant and implicit a faith as any lay Papist of Loretto; men who, unable themselves to bear the burden of their religion, find out some factor, to whose care and credit they commit it some divine of note and education, to whom they assign the whole warehouse of their religion, with all the locks and keys; so that a man may say his religion is no more within himself, but comes and goes according as that good man frequents his house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feeds him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises, is saluted, and, after the malmsey, or some well-spiced bruage, and better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." There are few things more exquisite than this, both in its descriptive truth, and its broad yet covert sarcasm; while it paints to the life the spirit which still infests much of our Protestantism. There are many passages equally felicitous, clothing the deepest truths in a diction of mingled luxuriance, sweetness, and power. The treatise claims

It is impossible to give an anthology of such pieces; but we may instance that in which he speaks of the knowledge of good and evil in

the ever-renewed study of the friends of Protestant freedom. Nowhere are its principles more fairly and eloquently expounded; and even the germ of all that is really just and good in the most recent discussions of "Liberty" will be found in it.

Still, in the same year, he published his "Tractate on Education," addressed to Master Samuel Hartlib, in which he advocates a plan of instruction similar to that which he had conducted with his nephew. There are some features of the plan narrow and erroneous; but there are others, such as the transference of logic and literary composition from the beginning to the close of the scholastic career, and the advantages which he attributes to a musical training, eminently suggestive. The "Tractate" is brief and pleasing in its style, with much of the same pungent richness of thought and observation that distinguishes the Areopagitica.

The publication of these writings, with those on the subject of divorce, all during a space of eighteen months,* while Mrs Milton remained with her friends at Forest Hill, must have left Milton little leisure to seek for any other solace in his solitude. According to the story, however, he is represented as at length

the world as leaping forth "out of the rind of one apple tasted as two twins cleaving together," and breaks forth into the strain-"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never seeks out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat." Elsewhere he says grandly, and in the highest spirit of freedom, "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best suppressing."

* The first edition of his Poems-those of the Horton period, with a few others, also appeared in 1645.