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. As 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.

In whatever turn his mind took, he had power and force to go beyond other men. 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.

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 1656. 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 dwelling-places.-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.

The building was a spacious theatre,
Half-round on two main pillars vaulted high.

AGON. i. 1607, seq.

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.

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 everything 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, 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 drɛipoxaλía 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 withal and ungentle, and swainish breast for by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a proficient, that if I found those authors any where speaking unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste of those names which before they had extolled; this effect it wrought with me, from that time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored and above them all, preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not after when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy. These reasonings, together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of what I was, or what I might be (which let envy call pride), and lastly that modesty, whereof though not in the title page, yet here I may be excused to make some beseeming profession; all these uniting the supply of their natural aid together, kept me still above those low descents of mind, beneath which he must deject and plunge himself, that can agree to salable and unlawful prostitutions. Next (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befel him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn; and if I found in the story afterward, any of them, by word or deed, breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault of the poet, as that which is attributed to Homer, to have written indecent things of the gods: only this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up, both by his counsel and his arms, to secure and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even these books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and stedfast observation of that virtue which abhors the society of bordelloes. Thus, from the laureat fraternity of poets, riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading led me to the shady spaces of philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon: where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy; (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love's name, carries about;) and how the first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in

the soul, producing those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtuewith such abstracted sublimities as these; it might be worth your listening, readers; as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding; not in these noises."

CHAPTER XIII.

MILTON'S CHARACTER OF CROMWELL.

THIS character is of the utmost importance, because it will show us what the great republican thought of the Protector's services, and what he expected from him. "Oliver Cromwell was sprung from a line of illustrious ancestors, who were distinguished for the civil functions which they sustained under the monarchy, and still more for the part which they took in restoring and establishing true religion in this country. In the vigour and maturity of his life, which he passed in retirement, he was conspicuous for nothing more than for the strictness of his religious habits and the innocence of his manners; and he had tacitly cherished in his breast that flame of piety which was afterwards to stand him in so much stead on the greatest occasions, and in the most critical exigencies. In the last parliament which was called by the king, he was elected to represent his native town; when he soon became distinguished by the justness of his opinions, and the vigour and decision of his counsels. When the sword was drawn, he offered his services, and was appointed to a troop of horse, whose numbers were soon increased by the pious and the good, who flocked from all quarters to his standard; and in a short time he almost surpassed the greatest generals in the magnitude and rapidity of his achievements. Nor is this surprising; for he was a soldier disciplined to perfection in the knowledge of himself: he had either extinguished, or by habit had learned to subdue, the whole host of vain hopes, fears, and passions, which infest the soul. He first acquired the government of himself, and over himself acquired the most signal victories; so that on the first day he took the field against the external enemy, he was a veteran in arms, consummately practised in the toils and exigencies of war. It is not possible for me, in the narrow limits in which I circumscribe myself on this occasion, to enumerate the many towns which he has taken, the many battles which he has won. The whole surface of the British empire has been the scene of his exploits, and the theatre of his triumphs; which alone would furnish ample materials for a history, and want a copiousness of narration not inferior to the magnitude and diversity of the transactions. This alone seems to be a sufficient proof of his extraordinary and almost supernatural virtue, that by the vigour of his genius, or the excellence of his discipline, adapted not more to the necessities of war than to the precepts of Christianity, the good and the brave were from all quarters attracted to his camp, not only as to the best school of military talents, but of piety and virtue; and that during the whole war, and the occasional intervals of peace, amid so many vicissitudes of faction and of events, he retained and still retains the obedience of his troops, not by largesses or indulgence, but by his sole authority, and the regularity of his pay. In this instance his fame may rival that of Cyrus, of Epaminondas, or any of the great generals of antiquity. Hence he collected an army as numerous and as well equipped as any one ever did in so short a time; which was uniformly obedient to his orders, and dear to the affections of the citizens; which was formidable to the enemy in the field, but never cruel to those who laid down their arms; which committed no lawless ravages on the persons or the property of the inhabitants; who, when they compared their conduct with the turbulence, the intemperance, the impiety, and the debauchery of the royalists, were wont to salute them as friends, and to consider them as guests. They were a stay to the good, a terror to the evil, and the warmest advocates for every exertion of piety and virtue. Nor would it be right to pass over the name of Fairfax, who united the utmost fortitude with the utmost courage; and the spotless innocence of whose life seemed to point him out as the peculiar favourite of Heaven. Justly indeed may you be excited to receive this wreath of praise; though you have retired as much as possible from the world, and seek those shades of privacy which were the delight of Scipio. Nor was it only the enemy whom

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