not perceiving the heavenly brightness and inward splendour of their more glorious evangelic ministry, with as great ambition affect to be kings, as in all their courses is easy to be observed. Their eyes ever eminent upon worldly matters, their desires ever thirsting after worldly employments, instead of diligent and fervent study in the Bible, they covet to be expert at canons and decretals, which may enable them to judge and interpose in temporal causes, however pretended ecclesiastical. Do they not hoard up pelf, seek to be potent in secular strength, in state affairs, in lands, lordships, and domains, to sway and carry all before them in high courts and privy councils, to bring into their grasp the high and principal offices of the kingdom? Have they not been known of late to check the common law, to slight and brave the indiminishable majesty of our highest court, the law-giving and sacred parliament? Do they not plainly labour to exempt churchmen from the magistrate? Yea, so presumptuously as to question and menace officers that represent the king's person, for using their authority against drunken priests?"

Yet, he continues, "they entreat us that we would not be weary of those insupportable grievances that our shoulders have hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we would think them fit to be our justices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state, though they come furnished with no more experience than they learned between the cook and the manciple, or more profoundly at the college audit, or the regent-house, or, to come to their deepest insight, at their patron's table. They would request us to endure still the rustling of their silken cassocks, and that we would burst our midriffs, rather than laugh to see them under sail in all their lawn and sarcenet,-their shrouds and tackle,—with a geometrical rhomboides upon their heads! They would bear us in hand that we must of duty still appear before them once a year in Jerusalem, like good circumcised males and females, to be taxed by the poll, to be sconced our head-money, our twopences, in their chandlery-shop book of Easter. They pray that it would please us to let them hale us, and worry us with their bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the parliament that they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in their diabolical courts; to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our wide wounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, and mercury. Surely a right-reasonable, innocent, and soft-hearted petition. O, the relenting bowels of the fathers!"

From these passages may be discovered how severely the feelings of the puritans had been exasperated by the persecutions they had endured, and in what light each party beheld the other. However, it is by no means my intention to enter into an analysis of these, or any other of his works, or to introduce specimens of the whole, which, where arguments and beauties lie so thick, would swell this prefatory notice into volumes. He seems everywhere to

Roli

maintain his positions fairly, earnestly, and with consummate skill though, in many places, there is a manifest want of courtesy, and sometimes perhaps even of Christian charity. But this is more a subject of regret than wonder. The spirit of the times was fierce; all parties being known to each other more by the interchange of injuries than of brotherly love, or anything recommended by the gospel. Abuse was constantly mistaken for logic. Among those who were in power, and those who were out, too many secretly coveted the same things-rank, distinction, wealth; as the presbyterians soon made evident when they had succeeded in ousting the prelates.

Of all Milton's prose works, none, perhaps, contains passages of greater beauty than his treatises on Divorce. While ostensibly engaged in discussing the question generally, and upon public grounds, he was, it is well known, pleading his own cause. He had married a woman, not wanting, perhaps, in the virtue on which all a woman's peculiar virtues are built, but otherwise worthless; one to whom company, the false and hollow attentions of gay chamberers, show, glitter, and banqueting, were more pleasing than the society and love of her husband. Too late, indeed, he made the discovery, when, in one short month after their marriage, the lady became tired of the unriotous tranquillity of his house, and obtained his permission to return to her father's; where, instead of the modest cheerfulness, the plain repasts, the religious and happy homeliness of a philosophic dwelling, she was surrounded by the brawling soldiers of the king's army, the most dissolute, depraved, and godless crew that ever disturbed the peace of civil society.

With the patience and calmness of a good man hoping to reclaim the partner chance had brought him, he long bore with her perverseness, beseeching her, again and again, to return to her home. His prayers were disregarded, his messengers dismissed with contempt. Upon this he naturally grew angry, and resolved, if reason and argument would effect it, to obtain legal deliverance from a woman unworthy, as all his biographers agree, ever to have been his wife. At this circumstance of his own history he evidently glances in the Paradise Lost, where Adam, incensed, and half despairing, reproaches his guilty and now submissive consort with the fatal sin they had shared together :

"But for thee

I had persisted happy, had not thy pride
And wandering vanity, when least was safe,
Rejected my forewarnir.g, and disdained
Not to be trusted, longing to be seen
Even by the Devil himself; him overweening
To overreach, but with the serpent meeting
Fooled and beguiled, by him thou, I by thee,
To trust thee from my side, imagined wise,
Constant, mature, proof against all assaults,

And understood not all was but a show
Rather than solid virtue, all but a rib
Crooked by nature, bent as now appears,
More to the part sinister, from me drawn,
Well if thrown out, as supernumerary

To my just number found. O, why did God,
Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the world at once
With men as angels without feminine,
Or find some other way to generate

Mankind? This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befall, innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares,
And strait conjunction with this sex.

For either

He never shall find out fit mate, but such

As some misfortune brings him, or mistake,
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,

Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
By a far worse; or if she love, withheld

By parents; or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame :
Which infinite calamity shall cause

To human life, and household peace confound."

Book x. 873-908.

In handling this subject, it is easy to see he was personally concerned, so frequently and with such torturing eloquence does he pourtray domestic infelicity. He speaks of the husband, overtoiled with long-continued laborious thought, sitting down lonely by his fireside, a prey to that melancholy which intellectual exertion commonly leaves behind it, not finding in his wife a fit companion, but rather a cold image of clay, devoid of sympathy, devoid of love. And we see throughout that he had no children upon whom his heart might otherwise have showered its affections. This, the sweetest of human enjoyments, he had not yet known; for he was childless. And as far as it could be done-much further than at first view would be deemed possible, he has bared, in these works, the secrets of his bosom, and admitted the reader into communion close as that of friend with friend. He has exhibited to all those who know how to regard it, a picture of his soul, for the truth of which every man who attentively reads will be answerable. And he who can rise from the contemplation of this portrait, without intense love and admiration for the great and godlike spirit it represents, must be cased more completely in stoicism than Zeno himself.

Many of the finest passages in his controversial writings are sometimes spoken of, even by favourable judges, as declamation. But here, at least, he does not declaim. He reasons, and supports his reasoning by so many authorities and examples, fetched from the Scriptures, or from the most unobjectionable authors of ancient

and modern times, that he overwhelms and bears down before him all his antagonists, triumphantly establishing the doctrine, that divorce, properly regulated, can be no other than an important blessing to society. Timid and ill-judging persons, however, though convinced of this verity, often hesitate to support it, from the supposition that some truths may prove prejudicial to society; which, though they intend it not, is a most impious and unphilosophical notion, for it supposes God to be in contradiction with himself, to have established laws and relations which it would be destructive to human kind to make known.

Milton was wholly incapable of cherishing fancies of this kind. He saw every part of the economy of the universe in harmony with every other part; and even thus early undertook

"To vindicate eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to man."

He, therefore, feared not to encounter the obloquy he foresaw would be heaped upon him, for thus endeavouring, by one bold effort, "to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of man," insisting on the necessity of recovering domestic liberty, and of preceding the reforms of the state by a more important reform in the household laws, which, ill understood, had banished peace and love from the Christian hearth.

His ideas of woman must be sought for in this treatise, not in Johnson. Here we find him representing her as man's best companion, and in the sense most flattering to the sex, as the companion of his intellect, with whom he might well be content, though no other rational creature existed, to spend a life devoted to each other. For St. Augustin, in his commentary on the words,"And the Lord said, It is not good that man should be alone,”. having contended that, excepting for the continuation of the human race, "manly friendship, in all other regard, had been a more becoming solace for Adam, than to spend so many secret years in an empty world with one woman;" Milton replies: "But our writers deservedly reject this crabbed opinion; and defend that there is a peculiar comfort in the married state which no other society affords. No mortal nature can endure either in the actions of religion, or study of wisdom, without sometime slackening the cords of intense thought and labour; which, lest we should think faulty, God himself conceals us not his own recreations before the world was built : 'I was, saith the Eternal Wisdom, daily his delight, playing always before him.' And to him indeed wisdom is as a high tower of pleasure, but to us a steep hill, and we toiling ever about the bottom: he executes with ease the exploits of his omnipotence, as easy as with us it is to will: but no worthy enterprise can be done by us without continual plodding and wearisomeness to our faint and sensitive abilities. We cannot therefore be always contem

plative, or pragmatical abroad, but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling; and, like a glad youth in wandering vacancy, may keep her holidays to joy and harmless pastime. Which as she cannot well do without company, so in no company so well as where the different sex in most resembling unlikeness, and most unlike resemblance, cannot but please best, and be pleased in the aptitude of that variety. Whereof lest we should be too timorous, in the awe that our flat sages would form us and dress us, wisest Solomon among his gravest proverbs countenances a kind of ravishment and erring fondness in the entertainment of wedded leisure."

But where this sweet intercommunion of thought, in which the beauty of the gentler spirit exercises its soothing influence over man's sterner and rougher nature, is not found, "the solitariness of man, which God had mainly and principally ordered to prevent by marriage, hath no remedy, but lies under a worse condition than the loneliest single life. For in single life, the absence and remoteness of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himself, or to seek with hope; but here the continual sight of his deluded thoughts, without cure, must needs be to him, if especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel."

"But some are ready to object, that the disposition ought seriously to be considered before. But let them know again, that for all the wariness can be used, it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice; and we have plenty of examples. The soberest and best governed men are least practised in these affairs; and who knows not that the bashful muteness of a virgin may ofttimes hide all the unliveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for conversation? Nor is there that freedom of access granted or presumed, as may suffice to a perfect discerning till too late; and where any indisposition is suspected, what more usual than the persuasion of friends, that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all? And lastly, it is not strange, though many, who have spent their youth chastely, are in some things not so quicksighted, while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch; nor is it therefore that for a modest error a man should forfeit so great a happiness, and no charitable means to release him. Since they who have lived most loosely, by reason of their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces to teach them experience; whereas the sober man honouring the appearance of modesty, and hoping well of every social virtue under that veil, may easily chance to meet with a mind to all due conversation inaccessible, and to all the more estimable and superior purposes of matrimony useless and almost lifeless. And, what a