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heart, or spleen. After which bit of elegance he proceeds to work." Where my morning haunts are he wisses not," the libeller had said. Milton will give him the required information. "These morning haunts are where they should "be, at home: not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring: in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour or to devotion, in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses or not much tardier to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till "the attention be weary or memory have his full fraught: then, with useful and generous labours preserving the body's "health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of Religion and "our Country's Liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations, rather than "see the ruin of our Protestantism and the enforcement of a "slavish life."--This is interesting; Milton, it seems, has for some time been practising drill! The City Artillery Ground was near, where, under Skippon and other officers of the Train-Bands, one might have daily exercise in the pike and other weapons, and in marching. Did Milton, among others, make a habit of going there of mornings? Of this more hereafter; meanwhile let us follow him into his afternoons.These, according to his antagonist, he spent in playhouses and brothels; else how could he have attained his familiarity with old cloaks, false beards, night-walkers, saltlotion, and other such terms of Corinthian slang? And, pray, Milton cleverly retorts, how does my antagonist himself know the meaning of such terms, if they can only be known in one way? But, really, one might acquire such learning without taking all that trouble. Was there not, for example, a little book called Mundus Alter et Idem, written by the Right Rev. Father in God, Joseph Hall, lately Bishop of Exeter, and now Bishop of Norwich, and which was, for its size, quite an encyclopædia of ribaldry and coarse ideas? Might not a poor student have chanced to look into that volume, and bave enriched his vocabulary accordingly? Or, even without that, had not the Universities, under the sway of Prelacy, suffi

ciently provided for the instruction even of undergraduates in the language and business of playhouses and bordelloes? Had not he, Milton, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, seen University dons, who were then students of Divinity, and who had since then risen to high places in the Church, acting in obscene Latin and English plays in the College halls, and writhing their clergy-limbs" most abominably?

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For a while Milton proceeds in this strain of fierce banter, but only by way of prelude to an autobiographic passage of noble seriousness, which is the gem of the whole pamphlet. It is that passage already referred to by us long ago, and partly quoted from, where, reviewing the whole course of his youthful life and studies, he expounds, in terms so memorable, the principle on which, from the first, he had been careful to build up his character. Let the reader here again remember that principle. It is impossible to remember it too often in a Life of Milton; for it is, without exception, the profoundest thing that Milton has told us about himself, and the key to all that we now call Miltonic. It is hinted at, or expounded, in not a few of Milton's writings, but perhaps nowhere with such roundness and precision as in the passage now under notice. It is the principle of the inevitable congruity of the fruit with the tree, of the works that a man may do in the world with that man's personality or secret and intrinsic self. More expressly, it is the principle of the necessity of moral purity, of a conscience void of offence, to a life of the highest endeavour or the highest achievement in any walk whatsoever. It is the principle that courage or magnanimity presupposes self-respect, and that consequently he who would lay up for his mature years a store of this great virtue of courage or magnanimity, who would look all men in the face unabashed, and dare all things according to the highest conceptions of his reason, must begin by preserving from his earliest youth, and in the most secret sessions of his memory of himself, a spotless title to self-respect. Applied to literature, it is the principle that he who looks forward to a career of 1 Vol. I. pp 282-284.

great things in that kind must, if he would not be frustrate of his hope, make his own life a true poem first of all. On this principle, and not on any modification of the opposite theory so much in favour-the "wild oats theory," as we ventured to call it-Milton avows that his own life had been consciously framed. It had dawned upon him at an early date, and it had gradually acquired strength and clearness, so that, amid his wide, and even indiscriminate, readings in books, it had affected his critical judgments, and determined his literary likings and dislikings. His natural niceness or fastidiousness of disposition, not to speak of his Christian training, would, he believed, have kept him free from the grosser forms of vice, even without the aid of this principle; but, with this principle co-operating, his success had been easy. Up to the moment at which he was then writing, he challenged all inquiry, however rigorous, into his past life, in those respects in which the libeller had at random assailed it; and, if he should be found to have swerved from the principle he had now avowed, let him be branded as a liar! Nay, might there not be a subtle providence in the accident that had led thus to this declaration about himself and this exposition of a principle in his private philosophy? There was probably a considerable extent of life yet before him, in which he should still be in antagonism with men high in the world's esteem and should be pursued by hostile criticism. He had willingly, in the prospect of such a life, given his enemies an advantage. He had registered an affirmation which, if at any time they could disprove it, or prove that he had begun to be unfaithful to it, they could quote to his confusion!

Of Milton's continued hostility to Hall throughout the pamphlet we have already had instances. But, indeed, in every page Hall is gored and mangled. His unfortunate Mundus Alter et Idem is again and again hoisted up, and his Satires quoted for ridicule. "What frigid conceits are these!" he exclaims, after one quotation from Hall's Sixth Satire, Book II., containing the phrase "Bridge-Street in Heaven" and the like. And this is the man who, with such

models of true Satire before him as were to be found in the Latin and Italian writers, and in the English Vision and Creed of Piers Plowman, claimed to be the prototype of English satirists! Published sermons of Hall are also referred to and sneered at; and, with elaborate irony, it is professed (and, I think, truly) that no one who knew Hall's style, and his uncandid habit of always begging a verdict in the very wording of his title-pages, could have doubted that a pamphlet entitling itself "A modest Confutation of a slanderous and scurrilous Libel, &c.," was written by Hall or under his eye. But perhaps what Hall and his son must have disliked most at the moment were Milton's comments on the fair words they had thought it politic, in their straits, to use respecting the Parliament. Quoting their phrase, "The sun looks not upon a braver, nobler Convocation than is that of King, Peers, and Commons," Milton bids the reader observe the wonderful "decorum" of the expressions. Did this "cloistered lubber," this "losel Bachelor of Art" (he surely means the son here), know no better than "to term the high and sovran Court of Parliament a Convocation?" Was this the flower of all these voluminous papers (of the father's), the best of which were predestined to no better end than to be winding-sheets in Lent for pilchards? And then, to show how an eulogium on Parliament should be written, Milton writes one himself.

The new expressions which the pamphlet contains of Milton's opinions on points of the Church question will be best exhibited in the form of extracts, with headings prefixed to them, as before:

Praise of the Parliament.-" The most of them being either of ancient and high nobility, or at least of known and well-reputed ancestry-which is a great advantage towards virtue one way, but, in respect of wealth, ease, and flattery, which accompanies. a nice and tender education, is as much a hindrance another way -the good which lay before them they took, in imitating their worthiest progenitors, and the evil which assaulted their younger years by the temptation of riches, high birth, and that usual bringing-up, perhaps too favourable or too remiss, through the strength. of an inbred goodness, and with the help of divine grace, they nobly

overcame. Yet had they a greater danger to cope with; for, being trained up in the knowledge of learning, and sent to those places which were intended to be the seed-plots of piety and the liberal arts, but were become the nurseries of superstition and empty speculation, as they were prosperous against those vices which grow upon youth out of idleness and superfluity, so were they happy in working off the harms of their abused studies and labours, correcting by the clearness of their own judgment the errors of their mis-instruction, and were, as David was, wiser than their teachers. . . . Thus, in the midst of all disadvantages and disrespects (some also at last not without imprisonment and open disgraces in the cause of their country), having given proof of themselves to be better made and framed by nature to the love and practice of virtue than others under the holiest precepts and best examples have been headstrong and prone to vice, and having, in all the trials of a firm-ingrafted honesty, not oftener buckled in the contest than given every opposition the foil, this moreover was added by Heaven, as an ornament and happiness to their virtue, that it should be neither obscure in the opinion of men, nor eclipsed for want of matter equal to illustrate itself God and man consenting in joint approbation to choose them out as worthiest above others to be both the great reformers of the Church and the restorers of the Commonwealth."

Illiteracy of the Clergy.-"This is undoubted-that, if any carpenter, smith, or weaver, were such a bungler in his trade as the greater number of them are in their profession, he would starve for any custom. And, should he exercise his manufacture as little as they do their talents, he would forget his art: and, should he mistake his tools as they do theirs, he would mar all the work he took in hand. How few of them that know how to write or speak in a pure style, much less to distinguish the ideas and various kinds of style! In Latin, barbarous and oft not without solecisms, declaiming in rugged and miscellaneous gear blown together by the four winds, and in their choice preferring the gay rankness of Apuleius, Arnobius, or any modern fustianist, before the native Latinisms of Cicero! In the Greek tongue most of them unlettered, or unentered to any sound proficiency in those Attic masters of moral wisdom and eloquence! In the Hebrew text, which is so necessary to be understood, except it be some few of them, their lips are utterly uncircumcised. No less are they out of the way in Philosophy-pestering their heads with the sapless