upon this assurance, that my adversary's cause is maintained by nothing but fraud, fallacy, ignorance, and barbarity; whereas mine has light, truth, reason, the practice and the learning of the best ages of the world, of its side."

In 1654 Milton published his "Defensio secunda contra Infamem Libellum Anonymum, cui titulus, Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Cœlum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos."

This commences with another magnificent passage regarding himself :—

"Jam videor mihi, ingressus iter, transmarinos tractus et porrectas late regiones, sublimis perlustrare; vultus innumeros atque ignotos, animi sensus mecum conjunctissimos: hinc Germanorum virile et infestum servituti robur, inde Francorum vividi dignique nomine liberales impetus, hinc Hispanorum consulta virtus, Italorum inde sedata suique compos magnanimitas ob oculos versatur. Quicquid uspiam liberorum pectorum, quicquid ingenui, quicquid magnanimi aut prudens latet aut se palam profitetur, alii tacite favere, alii aperte suffragari, accurrere alii et plausu accipere, alii tandem vero victi, dedititios se tradere. Videor jam mihi, tantis circumseptus copiis, ab Herculeis usque columnis ad extremos Liberi patris terminos, libertatem diu pulsam atque exulem, longo intervallo domum ubique gentium reducere: et, quod Triptolemus olim fertur, sed longe nobiliorem Cereali illa frugem ex civitate mea gentibus importare; restitutum nempe civilem liberumque vitæ cultum, per urbes, per regna, perque nationes disseminare," &c.

"I seem to survey, as from a towering height, the far-extended tracts of sea and land, and innumerable crowds of spectators, betraying in their looks the liveliest interest, and sensations the most congenial with my own here I behold the stout and manly prowess of the German, disdaining servitude; there the generous and lively impetuosity of the French; on this side the calm and stately valour of the Spaniard; on that the composed and wary magnanimity of the Italian. Of all the lovers of liberty and virtue, the magnanimous and the wise, in whatever quarter they may be found, some secretly favour, others openly approve; some greet me with congratulations and applause; others, who had long been proof against conviction, at last yield themselves captive to the force of truth. Surrounded by congregated multitudes, I now imagine, that, from the columns of Hercules to the Indian ocean, I behold the nations of the earth recovering that liberty which they so long had lost; and that the people of this island are transporting to other countries a plant of more beneficial qualities, and more noble growth, than that which Triptolemus is reported to have carried from region to region; that they are disseminating the blessings of civilization and freedom among cities, kingdoms, and nations. Nor shail I approach unknown, nor perhaps unloved, if it be told that I am the same person, who engaged in single combat that fierce advocate of despotism, till then reputed invincible in the opinion of many, and in his own conceit, who insolently challenged us and our armies to the combat; but whom, while I repelled his virulence, I silenced with his own weapons; and over whom, if I may trust to the opinion of impartial judges, I gained a complete and glorious victory."

In 1659 Milton published his " Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, showing that it is not lawful for any Power on earth to compel in matters of religion.' The same year he published "Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church; wherein is also discoursed of Tithes, Churchfees, and Church-revenues; and whether any Maintenance of Ministers can be settled by law."

He wrote also "A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth ;" and, "The Present Means and brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in practice, and without delay; in a Letter to General Monk."

In 1660 he published "The ready and easy way to establish a free Commonwealth, and the excellence thereof compared with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting Kingship in the realm."

In the same year he published "Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, titled the Fear of God, preached and since published by Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King, wherein many notorious wrestings of Scripture, and other falsities, are observed."

The author of this book was Peter de Moulin, afterwards Prebendary of Canterbury. See an "Account of Alexander Morus," among the Literati of Geneva, where he published many books. See Senebier's "Histoire Littéraire."

I cannot help lamenting that Milton spent so many years in these bitter political and sectarian squabbles: "coarser minds" would have done for that work. He was always powerful-sometimes splendid; but here his passions were human, and too often mingled with earthly dross. That magnificent and stupendous imagination must have often slept : his faculties duly employed might have produced other epic poems equal to " Paradise Lost:" he might even have gained something more of facility and softness: other gardens of Eden might have been described, and human passions of half-etherial sublimity might have been embodied: his youthful purpose of some romantic tale of chivalry might also have been executed.

Perhaps he would never have attained to the rich profusion of Spenser; but he would have been far more nervous, gigantic, and heaven-exalted in his characters and descriptions: he would have painted castles and battles and enchantments with a darker, more awful, and more prophet-like power: he would have given, by a few mighty strokes, what Spenser somewhat weakens by the expanded multiplicity of his touches. With the collected sternness of Dante, and the gloomy touches of his inspired vein, he would have filled the imagination with something of superhuman exaltation of visionary grandeur.

What themes for a creative mind did the superstitions, manners, and traditionary tales of chivalry offer! Milton's memory was stored with this branch of literature, and delighted in it; and his faculty of sublime fiction could have added to it any ornaments he chose: but mighty as was his imagery, the spiritual part of his power was still mightier : magnificence of thought and sentiment is his prime characteristic. It is his force of reflection and comment, which overcomes and electrifies us; the vast extent of his views; his comprehension, and stupendous grasp : and, while he speaks as a poet, he speaks also as a sage, and a philosopher.

How would he have described the Crusades, above all other poets! what endless diversity of scenery, heroism, customs, incidents, moral and intellectual character; observation, learning, opinion, reasoning, principles, would he have supplied! This would have been far superior to the story of "King Arthur," in which, perhaps, there is some mixture of childishness, unbecoming the lofty bard's austere grandeur. While Milton's mind was immersed for twenty years in all those mean contests of human ambition or bigotry, in which intrigue, artifice, and selfish passions pervert and darken the heart and the head, he must have stifled those radiant visions of spiritual purity, which were his natural food and delight. A suppressed fire often turns to poison; and perhaps it gave some embitterment to the poet's feelings: but the fire now and then blazed unexpectedly in a glorious flame amid endless pages of subtle or heavy prose.

Perhaps he would not have lost his eye-sight, if he had pored less over these controversial mysteries, dry as the dust of the barren desert. The dreams of imagination give rest to the eyes, and are brightest when the outward view is closed.

As

The vexatious humours with which the poet had to contend must have added to the irritable temperament of his frame. He was naturally "a choleric man," according to the report of Mrs. Powell, the mother of his first wife; and he had a scorn of mean intellects and unlearned persons. Loftiness was a prime ingredient in his disposition, as well as in his mental faculties: detraction and contumely enraged him his opinions were strong and fixed-he would bend to no man. he never deviated from the paths of duty he had chalked out, so opposition embittered his temper, or excited his scorn: he was not one, therefore, who could buffet in troubled waters without a great wear of his frame. He himself says, that he lost his sight "overplied in liberty's defence." This was, no doubt, true :-the sour humours of the body might, by a natural effect, disease the eyes: they were tender even in his youth.

The cause of liberty, pursued from the purest motives, if it could be separated from the constant participation of the great body who were actuated by a love of licentiousness, and an envious desire to overturn and plunder the great and the rich, would become such a mind as Milton's: but the large mass of the active movers of that celebrated contest was of a temper, and passion, and principle utterly unfitted to the bard's holy spirit. He was blinded by his zeal in a cause in which his heart and his convictions were embarked, and he reaped the fruit of the food he sought in bitterness and sorrow: he found thorns and brambles and weeds without end, wherever he applied his sickle.

Opinions differ concerning the character of the sovereign, against whom he lifted his voice and his hand. That unhappy monarch was so placed by birth and circumstances, that perhaps the wisest man and the greatest hero could not have escaped safe, much less victorious. He had some weaknesses, of which a leading one was ductility: he was a man of elegant taste, numerous accomplishments, varied learning, with a sensitive, generous heart, and undoubted piety: he entertained some notions of kingly power, which in these days would be generally condemned; but in the times in which he imbibed and persevered in them, it would have been truly extraordinary if he had thought otherwise. The most plausible charge laid against his character is insincerity: this arose from want of firmness. He was sometimes led into momentary concessions contrary to his conviction.

The trust he put in Buckingham cannot be entirely excused, because that minister was deficient in almost every quality necessary to a statesman: his want of high talents, his profligacy, his profusion, his deficiency in all the grand principles of a sound government, his corruption, his reckless indiscretions, offered a mark for the revolutionary passions of the age, which they could not miss. But the system of favouritism was then the general fault of monarchs; and Charles had a warm and friendly heart, which could not easily give up an attachment. On the contrary, the unfortunate prince has been blamed for sacrificing Strafford: for that afflicting charge nothing less than extreme duresse can be an excuse.

When once the sword of civil contest is drawn, neither party thinks itself safe till it has destroyed the other; this is the excuse the parliamentarians plead for putting Charles to death. I shall never cease to consider it a bloodthirsty and unpardonable act. All my veneration for Milton, and all the power of argument of his mighty mind, will not alter that opinion.

The opposition to the rule of kings had been secretly brooding and fomenting through Europe for near a century, but had been kept down in England by the magnanimous and prudent spirit of Queen Elizabeth but the Puritans had been constantly at work against her throne, while the Jesuits beset it on other principles, and with other views. At Milton's birth, the imbecility of King James had encouraged that spirit in the former growing sect, which struck at the root of all ancient institutions. Milton probably drank in these schisms with his earliest breath; but for a time his classical and romantic studies, the glories of his poetical imagination, his neighbourhood to the feudal hospitalities of Harefield, the smiles of Spenser's patroness, the noble and splendid pageantry of Ludlow Castle, and his travels among the seats of the ancient arts, the heroic fablings of Tasso, and the glowing recollections of the Marquis Manso in the Elysian scenery of the sunny bay of Naples, suspended, and nearly expelled them.

But when the discordant trumpet of open civil strife was once sounded, and by an unhappy spell excited all the early predilections which had been instilled into his childhood, the Muse, for whom nature had best fitted him, was for a long time forgotten; and all the crabbed lore of puritanical gloom overshadowed the native fire of a heavenly imagination.

men.

In whatever turn his mind took, he had power and force to go beyond other When his gigantic strength entered the field of battle, like Samson, he would lay all prostrate before him; and like him, rather than submit and give triumph to his foes, would have grasped the columns, and brought the tumbling roof of the theatre on the heads of all; willing to fall himself in the common ruin, rather than let the proud and the mighty prevail over him. Here lay his ambition; here he had something of the spirit of his Fallen Angels. To him all monarchs of the ordinary vigour of human intellect appeared but as children of the dust in the conscious vastness of his intellectual supremacy, he met them, when they put on the armour of assault, with scorn and defiance.

The building was a spacious theatre,

Half-round, on two main pillars vaulted high.

AGON. i. 1607, seq.

CHAPTER XII.

MILTON'S CONTROVERSIAL WRITINGS.

On March 15, 1648-9, the council of state appointed Milton secretary for the foreign tongues. In 1652 the poet's eyesight was entirely lost; but he was still continued in his office, and allowed an assistant, Mr. Philip Meadowes. About this time his first wife died, leaving him three daughters. He did not re-marry till 1658. This second wife was daughter of Captain Woodcock, of Hackney: she died in childbed the next year, and was buried at St. Margaret's, Westminster, 10th February, 1657.

On April 17, 1655, it was ordered that "the former salary of Mr. John Milton of two hundred eighty-eight pounds, &c., formerly charged on the council's contingencies, be reduced to one hundred and fifty pounds per annum, and paid to him during his life out of his Highnesse's exchequer."

Bishop Sumner says, it is presumed that from this time Milton ceased to be employed in public affairs; but Todd gives proofs that he continued to be employed long afterwards, first with the aid of Philip Meadowes, and afterwards, in 1657, of Andrew Marvell, the poet, whose noble panegyrical verses are prefixed to the Paradise Lost.❤

As late as the 25th of October, 1659, there is a warrant of state for the payment to John Milton and Andrew Marvell of £86 12s. each, at the rate for each of £200 per annum.

A little before the king's coming over, Milton was sequestered from his Latin secretaryship, and the salary.

In 1658 he amused himself by editing from a MS. "the Cabinet-Council of Ralegh."

Whatever merit Milton might have in the able and learned discharge of his political services, it is deeply to be lamented that his brilliant and sublime faculties were so employed. He had a mind too creative to be wasted in writing down official despatches, or turning them into classical Latin: humble talents would have done better for such laborious and technical tasks. How the slumbering fire of his rich and ever-varying fictions must have consumed his heart and his brain! -How he must have fretted at the base intrigues of courts and councils, and the turpitude of human ambition !-While immured within dark and close official walls, how he must have sighed and pined to be courting his splendid visions, of a higher and more congenial world, on the banks of some haunted stream!-The woods and forests, the mountains, seas, and lakes, ought to have been his dwellingplaces.-The whispers of the spring, or the roaring of the winter-winds, ought to have soothed or excited his spirits.-In those regions aërial beings visit the earth; there the soul sees what the concourse of mankind puts to flight; there the mean passions, that corrupt the human bosom, have no abode.

To make a man of business requires nothing but petty and watchful observation, cold reserve, and selfish craft: to catch the moment when caution in others is asleep; to raise hopes, yet promise nothing; to seem to give full information, yet to be so vague, that every thing is open to escape. How can the poet practise such arts as these! He is lost in himself; he is wrapped up in his own creations.

Milton has left interspersed in his controversial writings fragments of autobiography which have every sort of value. They are full of facts;-are vigorous, wise, eloquent, and sublime.

They are also proofs of that enthusiasm of character, which led the poet to those ideal views of liberty that are inconsistent with human frailty.

Of such passages the first, and perhaps most interesting, is the writer's description of his own person :

"I do not believe," says the poet," that I was ever once noted for deformity, by any one who ever saw me; but the praise of beauty I am not anxious to obtain. My stature certainly is not tall; but it rather approaches the middle than the diminutive. Yet what if it were diminutive, when so many men, illustrious both in peace and war, have been the same? And how can that be called diminutive,

* A curious letter of Milton's to Lord President Bradshaw, as early as 1653, recommending Marvell as an assistant, is given by Todd, then lately discovered in the State Paper Office.

which is great enough for every virtuous achievement? Nor, though very thin, was I ever deficient in courage or in strength; and I was wont constantly to exercise myself in the use of the sword, as long as it comported with my habits and my years. Armed with this weapon, as I usually was, I should have thought myself quite a match for any one, though much stronger than myself; and I felt perfectly secure against the assault of any open enemy. At this moment I have the same courage, the same strength, though not the same eyes; yet so little do they betray any external appearance of injury, that they are as unclouded and bright as the eyes of those who most distinctly see. In this instance alone I am a dissembler against my will. My face, which is said to indicate a total privation of blood, is of a complexion entirely opposite to the pale and the cadaverous; so that, though I am more than forty years old, there is scarcely any one to whom I do not appear ten years younger than I am; and the smoothness of my skin is not, in the least, affected by the wrinkles of age.”

His adversary had maliciously and daringly accused him of looseness of life and conversation. To this Milton indignantly thus replies :—“ But because as well by this upbraiding to me the bordelloes, as by other suspicious glancings in his book, he would seem privily to point me out to his readers, as one whose custom of life were not honest but licentious; I shall entreat to be borne with, though I digress; and in a way not often trod, acquaint ye with the sum of my thoughts in this matter, through the course of my years and studies; although I am not ignorant how hazardous it will be to do this under the nose of the envious, as it were in skirmish to change the compact order, and instead of outward actions to bring inmost thoughts into front. And I must tell ye, readers, that by this sort of men I have been already bitten at; yet shall they not for me know how slightly they are esteemed, unless they have so much learning as to read what in Greek an epokala is, which, together with envy, is the common disease of those who censure books that are not for their reading. With me it fares now, as with him whose outward garment hath been injured and ill-bedighted; for having no other shift, what help but to turn the inside outwards, especially if the lining be of the same, or, as it is sometimes, much better? So if my name and outward demeanour be not evident enough to defend me, I must make trial if the discovery of my inmost thoughts can: wherein of two purposes both honest, and both sincere, the one perhaps I shall not miss: although I fail to gain belief with others, of being such as my perpetual thoughts shall here disclose me, I may yet not fail of success in persuading some to be such really themselves, as they cannot believe me to be more than what I feign. I had my time, readers, as others have, who have good learning bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places, where the opinion was, it might be soonest attained; and as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended; whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood them ; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what it is, there be few who know not, I was so allured to read, that no recreation came to me better welcome: for that it was then those years with me which are excused, though they be least severe, I may be saved the labour to remember ye. Whence having observed them to account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love those high perfections, which under one or other name they took to celebrate; I thought with myself by every instinct and presage of nature, which is not wont to be false, that what emboldened them to this task, might with such diligence as they used embolden me; and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share, would herein best appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely, and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of not unlike praises for albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort perhaps idle; yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious. Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred: whereof not to be sensible when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and