before (at Berwick in 1639, in Edinburgh during the royal visit to Scotland in 1641, and more recently during the Uxbridge Treaty of Feb. 1644-5), and had always singled him out as not only the most able, but also the most likeable, man of his perverse tribe. He had therefore received him graciously on his coming to Newcastle; and, though there arrived subsequently from Scotland three other Presbyterian ministers, Mr. Robert Blair, Mr. Robert Douglas, and Mr. Andrew Cant, all commissioned by the General Assembly to work upon his Majesty's conscience, it was still with Henderson that he preferred to converse. The main subject of their conversations was, of course, the question between Presbytery and Episcopacy. Could the King lawfully do what was required of him? Could he lawfully now, on any mere plea of State-necessity, give up that Church of England in the principles of which he had been educated, which he had sworn at his coronation to maintain, and which he still believed in his conscience to be the true and divinelyappointed form of a Church? If Mr. Henderson could prove to his Majesty even now that Episcopacy was not of divine appointment, then the plea of State-necessity might avail, and his Majesty might see his way more clearly! It was on this point that the repeated conversations of the King and Henderson at Newcastle did undoubtedly turn. Nay, there was more than mere conversation: there was an elaborate discussion in writing. The King, it is said, would fain have had a little council of Anglican Divines called to assist him; but, as that could not be, he was willing to adopt Henderson's suggestion of a paper debate between themselves. Accordingly, there is yet extant, in the Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolina or Printed Works of Charles I., what purports to be the actual series of Letters exchanged between the King and Henderson. The King opens the correspondence on the 29th of May; Henderson answers June 3; the King's second letter. is dated June 6; Henderson's reply does not come till June 17; the King's third letter is dated June 22; Henderson replies July 2; and two short letters of the King, being the fourth and fifth on his side, are both dated July 16.

There the correspondence ends, Henderson having, it is believed, thought it fit that his Majesty should have the last word. In the King's letters, as they are printed, one observes a stately politeness to Henderson throughout, with very considerable reasoning power, and sometimes a really smart phrase; in Henderson's what strikes one is the studied respectfulness and delicacy of the manner, combined with grave decision in the matter. The controversy, whether in speech or in writing, was unreal on the King's part, and for the purpose of procrastination only; and Henderson, while painfully engaging in it, had known this but too well. His heart was already heavy with approaching death. He had been ill when he came to Newcastle; and in July, when he is said to have let the King have the last word in the written correspondence, he was hardly able to go about. His friends in London, hearing this, were greatly concerned. "It is part of my prayer to God," Baillie writes to him affectionately on the 4th of August, "to restore you to health, and continue your service a time: we never had so much need of you as now." In the same letter, referring to the King's obstinacy, and to the grief on that account which he believes to be preying on Henderson, he implores him to take courage, shake off" melancholious thoughts," and "digest what cannot be gotten amended." But Baillie knew what was coming. "Mr. Henderson is dying, most of heartbreak, at Newcastle," he wrote, three days later, to Spang in Holland. No! it was not to be at Newcastle. "Give me back one hour of Scotland: let me see it ere I die." Some such wish was in Henderson's mind, and they managed to convey him by sea to Edinburgh. He arrived there on the 11th of August, and was taken either to his own house, in which he had not been for three years, or to some other that was more convenient. He rallied a little, so as to be able to dine with one friend and talk cheerfully, but never again left his room. There his brother-ministers of the city, and such others as were privileged, gathered round him, and took his hands; and the rest of the city lay around, making inquiries; and prayers went up for him in all the churches. On the

19th of August, eight days after his return, he died, aged sixty-three years, and there began a mourning in the Scottish Israel over the loss of their greatest man. They buried him in the old churchyard of Greyfriars, where his grave and tombstone are yet to be seen.1

The last of Baillie's letters to Henderson, dated Aug. 13, 1646, contains a curious passage. "Ormond's Pacification "with the Irish," writes Baillie, " is very unseasonable; the placing of Hopes (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about "the Prince as his teacher is ill taken." The Hopes here mentioned is no other than THOMAS HOBBES, then just appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales in Paris. As the letter must have reached Edinburgh after Henderson was dead, he was not troubled with this additional piece of bad news before he left the world. Doubtless, however, he had heard of Hobbes, and formed some imagination of that dreadful person and his opinions. Hobbes indeed was now in his fifty-eighth year, or not much younger than the dying Henderson himself. But he was of slower constitution, and had begun his real work late in life, as if with a presentiment that he had plenty of time before him, and did not need to be in a hurry. He was to outlive Henderson thirty-three

years.

"King's." After all, however, Godwin's sceptical inquiry leaves a shrewd somewhat behind it. For, granted that a written correspondence did take place, "the question remains," as Godwin asserts, "whether the papers now to be "found in King Charles's works are the 66 very papers that were so exchanged "at Newcastle." The suspicion here

suggested tells, in my mind, more against the King's letters as we now have them than against Henderson's. The King's letters, we may be sure, would be pretty carefully edited in 1649; and what may have been the amount and kind of editing thought allowable ?

CHAPTER III.

EFFECTS OF MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA-HIS INTENTION OF ANOTHER MARRIAGE: HIS WIFE'S RETURN AND RECONCILIATION WITH HIM -REMOVAL FROM ALDERSGATE STREET ΤΟ BARBICAN-FIRST EDITION OF MILTON'S COLLECTED POEMS: HUMPHREY MOSELEY THE BOOKSELLER-TWO DIVORCE SONNETS AND SONNET TO HENRY LAWES-CONTINUED PRESBYTERIAN ATTACKS ON MILTON: HIS ANTI-PRESBYTERIAN SONNET OF REPLY-SURRENDER OF OXFORD: CONDITION OF THE POWELL FAMILY-THE POWELLS IN LONDON: MORE FAMILY PERPLEXITIES: BIRTH OF MILTON'S FIRST CHILD.

THE effect of Milton's Areopagitica, immediately after its publication in November 1644, and throughout the year 1645, seems to have been very considerable. Parliament, indeed, took no formal notice of the eloquent pleading for a repeal of their Licensing Ordinance of June 1643. As a body, they were not ripe for the discussion of the question of a Free Press, and the Ordinance remained in force, at least as an instrument which might be applied in cases of flagrant transgression. But public opinion was affected, and the general agitation for Toleration took more and more the precise and practical form into which Milton's treatise had directed it: viz. an impatience of the censorship, and a demand for the liberty of free philosophising and free printing. "Such was the effect "of our author's Areopagitica," says Toland, in his sketch of Milton's life, "that the following year Mabol, a licenser, offered "reasons against licensing, and, at his own request, was discharged that office."1 Toland is in a slight mistake here, at least in his dating. The person whom he means-Gilbert 1 Toland's Memoir of Milton prefixed to the Amsterdam (1698) edition of Milton's Prose Works, p. 23.