sorrowing friend. Many writers, especially those who have an intimate acquaintance with the ancient classics, have agreed with Lord Macaulay in regarding the appreciation of "Lycidas" as a test of one's insight into the most poetical aspects of poetry. But this may reasonably be doubted. It has been well remarked that minds trained upon the old models seem incapable of understanding how cold and artificial sounds the strain to uneducated but not unpoetical persons which treats of Arethuse and Mincius in speaking of a gentleman drowned in the Irish Channel, and which describes a Fellow of Christ's College as tending flocks and singing for the edification of old Damotas. In "Lycidas" Milton at length appears as a Puritan full-fledged; "he has thrown away the last relics of Church and State, and is Presbyterian." The scathing passage in which he denounced

"Such as, for their bellies' sake,

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,

And shove away the worthy bidden guest.

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least
That to the faithful herdman's art belongs,"

doubtless found an echo in many a stern heart in England at that time, when Laud and his policy were causing widespread revolt.

In 1638 Milton took that journey to the Continent which he had long meditated. Taking letters of introduction with him, he passed through Paris (where he saw Grotius), Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, and settled at Florence, where he remained for two months. There he made the acquaintance of many learned men, some of them well known in Italian literary history, and "found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." From Florence he went to Rome, where also he received a very warm reception from cultivated society.

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After staying about two months there, he spent a short time in Naples. From Naples it was his intention to travel to Italy and Greece, but the sad news of the Civil War in England called him back; "for I thought it base that I should be travelling abroad for pleasure while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty." He returned to England by slow stages, arriving there in August, 1639. Soon after his father's household at Horton was broken up, and Milton took lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, where he acted as tutor to his two nephews, John and Edward Phillips, and busied himself in literary projects-amongst others, in drafting schemes for a poem on the subject of "Paradise Lost." But stirring times had now arrived, and Milton was not the man to see his countrymen struggle for liberty and quietly remain. buried in literary meditations. For twenty years, from 1640 to 1660, his life is not that of a poet, but of a strenuous combatant, constantly engaged in controversy, the most exhausting, the most hurtful, the most evanescent of all modes of composition. Is this to be regretted? From a literary point of view undoubtedly it is. There are splendid passages in Milton's prose works-passages where we are carried away by torrents of gorgeous eloquence; but in prose, as he himself said, "he had only the use of his left hand;" and the natural acerbity of his temper, quickened by the insults of his assailants, often. led him to indulge in the most vulgar railing. "For the mass. of his prose treatises, miserable discussions is the final and right word," says Mr. Matthew Arnold, who quotes with approbation the remarks on them by the distinguished French critic M. Scherer:-"In all of them the manner is the same. The author brings into play the treasures of his learning, heaping together testimonies from Scripture, passages from the Fathers, quotations from the poets; laying all antiquity, sacred and profane, under contribution; entering into subtle discussions on the sense of this or that Hebrew or Greek word. But not only by his undigested erudition, and by his absorption in religious controversy, does Milton belong to his age; he belongs to it too by the personal tone of his polemics." But

there are other than literary grounds from which the question. ought to be regarded. If Milton thought that by the services his pen could render, the cause of justice, and liberty, and good government could be advanced, most assuredly he did well to use it as he did during those twenty eventful years.

Milton's prose writings, and the circumstances which led to their publication, we can only very briefly touch on. He began his career as a controversialist by five pamphlets against the Episcopal form of Church government, all published in 1641 and 1642. The preface to the second book of the fourth of these, "The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy," is one of the finest pieces of Milton's prose, besides being of high biographical importance. He there gives a sketch of his life, of his work, and of his aim at some future period, when quieter times came, to produce a work "which the world would not willingly let die." "Neither do I think it shame," he says, "to covenant with any knowing reader that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him towards the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; not to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases: to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges which I can give them." From this proud self-confidence a great result might have been augured, and a great result was achieved, for that result was "Paradise Lost."

The second series of Milton's pamphlets was written with a purely personal object. About Whitsuntide 1643, Milton,

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with his nephew Phillips, "took a journey into the country, nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was any more than a journey of recreation; but home he returns a married man that went out a bachelor, his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a justice of the peace, at Foresthill, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire." The circumstances connected with this marriage have never been clearly explained. The Powells were Royalists; Mary was only seventeen, whereas her husband was thirty-five; and altogether it seems to have been as ill-assorted a union as could well be imagined. After the newly married pair had lived together for a month, Mary Powell went back to her friends, promising, however, to return at Michaelmas. Milton, like Carlyle, was gey ill to live wi';" his studious habits, his solitary life, and his austere disposition were doubtless very repellant to a young girl accustomed to "a great house and much company and jollity." She did not return at Michaelmas, and for a very good reason. Before that time Milton had published the first of those strange pamphlets in which he advocated freedom of divorce on very easy conditions. This raised a tempest of opposition against him, but single-handed he undauntedly continued to maintain his thesis in three other pamphlets, the last of which appeared early in 1645. When, however, the Powell family, later on in that year, fell into difficulties, and his wife returned to him and asked his forgiveness, Milton granted it, and again received her into favour.

Between the publication of the first and the last pamphlet on Divorce appeared Milton's tract on Education (1644), and his "Areopagitica," published in the same year, the first formal plea for the liberty of the press. It is the most generally known of Milton's prose works, and there is little need to dwell on its surpassing eloquence; none but a poet and a very great one could have written it. Meanwhile Milton's writings on Divorce had lost him the favour of the Presbyterians, many of whom bitterly assailed him; and he began to think that "new Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." From about

1646, he favoured Independency so far as he favoured any form of church government; but in religious matters he was a law unto himself, going to no church, and joining no communion.

The year 1646 is memorable as having been that in which the poems written by Milton up to that date were collected and published together. "Let the event guide itself which way it will," wrote Moseley, the publisher, in the preface to the collected edition; "I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote, whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled." Three years after, in 1649, Milton again entered into controversy by publishing a pamphlet defending the execution of Charles I. Then came his Latin controversy with the great Leyden scholar Salmasius, over whom he obtained a brilliant victory. His exertions in this battle cost him his eyesight: in 1652 he became totally blind. Some consolation for his blindness was to be derived from the fact that his replies to Salmasius had caused Europe to ring with his fame from side to side. About 1654 his wi:e died, leaving behind her three daughters. He married again in 1656, but his second wife only lived fifteen months, dying in childbirth in 1658.

On the death of Cromwell, Milton in vain endeavoured to stem the tide of popular feeling in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, writing five pamphlets with this end in view, and fighting for what was clearly a hopeless cause till the very last moment. All in vain on the 8th of May Charles II. was proclaimed, and on the 29th he entered London in triumph. Milton, who had been the foremost advocate of Republicanism, who had defended the execution of the King, who had acted as Latin secretary during the Protectorate, whose name was famous throughout Europe as the champion of the Commonwealth and the contemner of kings, now indeed found himself fallen on evil days and evil tongues. It is a wonder that he escaped death: if any man deserved it, the Royalists might plausibly have argued, it was the stern old blind man