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Such were the position and temper of the presbyterians of Great Britain, at a crisis in the history of the Church, when a right appreciation of the principles of religious freedom, and a pervading spirit of Christian candour and love, would have secured to this empire the lasting and blessed heritage of liberty of conscience and perfect ecclesiastical equality. Universal history, perhaps, does not record a more lamentable loss of a more precious opportunity.

It is easy to imagine what kind of reception would be given, by a class whose ambitious bigotry sought to bend the souls of all their fellow-subjects to a uniform compliance with their creed and ritual, to such novel doctrines as those of Milton on the subject of marriage and divorce. His treatise kindled a perfect fury of opposition among the clergy and leaders of the presbyterian party. Forgetful of the services for which they were indebted to Milton, in their struggle against episcopal oppression, they assailed him with rabid animosity from the pulpit and the press; and, as if to challenge the severest inflictions of that power under which they had themselves been made to smart, they even caused him to be summoned before the House of Lords. From this tribunal he retired unharmed, leaving to his opponents the shame of defeat in addition to the guilt of persecution.

Confident in the justice of the views laid down in the dissertation last noticed, Milton resolved again to enter into the marriage state, and is even said to have made proposals to a young lady, the daughter of a Dr. Davis. His addresses do not appear to have been favourably received at first, and before they could be prosecuted to a successful issue, they were interrupted by an unexpected occurrence. The royal cause had met with its fatal disaster on Naseby field, and the known adherents of Charles were consequently placed in a precarious and alarming position. Among these were the family of Milton's wife, who now, gays Dr. Symmons, became "sensible of the folly of their conduct, and solicitous to propitiate the resentment of an

injured husband, whose assistance might now probably be immediately requisite for their protection or subsistence. The plan for the accomplishment of their purposes was conceived and executed with successful ingenuity. Combining with his friends, who concurred in the wish for a reconciliation between the pair who had been united at the altar, they watched our author's visits, and, as he was in the house of a relation, they stationed his wife in an inner apartment, with instructions to appear at the proper time, and to supplicate for his pardon upon her knees. Faithful to the lesson of her friends, she sustained her part with skill, and probably with feeling. The scene was surprising, and the resistance of Milton, which seemed firm only for a moment, fell before its weighty effect. Yielding to the entreaties of beauty, and perhaps also to the recurrence of love, what he appeared to concede only to the solicitations of his friends, and dismissing every irritating recollection from his bosom, he re-admitted the wife who had deserted and insulted him into the full possession of his affections. Not satisfied with this signal triumph over his resentment, he extended his placability to those who were the abettors, if not the instigators, of her offence; and, receiving her parents and family under his roof, he protected and maintained them in this hour of their danger and distress. If his interest with the victorious party was unable to obtain complete immunity for his royalist connexions, it availed to save them from ruin, and to preserve the bulk of a property from which he was destined to receive not even the stipulated fortune of his wife. Conduct of so high a character, the offspring of a large and feeling heart, is above the ornament of any laboured panegyric. Let the facts, in the intercourse of Milton with the Powells, be placed distinctly and at once in our view, and nothing but atrocious prejudice can withhold us from admiring the magnanimity of the former, and from despising, while we pity, the meanness of the latter."* * Symmons's Life of Milton, pp. 176, 178.

Finding that his house in Aldersgate-street was too small for his establishment, which was now increased by the return of his wife, he hired a more spacious residence in Barbican.* Even this soon proved not too large for his requirements; for, not only did his wife's parents seek an asylum under his roof, but also a numerous train of brothers and sisters, all of whom continued with him until after his father's death, which occurred in 1647, when the family property was restored to them by an arrangement with the Government. It is a striking proof of the irrepressible activity of Milton's mind, that, amidst the public convulsions and domestic anxiety of the time, he could find either leisure or inclination for the literary pursuits in which he engaged. Yet it was in the year 1644 that he produced his "Treatise on Education," as well as the greatest of all his productions in prose, entitled, "Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Speaking."

The treatise on education was addressed to his friend, Master Samuel Hartlib, and was occasioned by Milton's conviction, and, indeed, his experience of the cramped, barbarous, and almost useless style of education which then prevailed in our public schools and universities, and which, even in our own day, is but slowly and reluctantly retiring before the march of enlightened reform. It has been variously commented upon by the biographers of Milton. Dr. Symmons describes it "as calculated only to amuse the fancy, while it would be found by experience to disappoint the expectation." Mr. Milford, however, takes a different view. "The system of education which he adopted

"I cannot but remark," says Dr. Johnson, “ a kind of respect, perhaps unconsciously, paid to this great man by his biographers; every house in which he resided is historically mentioned, as if it were an injury to neglect naming any place that he honoured by his presence." Indeed it is known that foreigners of distinction gratified their curiosity, during the life of Milton, by visiting the house in Bread-street where he was born.

was deep and comprehensive; it promised to teach science with language, or rather to make the study of languages subservient to the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Dr. Johnson has severely censured this method of instruction, but with arguments that might successfully be met. The plan recommended by the authority of Milton seems to be chiefly liable to objection from being too extensive."

Milton commences by stating his own views of the great purpose of education, and of the inadequacy of existing institutions to fulfil it. “The end then of learning," he says, "is to repair the ruins of our first parents, by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, 3 by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kinds of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.

"Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful: First, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might

be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.* And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behind, is our time lost partly in too oft idle vacancies given both to schools and universities; partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled, by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit.

*

"And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy, (and those be such as are most obvious to the sense,) they present their young unmatriculated novices, at first coming, with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics; so that they, having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows, where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate, to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblement, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge."+

Having thus indicated the main defects of university education, Milton thus enters on the development of his projected reforms. "I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct you to a hill-side, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at

* On this subject, see Locke's Treatise on Education, § 162—177. Works, folio edition, vol. iii. p. 72, seq.

+ Prose Works, vol. iii. pp. 464, 466.

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