commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine in prison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are. Nay, 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 burthen 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. It is 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 rejected truth, for want of which whole nations fare worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men ;-how we 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 martyrdom; and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself,-slays an immortality rather than a life."

Turning to those compositions on which his fame irremovably rests, it seems strange that, as already

stated, it was not till Milton had fought his way through middle life, in state controversies-when old, and blind, and poor, his genius, at length (to accommodate a magnificent figure of his own), "mewing," like "an eagle, her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam" of sacred inspiration-" purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance," soared" with no middle flight above the Eonian mount," while she "pursued, to the height of (her) great argument, things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," and nobly dared to

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assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men."

PARADISE LOST, Book I.

The Latin poems of Milton were, for the most part, the proofs of the early products of his learning, rather than the precocious evidence of his genius. They gained him, however, no small reputation, both at home and abroad, among scholars. These, with some maturer fruits of the same hot-house culture, are still reprinted in his collected pieces, but command little attention, except as curiosities of literature. Nor are they much better known, even in the English version, from the kindred pen of Cowper. Like all his poems, they abound in classical allusions and mythological embellishments, which (particularly the latter) are sometimes strangely, not to say profanely, blended with scriptural truths and Christian subjects.

In these juvenile essays, Milton's views of picturesque nature are more general than accurate, and more classical than just like the ideal of beauty in sculpture, his poetical beauty is equally the offspring of imagination; delighting the eye, indeed, and filling the

mind, but seldom touching the heart with the force or reality of truth. A man born blind might, from verbal precedents (in ancient authors especially), have written all the descriptive passages in these compositions.

The earliest original poem in his own tongue, which has been preserved, bears the simple and affecting title -On the Death of a fair Infant, dying of a Cough. She was the daughter of his sister, whom he thus apostrophizes in the first lines :—

"O fairest flower! no sooner blown but blasted!
Soft silken primrose, fading timelessly!"

A flower as fair as she, and one that will not fade so timelessly, has the poet planted on her grave, in this affectionate memorial. Though very elaborately wrought after the fashion of a pedantic age, and abounding with forced conceits and cold fancies, these verses give promise of better things, when his genius (he being then in his seventeenth year only) should arrive at maturity, and dare to speak, and write, and think, according to its own free will and choice, unfettered by any precedents of the schools or time-sanctioned authorities.

Our author's next performance (though, like the preceding, more in the style of Donne and Cowley than the genuine vein of John Milton) was a splendid ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, in a graceful lyric measure. A recitative of four stanzas forms a fine preamble to the Hymn. After proposing his theme, the poet thus earnestly exhorts his Muse to run to Bethlehem and hail the advent of the Redeemer before the wise men from the east could reach "the place where the young child lay."

"See how from far, upon the eastern road,

The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:

O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,

And lay it lowly at his blessed feet:

Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet;

And join thy voice unto the angel-quire,

From out his secret altar, touch'd with hallow'd fire."

This Muse was surely his own "Urania" (not one of the fabled Nine), and here she tried her youthful voice in a prelude worthy of that adventurous song of Paradise, when, many a year of after-troubles past, she rose from warbling her humble Christmas-carol, to swell the hallelujahs of heaven, and the hosannas of earth, while she "with angels did divide to sing." The multitude of the heavenly host which appeared to the shepherds in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night, are thus gloriously presented:

"At last surrounds their sight

A globe of circular light,

That with long beams the shame-faced night array'd;
The helmed cherubim,

And sworded seraphim,

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd,
Harping, in loud and solemn quire,

With unexpressive notes, to Heaven's new-born heir.

"Such music, as 'tis said,

Before was never made,

But when of old the sons of morning sung;
While the Creator great

His constellations set,

And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,

And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.

"Ring out, ye crystal spheres !

Once bless our human ears

(If ye have power to touch our senses so),

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the base of Heaven's deep organ blow,
And, with your ninefold harmony,

Make up full concert to the angelic symphony."

The sections of this ode, on the portentous tradition that certain heathen oracles were silenced after the birth of Christ, have been universally admired. Recording the terror and consternation of the expelled idols fleeing from their shrines, we have sketches, brief but masterly, of the principal peers of Satan's Pandemonium, which may well be compared with the finished portraits of the same infernal personages in the first and second books of Paradise Lost.

A fragment, On the Passion of our Saviour, probably attempted in the same year with the foregoing, shows that the writer had not yet disenthralled himself from the bondage of bad Italian and worse English examples in style. Witness the following stanza :

"Befriend me, Night! best patroness of grief,
Over the pole thy thickest mantle throw,
And work my flatter'd fancy to belief,
That heaven and earth are colour'd with my woe;
My sorrows are too dark for day to know:

The leaves should all be black whereon I write,

And letters where my tears have wash'd a wannish white."

Were ever tears shed, such frigid lines as these? they would freeze before they fell; but, hark!—the next stanza! and you will say, "that strain was of a higher mood."

either in writing or reading
If they sprang into the eye,

"See, see the chariot and those rushing wheels,
That whirl'd the prophet up at Chebar flood;
My spirit some transporting cherub feels;