They chant their artless notes in simple guise;
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim;
Perhaps "Dundee's" wild-warbling measures rise,
Or plaintive "Martyrs," worthy of the name,
Or noble "Elgin " beets the heavenward flame—
The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays:
Compared with these, Italian trills are tame;

The tickled ear no heartfelt raptures raise;
Nae unison hae they with our Creator's praise.

The priest-like father reads the sacred page-
How Abram was the friend of GOD on high;
Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage

With Amalek's ungracious progeny ;
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie

Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire;
Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry;

Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire;
Or other holy seers that tuned the sacred lyre.

Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme-
How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed;
How HE, who bore in heaven the second name,
Had not on earth whereon to lay His head:
How His first followers and servants sped;

The precepts sage they wrote to many a land:
How he, who lone in Patmos vanished,

Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand.

And heard great Bab'lon's doom pronounced by
Heaven's command.

Then, kneeling down to HEAVEN'S ETERNAL KING,
The saint, the father, and the husband prays:

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Hope "springs exulting on triumphant wing"
That thus they all shall meet in future days:

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There ever bask in uncreated rays,

No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear, Together hymning their Creator's praise,

In such society, yet still more dear,

While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere.

Compared with this, how poor Religion's pride,
In all the pomp of method, and of art,
When men display to congregations wide
Devotion's every grace, except the heart!
The Power, incensed, the pageant will desert,
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole :
But, haply, in some cottage far apart,

May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul; And in His book of life the inmates poor enroll.

Then homeward all take off their several way;
The youngling cottagers retire to rest;
The parent-pair their secret homage pay,

And proffer up to Heaven the warm request
That HE, who stills the raven's clamorous nest,
And decks the lily fair in flowery pride,
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide;
But, chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside.

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: 25
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
"An honest man's the noblest work of GOD;"
And certes, in fair Virtue's heavenly road,

The cottage leaves the palace far behind.
What is a lordling's pomp?-a cumbrous load,
Disguising oft the wretch of human kind,
Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refined!

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O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent,
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And, oh! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From luxury's contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent,

A virtuous populace may rise the while,

And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle.

O Thou! who pour'd the patriotic tide

That stream'd through Wallace's undaunted heart,
Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the second glorious part,
The patriot's God peculiarly Thou art,

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!
Oh, never, never Scotia's realm desert;

But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard,
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

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LXXII.

THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.

BY JOHN MILTON.'

I DENY not but that it is of the greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth to have a vigilant eye 20 how books demean themselves as well as men, and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, 25

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they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a 10 burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life whereof, perhaps, there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a 15 rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a kind of martyrdom; and, if it extended to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and soft essence, the breath of reason itself-slays an immortality 25 rather than a life.

Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances 30 hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was

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from out the rind of one apple, tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As therefore 5 the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider Vice, with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly1 better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies 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. 15 Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that Vice prom-20 ises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus' or Aquinas), describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in 25 with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the 30 confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the region of sin and falsity, than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason?

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