Chapter 14

MILTON AMONG THE SECTARIES, AND IN A "WORLD OF DISESTEEM": STORY OF MRS. ATTAWAY--SAMUEL HARTLIB, JOHN DURIE, AND JOHN AMOS COMENIUS: SCHEMES OF A REFORMED EDUCATION, AND PROJECT OF A LONDON UNIVERSITY--MILTON'S _TRACT ON EDUCATION_, AND METHOD WITH HIS PUPILS--HIS SECOND DIVORCE TRACT, OR COMPILATION FROM BUCER--MR. HERBERT PALMER'S ATTACK ON MILTON FROM THE PULPIT--MILTON AND THE STATIONERS' COMPANY: THEIR ACCUSATION OF HIM IN A PETITION TO THE COMMONS--HIS _AREOPAGITICA_, OR SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING--ANGER OF THE STATIONERS, AND THEIR COMPLAINT AGAINST MILTON TO THE LORDS: CONSEQUENCE OF THE COMPLAINT--THE DIVORCE QUESTION CONTINUED: PUBLICATION OF MR. HERBERT PALMER'S SERMON, AND FARTHER ATTACKS ON MILTON BY PRYNNE, DR. FEATLEY, AND AN ANONYMOUS PAMPHLETEER--_TETRACHORDON AND COLASTERION_: THEIR REPLIES TO THE ASSAILANTS.

Ever since August 1643, when Milton had published his extraordinary _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, but more especially since Feb. 1643-4, when he had published the second and enlarged edition of it, with his name in full, and the dedication to Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, his reputation with orthodox English society had been definite enough. He was one of those dreadful Sectaries! Nay he was a Sectary more odious than most; for his was a _moral_ heresy. What was Independency, what was Anabaptism, what was vague Antinomianism, compared with this heresy of the household, this loosening of the holy relation on which all civil society depended? How detestable the doctrine that, when two married people found they had made a mistake in coming together, or at least when the husband could declare before God and human witnesses his irreconcilable dissatisfaction with his wife, then it was right that the two should be separated, with liberty to each to find a new mate! True, it was an able man who had divulged this heresy, one who had brought applauses from Cambridge, who was said to have written beautiful English poems, who had served the cause of Parliament by some splendid pamphlets for Church-reformation and against Episcopacy, and who had in these pamphlets encountered even the great Bishop Hall. All this only made the doctrine more dangerous, the aberration more lamentable. This Mr. Milton must be avoided, and denounced as a Sectary of the worst kind! Some said it was all owing to the conduct of his wife, a rank Royalist, who had deserted him and gone back to her friends! If that were the case, he was to be pitied; but perhaps there were two sides to that story too!

There must have been much gossip of this kind, about Milton and his Divorce Treatise, in the booksellers' shops near St. Paul's, and even round the Parliament in Westminster, in the early months of 1644. The gossip may have affected Milton's relations with some of his former friends and acquaintances. If Bishop Hall, when he first saw the treatise, and perceived its literary ability, "blushed for his age" that so "scandalous" a thing should have appeared, and if even Howell the letter-writer, in his prison, thought it the impudent production of "a poor shallow-brained puppy," what could Milton's orthodox and reverend Smectymnuan friends--Marshall, Calamy, Young, Newcomen, and Spurstow-- think or say about it? Shocked they must have been; and, knowing Milton's temper, and with what demeanour he would front any remonstrances of theirs, they probably left him alone, and became scarcer in their visits to Aldersgate Street. It would not do to keep up the Smectymnuan connexion too visibly after what had happened. Or, if Young could not break off so easily, but would still call to see his old pupil, and to talk with old Mr. Milton about the Bread Street days, how the good man must have yearned to speak sometimes when the old gentleman was out of the way, and he and Milton were alone. "O my dear Mr. Milton, how much we are all concerned about that pamphlet! I am not going to argue it with you; I know you too well, and how little influence my reasonings could have with you now in any such matter; and it is my comfort at least to be able to tell some of my Assembly friends that, if they knew you as well as I do, they would be sure that nothing you do but is done in a great spirit and with a high intention. But, dear me! it is a terrible opinion you have broached!" To something like this Milton may have listened, more or less patiently; or he may have imagined it in Young's mind, if it was not uttered. The mutual regard between Young and his old pupil did not suffer so much from the trial but that we find Milton still willing to acknowledge publicly the connexion that had subsisted between them.

On the whole, it is certain that one consequence of the outcry about Milton's treatise among the London Presbyterians, and especially among the city clergy and the Divines of the Assembly, was to drive Milton more arid more into the society of those who had begun to dislike and to dread the ascendancy of the Presbyterians. Finding himself, almost from the first publication of the treatise, as he tells us, in "a world of disesteem" on account of it, he naturally held intercourse more and more with those who, though they may not have approved of _his_ particular heresy, yet, as being themselves voted heretics on other accounts, were more easy in their judgments of all extreme opinions. I believe, in fact, that, could Milton's acquaintanceships in London from the winter of 1643- 4 onwards be traced and recovered, they would be found to have been chiefly among the Independents, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, and other Tolerationists. What were the religious opinions of the Lady Margaret Ley, that "woman of great wit and ingenuity," and her husband Captain Hobson, "a very accomplished gentleman," with both of whom he was so intimate about this time, and who, as Phillips tells us, "had a particular honour for him and took much delight in his company," must be left to conjecture. [Footnote: It has been in my mind whether the Captain Hobson who was the Lady Ley's husband, and whom Dagdale describes as "... Hobson of... in the Isle of Wight, Esq.," can by possibility have been the same person as the Baptist preacher, Paul Hobson, who was also a Captain in the Parliamentary Army, and who figures much in Edwards's _Gangræna_ and in other books of the time, under the express name of "Captain Hobson," as a leading Sectary, though Edwards will have it that he was originally "a tailor from Buckinghamshire" (_antè_, p. 148). The supposition seems so absurd that I hardly like to mention that I spent hours in turning over Paul Hobson's published sermons and Baptist treatises in case I might come on any confirmation of it--which I did _not_.]

From Milton's Sonnet to the Lady Margaret one may safely infer at least that she was a woman of liberal principles as well as wit. Probably her house was the resort of a good many of what would now be called the "advanced" or "strong-minded" Christians of both sexes then in London; and Milton may there have extended his acquaintance with such, and have even been an object of peculiar interest to some of one sex, as "that handsome, fair gentleman, now talking to Lady Margaret, who is a great scholar and a poet, and whose wife has left him shamefully, so that he wants to be divorced from her, and has written a book which quite proves it." Milton's acquaintance with Roger Williams, at all events, is almost certainly to be dated from Williams's visit to England in 1643-4, when he was writing his _Bloody Tenent_; and if Milton, at the same time, did not become acquainted with John Goodwin of Coleman Street, it would be a wonder.

STORY OF MRS. ATTAWAY.

We must, I am sorry to say, descend lower in the society of London, in and about 1644, than the Lady Margaret Ley's drawing-room, or the level of marked men like Williams and Goodwin, if we would understand how Milton's Divorce opinion had begun to operate, and with what consequences of its operation his name was associated. The reader may remember a Mrs. Attaway, mentioned by us among both the Baptists and the Seekers, and as perhaps the most noted of all the women-preachers in London (_antè_, pp. 149, 153). She was, it seems, a "lace-woman, dwelling in Bell Alley in Coleman Street," and preaching on week-day afternoons in that neighbourhood, with occasional excursions to other parts of the city where rooms could be had. Sometimes other "preaching-women" were with her, and the gatherings, though at first of her own sex only, soon attracted curious persons of the other. From the descriptions of what passed in some of them, it would appear that, though the meetings were for worship, and there were regular discourses by Mrs. Attaway and others, free talk and criticism was permitted to all present, so that the conventicle took on sometimes the aspect of a religious debating society. Well, Mrs. Attaway, among others, had got hold of Milton's Divorce Treatise, and had been reading it. "Two gentlemen of the Inns of Court, civil and well-disposed men," who had gone "out of novelty" to hear her, afterwards told _Gangræna_ Edwards of some "discourse they had had with her." Among other passages she "spoke to them of Master Milton's _Doctrine of Divorce_, and asked them what they thought of it; saying "it was a point to be considered of, and that she, for her part, would look more into it, for she had an unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the language of Canaan." Edwards does not give the date of this conversation with Mrs. Attaway; and, though presumably in 1644, it may have been later. He evidently introduces it, however, in order to implicate Milton in the subsequent break-down, which he also reports, of the poor woman morally. For, if Mr. Edwards is to be believed, Mrs. Attaway did "look more into" Milton's doctrine, and at length acted upon it. Some time in 1645 she abjured her "unsanctified husband" Mr. Attaway, who, besides being unsanctified, was then absent in the army, leaving her alone in her lace-shop, and transferred herself to a man named William Jenney, an occasional preacher, who was much more sanctified, and was also on the spot. Mr. Jenney had, unfortunately, a wife already, some children by her, and one expected; but ho too had been meditating on the Divorce Doctrine, and had used his Christian liberty. Mr. Edwards had been most particular in his investigations. He had actually procured from a sure hand the copies of two letters-taken from the original letters, and compared by a minister with the originals--one of William Jenney to his wife since he went away with Mistress Attaway, the other of Mistress Attaway to William Jenney before his going away." He refrains from printing the letters _verbatim_, as they were too long; but he gives extracts. "I thought good to write to you these few lines," writes Jenney to the deserted Mrs. Jenney, Feb. 15, 1645, "to tell you that, because you have been to me rather a disturber of my body and soul than to be a meet help for me---- but I silence! And, for looking for me to come to you again, I shall never come to you again any more. I shall send unto you never no more concerning anything." If this actually was Jenney's letter, Mrs. Attaway was worth ten of him, and deserved a better second. "Dearest friend and well-beloved in the Lord," so she had begun the letter sent to him while he was still Mrs. Jenney's, and which had got into Mrs. Jenney's hands, "I am unspeakably sorry in respect of thy sufferings, I being the object that occasioned it." The sufferings were Mrs. Jenney's bastings of him because he was always with Mrs. Attaway. In good time, Mrs. Attaway goes on to say, he would be delivered from these. "When Jehoshaphat knew not what to do, he looked to the Lord. Let _us_ look to Him, believing confidently in Him with the faith of Jesus; and no question but we shall be delivered. In the mean season I shall give up my heart and affections to thee in the Lord; and, whatsoever I have or am in Him which is our Head, thou shalt command it." The event, according to Edwards, was that Mr. Jenney and Mrs. Attaway eloped together, Mrs. Attaway having persuaded Jenney that she should never die, but that, in obedience to a heavenly message, they must go to Jerusalem, and repair that city in anticipation of the bringing of all the Saints to it in ships to be sent from Tarshish. I suspect they went only to Jericho. [Footnote: This story of Mrs. Attaway is from Edwards's _Gangræna_, Part II. pp. 31, 32, 113- 115; _Fresh Discovery_, appended to Second Part of _Gangræna_, p. 9; and Third Part of _Gangræna_, pp. 25-27 and 188. See also Baillie's _Dissuasive_, Part II. pp. l00 and 123-4.]

All this on the faith of Mr. Edwards's statements in the _Gangræna_. But really one should not judge of even a poor enthusiastic woman, dead two hundred years ago, on that sole authority. Never was there a more nauseous creature of the pious kind than this Presbyterian Paul Pry of 1644-46. He revelled in scandals, and kept a private office for the receipt of all sorts of secret information, by word of mouth or letter, that could be used against the Independents and the Sectaries. [Footnote: Richard Baxter, as he himself tells us, sent communications from the country to Edwards. His correspondents were legion, but he concealed their names.] Yet there was a kind of coarse business-like conscientiousness in the toad; and, though he was credulous and unscrupulous in his collections of scandal, I do not believe he invented documents or lied deliberately. I do not doubt, therefore, that Mrs. Attaway, whether she went ultimately to Jericho or to Jerusalem, did know of Milton's Divorce Doctrine, and had extracted suggestions from it suitable to her circumstances. For, indeed, the Doctrine was likely to find not a few whose circumstances it suited. Mr. Edwards's book is strewn with instances of persons who had even found out a tantamount doctrine for themselves--men who had left their wives, or wanted to do so, and wives who had left their husbands, and who, without having seen Milton's treatise, defended their act or their wish on grounds of religion and natural law. Nay, in the frenzy of inquiry which had taken possession of the English mind, everything appertaining to Marriage and the Marriage-institution was being plucked up for fundamental re- investigation. There were actually persons who were occupying themselves intently with questioning the forbidden degrees of Consanguinity and Affinity in marriage, and who had not only come to the easy conclusion that marriage with a deceased wife's sister is perfectly legitimate, but had worked out a general theologico-physiological speculation to the effect that the marriage of near relatives is in all cases peculiarly proper, and perhaps the more proper in proportion to the nearness of the relationship. This, I imagine, was a very small sect. [Footnote: But, unless Edwards and Baillie were both wrong, there _was_ some such sect. See _Gangræna_, Part III. p. 187, and, more particularly, Baillie's _Dissuasive_, Part II. pp. 100 and 122-3.]

Let us re-ascend into more pleasant air. There was one rather notable person in London, of the highly respectable sort, though, decidedly among the free opinionists, whose acquaintance Milton did make about this time, if he had not made it before, and who must be specially introduced to the reader. This was SAMUEL HARTLIB.

SAMUEL HARTLIB: JOHN DURIE: JOHN AMOS COMENIUS, AND HIS SPECULATIONS ABOUT A REFORMED EDUCATION--PROJECT OF A LONDON UNIVERSITY.

Everybody knew Hartlib. He was a foreigner by birth, being the son of a Polish merchant, of German extraction, who had left Poland when that country fell under Jesuit rule, and had settled in Elbing in Prussia in very good circumstances. Twice married before to Polish ladies, this merchant had married, in Prussia, for his third wife, the daughter of a wealthy English merchant of Dantzic; and thus our Hartlib, their son, though Prussian-born and with Polish connexions, could reckon himself half-English. The date of his birth was probably about the beginning of the century, _i.e._ he may have been eight or ten years older than Milton. He appears to have first visited England in or about 1628, and from that time, though he made frequent journeys to the Continent, London had been his head-quarters. Here, with a residence in the City, he had carried on business as a "merchant," with extensive foreign correspondences, and very respectable family connexions. One of his aunts (sisters of his mother) had married a Mr. Clark, the son of a former Lord Mayor of London, and afterwards a Sir Richard Smith, Knight and Privy Councillor, and again a Sir Edward Savage. The other aunt had married a country gentleman, named Peak. A cousin of Hartlib's, the daughter of the first and wealthier aunt, Lady Smith, became the wife of Sir Anthony Irby, M.P. for Boston in the Long Parliament. But it did not require such family connexions to make Hartlib at home in English society. The character of the man would have made him at home anywhere. He was one of those persons, now styled "philanthropists" or "friends of progress," who take an interest in every question or project of their time promising social improvement, have always some iron in the fire, are constantly forming committees or writing letters to persons of influence, and altogether live for the public. By the common consent of all who have explored the intellectual and social history of England in the seventeenth century, he is one of the most interesting and memorable figures of that whole period. He is interesting both for what he did himself and also on account of the number and intimacy of his contacts with other interesting people. [Footnote: Memoir of Hartlib by H. Dircks, pp 2-6, where there are extracts from an autobiographical letter of Hartlib to Worthington, written in 1660. "The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington," edited by James Crossley, Esq., F.S.A. (Chetham Society), contains many letters from Hartlib to Worthington, between 1655 and 1662, but not this one. Mr. Crossley's Diary and Correspondence of Worthington, so far as it has gone, is one of the best edited books known to me, the footnotes being very nuggets of biographical lore; and it is to be regretted that the connected notices of Worthington, Hartlib, and Durie, postponed by Mr. Crossley until the work should be completed, have not yet appeared.]

An early friend of Hartlib, associated with him long before the date at which we are now arrived, was that John Durie of whom, and his famous scheme for a union of all the Protestant Churches of Europe, we have already had to take some account (Vol. II. pp. 367-8 and 517-8). Their intimacy must have begun in Hartlib's native town of Elbing in Prussia, where, I now find, Durie was residing in 1628, as minister to the English company of merchants in the town, and where, in that very year, I also now find, Durie had the great idea of his life first suggested to him by the Swedish Dr. Godeman. [Footnote: The proof is in statements of Hartlib's own in a Tract of his published in 1641 under the title of "A Briefe Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiasticall Peace amongst Protestants."] Among Durie's first disciples in the idea must certainly have been Hartlib; and it does not seem improbable that, when Hartlib left Prussia, in or about 1628, to settle in England, it was with an understanding that he was to be an agent or missionary for Durie's idea among the English. That he did so act, and that he was little less of an enthusiast for Durie's idea than Durie himself, there is the most positive evidence. Thus, in a series of letters, preserved in the State Paper Office, from Durie abroad to the diplomatist Sir Thomas Roe, of various dates between April 1633 and Feb. 1637-8, there is incessant mention of Hartlib. In the first of these letters, dated from Heilbron April 2/12, 1633, Durie, among other things, begs Roe "to help Mr. Hartlib with a Petition of Divines of those quarters concerning an Edition of a Body of Divinity gathered out of English authors, a work which will be exceeding profitable, but will require divers agents and an exact ordering of the work." In a subsequent letter Durie speaks of having sent Roe, "by Mr. Hartlib, whose industry is specially recommended," an important proposition made by the Swedish Chancellor Oxenstiern; and in still later letters Roe is requested by Durie to show Hartlib not only Durie's letters to himself, but also letters about the progress of his scheme which he has enclosed to Roe for the Archbishop of Canterbury (Abbot) and the Bishop of London (Laud). At this point, accordingly, July 20, 1633, there is a letter of Roe's to the Archbishop, from which it appears that Hartlib was made the bearer of Durie's letter to his Grace. Roe recommends the blessed work in which Durie is engaged, says that it seems to him and Durie that "there is nothing wanting but the public declaration of his Majesty and the Church of England" in its favour, and beseeches the Archbishop "to give his countenance to the bearer," described in the margin as "Mr. Hartlib, a Prussian." As Abbot was then within fifteen days of his death, nothing can have come of the application to him; and, as we already know, his successor Laud was a far less hopeful subject for Durie's idea, even though recommended by Roe and explained by Hartlib. In fact, he thought it mischievous moonshine; and, instead of giving Durie the encouragement which he wanted, he wrote to the English agent at Frankfort, instructing him to show Durie no countenance whatever. Durie felt the rebuff sorely. In England, he writes, he must depend now chiefly on Roe, who could still do much privately, apart from Laud's approbation. "Mr. Hartlib will send anything to Durie which Roe would have communicated to him in a secret way." So in June 1634; and fourteen months later (Aug. 1635) Durie, who had meanwhile removed to the Hague, again writes to Roe and again relies on Hartlib. The Dutch, he says, are slow to take up his scheme; and he can think of nothing better in the circumstances than that Roe in England should collect "all the advices and comments of the best divines of the age" on the subject, and have them printed. His very best agent in such a business would be Hartlib, "a man well known, beloved and trusted by all sides, a man exceeding painful, diligent and cordially affected to these endeavours, and one that for such works had lost himself by too much charity." On independent grounds it would be well to find him "some place suitable for his abilities, which might rid him of the undeserved necessities whereunto his public-heartedness had brought him;" but in this special employment he would be invaluable, being "furnished with the Polish, Dutch, English, and Latin languages, perfectly honest and trusty, discreet, and well versed in affairs." In the same strain in subsequent letters. Thus, from Amsterdam Dec. 7/17, Roe is thanked for having bestowed some gratuity on Hartlib, and Hartlib is described as, next to Roe, "the man in the world whom Durie loves and honours most for his virtues and good offices in Durie's cause." At the same time Durie "prays God to free Hartlib from his straits and set him a little on horseback," and adds, "His spirit is so large that it has lost itself in zeal to good things." Again, from Amsterdam Jan 25/Feb 4, 1635-6, Durie writes to Roe and encloses a letter to be sent to his (Durie's) diocesan in Hartlib's behalf. "Mr. Hartlib," Durie says to Roe, "has furnished his lordship (the diocesan) with intelligence from foreign parts for two or three years, and has not yet got any consideration. Perhaps his lordship knows not how Hartlib has fallen into decay for being too charitable to poor scholars, and for undertaking too freely the work of schooling and education of children. If Hartlib and Roe were not in England, Durie would despair of doing any good." The diocesan referred to is probably Juxon, Bishop of London; but, two years later, we find Roe recommending Durie's business and Hartlib personally to another prelate, Bishop Morton of Durham. Writing from St. Martin's Lane, Feb. 17, 1637-8, Sir Thomas "presents the Bishop with a letter from Mr. Durie, and one from Durie to the writer, from which the Bishop may collect his state, and his constant resolution to pursue his business as long as God gives him bread to eat. Such a spirit the writer has never met, daunted with nothing, and only relying upon Providence. ... Sir Thomas in Michaelmas term sent the Bishop a great packet from Samuel Hartlib, correspondent of Durie, an excellent man, and of the same spirit. If the Bishop like his way, Hartlib will constantly write to him, and send all the passages both of learning and public affairs, no man having better information, especially _in re literariâ_." [Footnote: The quotations in this paragraph are from the late Mr. Brace's accurate abstracts of Durie's and Roe's letters (sixteen in all) given in the six volumes of Calendars of the Domestic State Papers from 1633 to 1638.]

These letters enable us to see Hartlib as he was in 1637, a Prussian naturalized in London, between thirty and forty years of age, nominally a merchant of some kind, but in reality a man of various hobbies, and conducting a general news-agency, partly as a means of income and partly from sheer zeal in certain public causes interesting to himself. His zeal in this way, and in private benevolences to needy scholars and inventors, had even outrun prudence; so that, though he could reckon his means at between 300_l_. and 400_l_. a year, [Footnote: This appears from the letter of his to Worthington, of date Aug. 3, 1660, quoted in Dircks's Memoir (p. 4), where he says, "Let it not seem a paradox to you, if I tell you, as long as I have lived in England, by wonderful providences, I have spent yearly out of my own betwixt 300_l._ and 400_l._ sterling a year."] that had not sufficed for his openhandedness. Durie's great project for a reconciliation of the Calvinists and Lutherans, and a union of all the Protestant Churches of Europe on some broad basis of mutual tolerance or concession, had hitherto been his hobby in chief. He had other hobbies, however, of a more literary nature, and of late he had been undertaking too freely some work appertaining to "the schooling and education of children."

This last fact, which we learn hazily from Durie's letters and Roe's, we should have known, abundantly and distinctly, otherwise. There are two publications of Hartlib's, of the years 1637 and 1638 respectively, the first of a long and varied series that were to come from his pen. Now, both of these are on the subject of Education. "_Conatuum Comenianorum Præludia, ex Bibliothecâ S. H.: Oxoniæ, Excudebat Gulielmus Turnerus, Academia Typographus_, 1637" ("Preludes of the Endeavours of Comenius, from the Library of S. H.: Oxford, Printed by William Turner, University Printer, 1637")--such is the general title of the first of these publications. It is a small quarto, and consists first of a Preface "_Ad Lectorem_" (to the Reader), signed "Samuel Hartlibius," and then of a foreign treatise which it is the object of the publication to introduce to the attention of Oxford and of the English nation; which treatise has this separate title:--"_Porta Sapientiæ Reserata; sive Pansophiæ Christianæ Seminarium: hoc est, Nova, Compendiosa et Solida omnes Scientias et Artes, et quicquid manifesti vel occulti est quod ingenio humano penetrare, solertiæ imitari, linguae eloqui, datur, brevius, verius, melius, quam hactenus, Addiscendi Methodus: Auctore Reverendo Clarissimoque viro Domino Johanne Amoso Comenio_" ("The Gate of Wisdom Opened; or the Seminary of all Christian Knowledge: being a New, Compendious, and Solid Method of Learning, more briefly, more truly, and better than hitherto, all Sciences and Arts, and whatever there is, manifest or occult, that it is given to the genius of man to penetrate, his craft to imitate, or his tongue to speak: The author that Reverend and most distinguished man, Mr. John Amos Comenius"). So far as I have been able to trace, this is the first publication bearing the name of Hartlib. Copies of it must be scarce, but there is at least one in the British Museum. There also is a copy of what, on the faith of an entry in the Registers of the Stationers' Company, I have to record as his second publication. "Oct. 17, 1638: Samuel Gillebrand entered for his copy, under the hands of Mr. Baker and Mr. Rothwell, warden, a Book called _Comenii Pansophiæ Prodromus et Didactica Dissertatio_ (Comenius's Harbinger of Universal Knowledge and Treatise on Education), published by Sam. Hartlib." [Footnote: My notes from Stationers' Registers.] When the thing actually appeared, in small duodecimo, it had the date "1639" on the title-page.

The canvas becomes rather crowded; but I am bound to introduce here to the reader "that reverend and most distinguished man, Mr. John Amos Comenius," who had been winning on Hartlib's heart by his theories of Education and Pansophia, prepossessed though that heart was by Durie and his scheme of Pan-Protestantism.

He was an Austro-Slav, born in 1592, at Comnia in Moravia, whence his name Jan Amos Komensky, Latinized into Joannes Amosius Comenius. His parents were Protestants of the sect known as the Bohemian or Moravian Brethren, who traced their origin to the followers of Huss. Left an orphan in early life, he was poorly looked after, and was in his sixteenth year before he began to learn Latin. Afterwards he studied in various places, and particularly at Herborn in the Duchy of Nassau; whence he returned to his native Moravia in 1614, to become Rector of a school at Prerau. Here it was that he first began to study and practise new methods of teaching, and especially of grammatical teaching, induced, as he himself tells us, by the fame of certain speculations on that subject which had recently been put forth by Wolfgang Ratich, an Educational Reformer then very active in Germany. From Prerau Comenius removed in 1618 to Fulneck, to be pastor to a congregation of Moravian Brethren there; but, as he conjoined the charge of a new school with his pastorate, he continued his interest in new methods of education. Manuscripts of schoolbooks which he was preparing on his new methods perished, with his library, in a sack of Fulneck in 1621 by the Spaniards; and in 1624, on an edict proscribing all the Protestant ministers of the Austrian States, Comenius lost his living, and took refuge in the Bohemian mountains with a certain Baron Sadowski of Slaupna. In this retreat he wrote, in 1627, a short educational Directory for the use of the tutor of the baron's sons. But, the persecution waxing furious, and 30,000 families being driven out of Bohemia for their Protestantism, Comenius had to migrate to Poland It was with a heavy heart that lie did so: and, as he and his fellow-exiles crossed the mountain-boundary on their way, they looked back on Moravia and Bohemia, and, falling on their knees, prayed God not to let His truth fail utterly out of those hinds, but to preserve a remnant in them for himself. Leszno in Poland was Comenius's new refuge. Here again he employed himself in teaching; and here, in a more systematic manner than before, he pursued his speculations on the science of teaching and on improved methods for the acquisition of universal knowledge. He read, he tells us, all the works he could find on the subject of Didactics by predecessors or contemporaries, such as Ratich, Ritter, Glaumius, Wolfstirn, Cæcilius, and Joannes Valentinus Andreæ, and also the philosophical works of Campanella and Lord Bacon; but he combined the information so obtained with his own ideas and experience. The results he seems mainly to have jotted down, for future use, in various manuscript papers in his Slavic vernacular, or in German, or in Latin; but in 1631 he was induced by the curators of the school at Leszno to send to the press in Latin one book of a practical and particular nature. This was a so-called "_Janua Linguarum Reserata_," or "Gate of Languages Opened," propounding a method which he had devised, and had employed at Leszno, for rapidly teaching Latin, or any other tongue, and at the same time communicating the rudiments of useful knowledge. The little book, though he thought it a trifle, made him famous. "It happened, as I could not have imagined possible," he himself writes, "that that puerile little work was received with a sort of universal applause by the learned world. This was testified by very many persons of different countries, both by letters to myself congratulating me earnestly on the new invention, and also by translations into the various popular tongues, undertaken as if in rivalry with each other. Not only did editions which we have ourselves seen appear in all the European tongues, twelve in number--viz. Latin, Greek, Bohemian, Polish, German. Swedish, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian; but it was translated, as we have learnt, into such Asiatic tongues as the Arabic, the Turkish, the Persian, and even the Mongolian."

The process which Comenius thus describes must have extended over several years. There are traces of knowledge of him, and of his _Janua Linguarum Reserata_, in England as early as 1633. In that year a Thomas Home, M.A., then a schoolmaster in London, but afterwards Master of Eton, put forth a "_Janua Linguarum_" which is said by Anthony Wood to have been taken, "all or most," from Comenius. An actual English translation or expansion of Comenius's book, by a John Anchoran, licentiate in Divinity, under the title of "The Gate of Tongues Unlocked and Opened: or else A Summary or Seed-Plot of all Tongues and Sciences," reached its "fourth edition much enlarged" in 1639, and may be presumed to have been in circulation, in other forms, some years before. But the great herald of Comenius and his ideas among the English was Samuel Hartlib. Not only may he have had to do with the importation of Comenius's _Janua Linguarum_ and the recommendation of that book to such pedagogues as Home and Anchoran; but he was instrumental in extracting from Comenius, while that book and certain appendices to it were in the flush of their first European popularity, a summary of his reserved and more general theories and intentions in the field of Didactics. The story is told very minutely by Comenius himself.

The _Janua Linguarum Reserata_ was only a proposed improvement in the art of teaching Language or Words; and ought not a true system of education to range beyond that, and provide for a knowledge of Things? This was what Comenius was thinking: he was meditating a sequel to his popular little book, to be called "_Janua Rerum Reserata" or "Gate of Things Opened," and to contain an epitome or encyclopædia of all essential knowledge, under the three heads of Nature, Scripture, and the Mind of Man. Nay, borrowing a word which had appeared as the title of a somewhat meagre Encyclopædia of the Arts by a Peter Laurenbergius, Comenius had resolved on _Pansophia_, or _Pansophia Christiana_ ("Universal Wisdom," or "Universal Christian Wisdom"), as a fit alternative name for this intended _Janua Rerum_. But he was keeping the work back, as one requiring leisure, and could only be persuaded to let the announcement of its title appear in the Leipsic catalogue of forthcoming books. By that time, however, Hartlib of London had become so dear a friend to Comenius that he could refuse _him_ nothing. Whether there had been any prior personal acquaintance between Hartlib and Comenius, by reason of their German and Slavic connexions, I cannot say. But, since the publication of the _Janua Linguarum_, Hartlib had been in correspondence with Comenius in his Polish home; and, by 1636, his interest in the designs of Comenius, and willingness to forward them, had become so well known in the circle of the admirers of Comenius that he had been named as one of the five chief Comenians in Europe, the other four being Zacharias Schneider of Leipsic, Sigismund Evenius of Weimar, John Mochinger of Dantzic, and John Docemius of Hamburg. Now, Hartlib, having heard of the intended _Janua Rerum_ or _Pansophia_ of Comenius, not only in the Leipsic catalogue of forthcoming works, but also, more particularly, from some Moravian students passing through London, had written to Comenius, requesting some sketch of it. "Being thus asked," says Comenius, "by the most intimate of my friends, a man piously eager for the public good, to communicate some idea of my future work, I did communicate to him in writing, in a chance way, what I had a thought of prefixing some time or other to the work in the form of a Preface; and this, beyond my hope, and without my knowledge, was printed at Oxford, under the title of _Conatuum Comenianorum Præludia_." Here we have the whole secret of that publication from the Oxford University press, in 1637, which was edited by Hartlib and announced as being from his Library. It was not a reprint of anything that had already appeared abroad, but was in fact a new treatise by the great Comenius which Hartlib had persuaded the author to send him from Poland and had published on his own responsibility. He had apologized to Comenius for so doing, on the ground that the publication would "serve a good purpose by feeling the way and ascertaining the opinions of learned and wise men in a matter of such unusual consequence." Comenius was a little nettled, he says, especially as criticisms of the Pansophic sketch began to come in, which would have been obviated, he thought, if he had been allowed quietly to develop the thing farther before publication. Nevertheless, there the book was, and the world now knew of Comenius not only as the author of the little _Janua Linguarum_, but also as contemplating a vast _Janua Rerum_, or organization of universal knowledge on a new basis.--In fact, the fame of Comenius was increased by Hartlib's little indiscretion. In Sweden especially there was an anxiety to have the benefit of the counsels of so eminent a theorist in the business of education. In 1638 the Swedish Government, at the head of which, during the minority of Queen Christina, was the Chancellor Oxenstiern, invited Comenius to Sweden, that he might preside over a Commission for the revision and reform of the schools there. Comenius, however, declined the invitation, recommending that the work should be entrusted to some native Swede, but promising to give his advice; and, at the same time (1638), he began to translate into Latin, for the behoof of Sweden and of other countries, a certain _Didactica Magna_, or treatise on Didactics at large, which he had written in his Bohemian Slavic vernacular nine years before. Hartlib had an early abstract of this book, and this abstract is part of the _Comenii Pansophiæ Prodromus et Didactica Dissertatio_ which he edited in London in the same year, and published in duodecimo in 1639. [Footnote: Bayle's Dictionary: Art. _Coménius (Jean-Amos)_; "Geshichte der Pädagogik," by Karl von Raumer (Stuttgart, 1843), Zweither Theil, pp. 46-49; "Essays on Educational Reformers," by Robert Hebert Quick (1868), pp. 43-47; Wood's Ath. III. 366, and II. 677. The general sketch of Comenius in Bayle, and those by Raumer and Mr. Quick, are very good; but details in the text, and especially the particulars of Hartlib's early connexion with Comenius, have had to be culled by me from the curious autobiographical passages prefixed to or inserted in Comenius's various writings as far as 1642. These form Part I. of his large Folio, _Opera Didactica Omnia_, published by him at Amsterdam in 1657; and the passages in that Part which have supplied particulars for the text will be found at columns 3-4, 318, 326,403,442--444,454-459. Comenius, like most such theoretic reformers, had a vein of egotism, and a strong memory for details respecting the history of his own ideas and their reception.]

What, after all, were the new notions propounded from Poland, with such universal European effort, by this Protestant Austro-Slav, Comenius, and sponsored in England by the Prussian Hartlib? We shall try to give them in epitome. Be it understood, however, that the epitome takes account only of those works of Comenius which were written before 1639, without including the mass of his later writings, some of which were to be even more celebrated.

The _Didactica Magna_ is perhaps the most pregnant of the early books of Comenius. The full title of this treatise is, in translation, as follows: "Didactics at Large: propounding a universal Scheme for teaching all Things to all persons; or a Certain and Perfect Mode of erecting such Schools through all the communities, towns, and villages of any Christian Kingdom, as that all the youth of both sexes, without the neglect of a single one, may be compendiously, pleasantly, and solidly educated in Learning, grounded in Morals, imbued with Piety, and so, before the years of puberty, instructed in all things belonging to the present and the future life." In the treatise itself there are first some chapters of preliminary generalities. Man, says Comenius, is the last and most perfect of creatures; his destiny is to a life beyond this; and the present life is but a preparation for that eternal one. This preparation involves three things--Knowledge by Man of himself and of all things about him (Learning), Rule of himself (Morals), and Direction of himself to God (Religion). The seeds of these three varieties of preparation are in us by Nature; nevertheless, if Man would come out complete Man, he must be formed or educated. Always the education must be threefold--in Knowledge, in Morals, and in Religion; and this combination must never be lost sight of. Such education, however, comes most fitly in early life. Parents may do much, but they cannot do all; there is need, therefore, in every country, of public schools for youth. Such schools should be for the children of all alike, the poor as well as the rich, the stupid and malicious as well as the clever and docile, and equally for girls as for boys; and the training in them ought to be absolutely universal or encyclopædic, in Letters, Arts, and Science, in Morals, and in Piety. [Footnote: For Miltonic reasons, as well as for others, I cannot resist the temptation to translate here, in a Note, the sub stance of Comenius's views on the Education of Women; as given in Chap. IX. (cols. 42-44) of his _Didactica Magna_:--"Nor, to say something particularly on this subject, can any sufficient reason be given why the weaker sex" [_sequior sexus_, literally "the later or following sex," is his phrase, borrowed from Apuleius, and, though the phrase is usually translated "the inferior sex," it seems to have been chosen by Comenius to avoid that implication], "should be wholly shut out from liberal studies, whether in the native tongue or in Latin. For equally are they God's image; equally are they partakers of grace and of the kingdom to come; equally are they furnished with minds agile and capable of wisdom, yea often beyond our sex; equally to them is there a possibility of attaining high distinction, inasmuch as they have often been employed by God himself for the government of peoples, the bestowing of the most wholesome counsels on kings and princes, the science of medicine and other things useful to the human race, nay even the prophetical office, and the rattling reprimand of Priests and Bishops" [_etiam ad Propheticum munus, et incrependos Sacerdotes Episcoposque_, are the words; and, as the treatise was prepared for the press in 1638, one detects a reference, by the Moravian Brother in Poland, to the recent fame of Jenny Geddes of Scotland]. "Why then should we admit them to the Alphabet, but afterwards debar them from Books? Do we fear their rashness? The more we occupy their thoughts, the less room will there be in them for rashness, which springs generally from vacuity of mind." Some slight limitations as to the reading proper for young women are appended, but with a hint that the same limitations would be good for youth of the other sex; and there is a bold quotation of the Scriptural text (1 Tim. ii. 12),"_I suffer not a woman to teach_," and of two well-known passages of Euripides and Juvenal against learned women or bluestockings, to show that he was quite aware of these passages, but saw nothing in them against his real meaning.] Here, at length, in the eleventh chapter, we arrive at the great question, Has such a system of schools been anywhere established? _No_, answers Comenius, and abundantly proves his negative. Schools of a kind there had been in the world from the days of the Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzar, if not from those of Shem, but not yet were there schools everywhere; not yet, where schools did exist, were they for all classes; and, at best, where they did exist, of what sort were they? Places, for the most part, of nausea and torment for the poor creatures collected in them; narrow and imperfect in their aims, which were verbal rather than real; and not even succeeding in these aims! Latin, nothing but Latin! And how had they taught this precious and eternal Latin of theirs? "Good God! how intricate, laborious, and prolix this study of Latin has been! Do not scullions, shoeblacks, cobblers, among pots and pans, or in camp, or in any other sordid employment, learn a language different from their own, or even two or three such, more readily than school students, with every leisure and appliance and all imaginable effort, learn their solitary Latin? And what a difference in the proficiency attained! The former, after a few months, are found gabbling away with ease; the latter, after fifteen or twenty years, can hardly, for the most part, unless when strapped up tight in their grammars and dictionaries, bring out a bit of Latin, and that not without hesitation and stammering." But all this might be remedied. There might be such a Reformation of Schools that not only Latin, but all other languages, and all the real Sciences and Arts of life to boot, might be taught in them expeditiously, pleasantly, and thoroughly. What was wanted was right methods and the consistent practical application of these. Nature must supply the principles of the Method of Education: as all Nature's processes go softly and spontaneously, so will all artificial processes that are in conformity with Nature's principles. And what are Nature's principles, as transferable into the Art of Education? Comenius enumerates a good many, laying stress on such as these: nothing out of season; matter before form; the general before the special, or the simple before the complex; all continuously, and nothing _per saltum_. He philosophizes a good deal, sometimes a little quaintly and mystically, on these principles of Nature, and on the hints she gives for facility, solidity, and celerity of learning, and then sums up his deductions as to the proper Method in each of the three departments of education, the Intellectual, the Moral, and the Religious. Things before words, or always along with words, to explain them; the concrete and sensible to prepare for the abstract; example and illustration rather than verbal definition, or to accompany verbal definition: such is his main maxim in the first department. Object-lessons, wherever possible: i.e. if boys are taught about the stars, let it be with the stars over their heads to look at; if about the structure of the human body, let it be with a skeleton before them; if about the action of a pump, or other machine, let it be with the machine actually at hand. "Always let the things which the words are to designate be shown; and again, whatever the pupils see, hear, touch, taste, let them be taught to express the same; so that tongue and intellect may go on together." Where the actual objects cannot be exhibited, there may be models, pictures, and the like; and every school ought to have a large apparatus of such, and a museum. Writing and drawing ought to be taught simultaneously with reading. All should be made pleasant to the pupils; they ought to relish their lessons, to be kept brisk, excited, wide-awake; and to this end there should be emulation, praise of the deserving, always something nice and rousing on the board, a mixture of the funny with the serious, and occasional puzzles, anecdotes, and conundrums. The school-houses ought to be airy and agreeable, and the school-hours not too long. In order that there may be time to teach all that really ought to be taught, there must be a wise neglect of heaps of things not essential: a great deal must be flung overboard, as far as School is concerned, and left to the chance inquisitiveness of individuals afterwards. And what sort of things may be thus wisely neglected? Why, in the first place, the _non necessaria_ (things generally unprofitable), or things that contribute neither to piety nor to good morals, and without which there may be very sufficient erudition--as, for example, "the names of the Gentile gods, their love- histories, and their religious rites," all which may be got up in books at any time by any one that wants them; and, again, the _aliena_ (things that do not fit the particular pupil)--mathematics, for example, for some, and music for those who have no ear; and, again, the _particularissima_, or those excessive minutenesses and distinctions into which one may go without end in any subject whatsoever. So, at large, with very competent learning, no small philosophical acumen, much logical formality and numeration of propositions and paragraphs, but a frequent liveliness of style, and every now and then a crashing shot of practical good sense, Comenius reasons and argues for a new System of Education, inspired by what would now be called Realism or enlightened Utilitarianism. Objections, as they might occur, are duly met and answered; and one notes throughout the practical schoolmaster, knowing what he is talking about, and having before his fancy all the while the spectacle of a hundred or two of lads ranged on benches, and to be managed gloriously from the desk, as a skilled metallurgist manages a mass of molten iron. He is a decided advocate for large classes, each of "some hundreds," under one head-master, because of the fervour which such classes generate in themselves and in the master; and he shows how they may be managed. Emulation, kindliness, and occasional rebuke, are chiefly to be trusted to for maintaining discipline; and punishments are to be for moral offences only. How Comenius would blend moral teaching and religious teaching with the acquisition of knowledge in schools is explained in two chapters, entitled "Method of Morals" and "Method of instilling Piety;" and this last leads him to a separate chapter, in which he maintains that, "if we would have schools thoroughly reformed according to the true rules of Christianity, the books of Heathen authors must be removed from them, or at least employed more cautiously than hitherto." He argues this at length, insisting on the necessity of the preparation of a graduated series of school-books that should supersede the ordinary classics, conserving perhaps the best bits of some of them. If any of the classics were to be kept bodily for school-use, they should be Seneca, Epictetus, Plato, and the like. And so at last he comes to describe the System of Schools he would have set up in every country, viz.: I. THE INFANT SCHOOL, or MOTHER'S OWN SCHOOL, for children under six; II. THE LUDUS LITERARIUS, Or VERNACULAR PUBLIC SCHOOL, for boys and girls up to the age of twelve; III. THE LATIN SCHOOL or GYMNASIUM, for higher teaching up to eighteen or so; and IV. THE UNIVERSITY (with TRAVEL), for the highest possible teaching on to the age of about five- and-twenty. From the little babble of the Infant School about Water, Air, Fire, Iron, Bird, Fish, Hill, Sun, Moon, &c., all on the plan of exercising the senses and making Things and Words go together, up to the most exquisite training of the University, he shows how there might be a progress and yet a continuity of encyclopædic aim. Most boys and girls in every community, he thinks, might stop at the Vernacular School, without going on to the Latin; and he has great faith in the capabilities of any vernacular and the culture that may be obtained within it. Still he would like to see as many as possible going on to the Latin School and the University, that there might never be wanting in a community spirits consummately educated, veritable [Greek: polumatheis] and [Greek: pansophoi]. In the Universities apparently he would allow the largest ranging among the classics of all sorts, though still on some principle for organizing that kind of reading. There is, in fact, a mass of details and suggestions about each of the four kinds of schools, all vital to Comenius, and all pervaded by his sanguine spirit, but which one can hardly now read through. [Footnote: A separate little treatise on the management of "The Infant School," containing advices to parents for home use, was written by Comenius in Bohemian Slavic, and translated thence into German in 1633. It appears in Latin among his _Opera Didactica_ collected. He wrote also, he tells us, six little books for "The Vernacular School," under fancy-titles. These do not seem ever to have been published. His _Janua Linguarum_ (1631), and one or two appendages to it, were contributions to the theory and practice of "The Latin School."] The final chapter is one of the most eloquent and interesting. It is entitled, "Of the Requisites necessary for beginning the practice of this Universal Method." Here he comes back upon his notion of a graduated series of school-books, or rather of an organization of books generally for the purposes of education. "One great requisite," he says, "the absence of which would make the whole machine useless, while its presence would put all in motion, is A SUFFICIENT APPARATUS OF PAMMETHODIC BOOKS." All, he repeats, hinges on the possibility of creating such an apparatus. "This is a work," he adds, "not for one man, especially if he is otherwise occupied, and not instructed in everything that ought to be reduced into the Universal Method; nor is it perhaps a work for one age, if we would have all brought to absolute perfection. There is need, therefore, of a COLLEGIAL SOCIETY (_ergo Societate Collegiali est opus_). For the convocation of such a Society there is need of the authority and liberality of some King, or Prince, or Republic, and also of some quiet place, away from crowds, with a Library and other appurtenances." There follows an earnest appeal to persons of all classes to forward such an association, and the good Moravian winds up with a prayer to God. [Footnote: There is a summary of Comenius's _Didactica Magna_ in Von Reumer's "Geshichte der Pædgogis" (pp. 53-59). It is accurate so far as it goes; but I have gone to the book itself.]

A special part of Comenius's system, better known perhaps at the time of which we write than his system as a whole, was his Method for Teaching Languages. This is explained in Chapter XXII. of his _Didactica Magna_, and more in detail in his _Linguarum Janua Rescrata_, and one or two writings added to that book:--Comenius, as we already know, did not overrate linguistic training in education. "Languages are acquired," he says, "not as a part of learning or wisdom, but as instrumental to the reception and communication of learning. Accordingly, it is not _all_ languages that are to be learnt, for that is impossible, nor yet _many_, for that would be useless, as drawing away the time due to the study of Things; but only those that are _necessary_. The necessary tongues, however, are: first, the Vernacular, for home use; next, Neighbouring Tongues, for conversation with neighbours,--as, for example, the German for Poles of one frontier, and the Hungarian, the Wallachian, and the Turkish, for Poles of other parts; next, Latin, as the common language of the learned, admitting one to the wise use of books; and, finally, the Greek and Arabic for philosophers and medical men, and Greek and Hebrew for theologians." Not all the tongues that are learnt, either, are to be learnt to the same nicety of perfection, but only to the extent really needed. Each language should be learnt separately--first, the Vernacular, which ought to be perfectly learnt, and to which children ought to be kept for eight or ten years; then whatever neighbouring tongue might be desirable, for which a year would be long enough; next, Latin, which ought to be learnt well, and might be learnt in two years; and so to Greek, to which he would give one year, and Hebrew, which he would settle in six months. If people should be amazed at the shortness of the time in which he ventured to assert a language like the Latin might be learnt and learnt well, let them consider the principles of his method. Always Things along with Words, and Words associated with new groups of Things, from the most familiar objects to those rarer and farther off, so that the _vocabulary_ might get bigger and bigger; and, all the while, the constant use of the vocabulary, such as it was, in actual talk, as well as in reading and writing. First, let the pupil stutter on anyhow, only using his stock of words; correctness would come afterwards, and in the end elegance and force. Always practice rather than rule, and leading to rule; also connexion of the tongue being learnt with that learnt last. A kind of common grammar may be supposed lying in the pupil's head, which he transfers instinctively to each new tongue, so that he has to be troubled only with variations and peculiarities. The reading-books necessary for thoroughly teaching a language by this method might be (besides Lexicons graduated to match) four in number--I. _Vestibulum_ (The Porch), containing a vocabulary of some hundreds of simple words, fit for babbling with, grouped in little sentences, with annexed tables of declensions and conjugations; II. _Janua_ (The Gate), containing all the common words in the language, say about 8,000, also compacted into interesting sentences, with farther grammatical aids; III. _Palatium_ (The Palace), containing tit-bits of higher discourse about things, and elegant extracts from authors, with notes and grammatical comments; IV. _Thesaurus_ (The Treasury), consisting of select authors themselves, duly illustrated, with a catalogue of other authors, so that the pupils might have some idea of the extent of the Literature of the language, and might know what authors to read on occasion afterwards.--Comenius himself actually wrote a _Vestibulum_ for Latin, consisting of 427 short sentences, and directions for their use; and, as we know, his _Janua Linguarum Reserata_, which appeared in 1631, was the publication which made him famous. It is an application of his system to Latin. On the principle that Latin can never be acquired with ease while its vocabulary is allowed to lie alphabetically in dead Dictionaries, or in multitudinous variety of combination in Latin authors, about 8,000 Latin words of constant use are collected into a kind of Noah's Ark, representative of all Latinity. This is done in 1,000 short Latin sentences, arranged in 100 paragraphs of useful information about all things and sundry, under such headings as _De Ortu Mundi_ (Of the Beginning of the World), _De Elementis_ (Of the Elements), _De Firmamento_ (Of the Firmament), _De Igne_ (Of Fire), and so on through other physical and moral topics. Among these are _De Metallis_ (Of Metals), _De Herbis_ (Of Plants), _De Insectis_ (Of Insects), _De Ulceribus et Vulneribus_ (Of Sores and Wounds), _De Agricultura_ (Of Agriculture), _De Vestituum Generibus (Of Articles of Dress), _De Puerperio_ (Of Childbirth), _De Pace et Bella_ (Of Peace and War), _De Modestia_ (Of Modesty), _De Morte et Sepultura_ (Of Death and Burial), _De Providentia Dei_ (Of the Providence of God), _De Angelis_ (Of Angels). Comenius was sure that due drill in this book would put a boy in effective possession of Latin for all purposes of reading, speaking, and writing. And, of course, by translation, the same manual would serve for any other language. For, the Noah's Ark of _things_ being much the same for all peoples, in learning a new language you have but to fit on to the contents of that permanent Ark of realities a new set of vocables. [Footnote: _Dialectica Magna_ Chap. XXII. first edition of _Janua_, as reprinted in _Comenii Opera Didactica_, 1657 (Part I, cols. 255-302).]

Comenius rather smiled at the rush of all Europe upon his _Janua Linguarum_, or Method for Teaching Languages. That was a trifle in his estimation, compared with the bigger speculations of his _Didactica Magna_, and still more with his _Pansophiæ Prodromus_ or _Porta Sapientiæ Reserata_. A word or two on this last little book:--Comenius appears in it as a would-be Lord Bacon, an Austro-Slavic Lord Bacon, a very Austro-Slavic Lord Bacon. He mentions Bacon several times, and always with profound respect ("_illustrissimus Verulamius_" and so on); but it appeared to him that more was wanted than Bacon's _Novum Organum,_ or _Instauratio Magna_, with all its merits. A PANSOPHIA was wanted, nay, a PANSOPHIA CHRISTIANA, or consolidation of all human knowledge into true central Wisdom, one body of Real Truth. O Wisdom, Wisdom! O the knowledge of things in themselves, and in their universal harmony! What was mere knowledge of words, or all the fuss of pedagogy and literature, in view of that! Once attained, and made communicable, it would make the future of the world one Golden Age! Why had it not been attained? What had been the hindrances to its attainment? What were the remedies? In a kind of phrenzy, which does not prevent most logical precision of paragraphing and of numbering of propositions, Comenius discusses all this, becoming more and more like a Bacon bemuddled, as he eyes his PANSOPHIA through the mist. What it is he cannot make plain to us; but we see he has some notion of it himself, and we honour him accordingly. For there are gleams, and even flashes, through the mist. For example, there is a paragraph entitled _Scientiarum Laceratio_, lamenting the state of division, disconnectedness, and piece-meal distribution among many hands, into which the Sciences had fallen. Though there were books entitled Pansophias, Encyclopædias, and the like, he had seen none sufficiently justifying the name, or exhausting the universality of things. Much less had he seen the whole apparatus of human intelligence so constructed from its own certain and eternal principles that all things should appear mutually concatenated among themselves from first to last without any hiatus! "Metaphysicians hum to themselves only, Natural Philosophers chaunt their own praises, Astronomers lead on their dances for themselves, Ethical Thinkers set up laws for themselves, Politicians lay foundations for themselves, Mathematicians triumph for themselves, and for themselves Theologians reign." What is the consequence? Why, that, while each one attends only to himself and his own phantasy, there is no general accord, but only dissonance. "We see that the branches of a tree cannot live unless they all alike suck their juices from a common trunk with common roots. And can we hope that the branches of Wisdom can be torn asunder with safety to their life, that is to truth? Can one be a Natural Philosopher who is not also a Metaphysician? or an Ethical Thinker who does not know something of Physical Science? or a Logician who has no knowledge of real matters? or a Theologian, a Jurisconsult, or a Physician, who is not first a Philosopher? or an Orator or Poet who is not all things at once? He deprives himself of light, of hand, and of regulation, who pushes away from him any shred of the knowable." From such passages one has a glimmer of what Comenius did mean by his Pansophia. He hoped to do something himself towards furnishing the world with this grand desideratum. He had in contemplation a book which should at least show what a proper Encyclopædia or Consolidation of Universal Truth ought to be. But here again he invites co-operation. Many hands in many lands would have to labour at the building of the great Temple of Wisdom. He appeals to all, "of every rank, age, sex, and tongue," to do what they can. Especially let there be an end to the monopoly of Latin. "We desire and protest that studies of wisdom be no longer committed to Latin alone, and kept shut up in the schools, as has hitherto been done, to the greatest contempt and injury of the people at large and the popular tongues. Let all things be delivered to each nation in its own speech, so that occasion may be afforded to all who are men to occupy themselves with these liberal matters rather than fatigue themselves, as is constantly the case, with the cares of this life, or ambitions, or drinking-bouts, or other vanities, to the destruction of life and soul both. Languages themselves too would so be polished to perfection with the advancement of the Sciences and Arts. Wherefore we, for our part, have resolved, if God pleases, to divulge these things of ours both in the Latin and in the vernacular. For no one lights a candle and hides it under a bushel, but places it on a candlestick, that it may give light to all." [Footnote: _Pansophici Libri Delineatio_ (_i.e._ the same treatise which Hartlib had printed at Oxford in 1637) in _Comenii Opera Didactica_, Part I. cols. 403-454.] Such were the varied Comenian views which the good Hartlib strove to bring into notice in England in 1637-9. Durie and Reconciliation of the Churches was still one of his enthusiasms, but Comenius and Reformed Education was another. But, indeed, nothing of a hopeful kind, with novelty in it, came amiss to Hartlib. He, as well as Comenius, had read Lord Bacon. He was a devoted admirer of the Baconian philosophy, and had imbibed, I think, more deeply than most of Bacon's own countrymen, the very spirit and mood of that philosophy. That' the world had got on so slowly hitherto because it had pursued wrong methods; that, if once right methods were adopted, the world would spin forward at a much faster rate in all things; that no one could tell what fine discoveries of new knowledge, what splendid inventions in art, what devices for saving labour, increasing wealth, preserving health, and promoting happiness, awaited the human race in the future: all this, which Bacon had taught, Hartlib had taken into his soul. His sympathy with Durie and Religious Compromise and his sympathy with Comenius and School Reform were but special exhibitions of his general passion for new lights. The cry of his soul, morning and night, in all things, was

Phosphore, redde diem! Quid gaudia nostra moraris? Phosphore, redde diem!

[Footnote: This is no fancy-quotation. Hartlib himself, in 1659, uses it in a letter to the famous Boyle, as the passionate motto of his life (see Diary of Worthington, edited by Crossley, I, 168, and Boyle's Works, ed. 1744, V. 293).]

Naturally this passion had a political side. Through the reign of Thorough, it is true, Hartlib had been as quiet as it became a foreigner in London to be at such a time, and had even been in humble correspondence in Durie's behalf with Bishops, Privy Councillors, and other chiefs of the existing power. But, when the Scottish troubles brought signs of coming change for England, and there began to be stir among the Puritans and the miscellaneous _quidnuncs_ of London in anxiety for that change, Hartlib found himself in friendly contact and acquaintanceship with some of these forward spirits. One is not surprised, therefore, at the fact, previously mentioned in our History (Vol. II. p. 45), that, when Charles was mustering his forces for the First Bishops' War against the Scots, and Secretary Windebank was busy with arrests of persons in London suspected of complicity with the Scots, Hartlib was one of those pounced upon. Here is the exact official warrant:--"These are to will, require, and authorize you to make your repair to the house of Samuel Hartlib, merchant, and to examine him upon such interrogatories as you shall find pertinent to the business you are now employed in; and you are also to take with you one of the messengers of his Majesty's Chamber, who is to receive and follow such order and directions as you shall think fit to give him; and this shall be your sufficient warrant in this behalf.--Dated at my house in Drury Lane, 1 May 1639.--Fran. Windebank. To Robert Reade, my Secretary." [Footnote: Copied by me from the original in the S.P.O.]--The reader may, at this point, like to know where Hartlib's house was. It was in Duke's Place, Aldgate. He had been there for more than a year, if not from his first settling in London; and it was to be his residence for many years to come.[Footnote: Among the Ayscough MSS. in the British Museum there is one (No. 4276) containing a short letter from Joseph Meade to Hartlib, dated from Christ's College, Cambridge, June 18, 1638, and addressed "To his worthie friend Mr. Samuel Hartlib at his house in Duke's Place, London." There is nothing of importance in the letter; which is mainly about books Meade would like Hartlib to send to certain persons named-- one of them Dr. Twisse, afterwards Prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly. Meade died less than four months after the date of this letter.] He was married, and had at least one child.--Reade and the King's officer appear to have discovered nothing specially implicating Hartlib; for he is found living on much as before through the remainder of the Scottish Presbyterian Revolt, on very good terms with his former Episcopal correspondents and others who regarded that Revolt with dread and detestation. The following is a letter of his, of date Aug. 10, 1640, which I found in his own hand in the State Paper Office. It has not, I believe, been published before, and letters of Hartlib's of so early a date are scarce: besides, it is too characteristic to be omitted:--

"Right Hon. [no farther indication of the person addressed: was it Sir Thomas Roe?]

"These are to improve the leisure which perhaps you may enjoy in your retiredness from this place. The author of the Schedule of Divers New Inventions [apparently enclosed in the letter] is the same Plattes who about a year ago published two profitable treatises concerning Husbandry and Mines. He is now busy in contriving of some other Tracts, which will more particularly inform all sorts of people how to procure their own and the public good of these countries. [Footnote: Gabriel Plattes, author of "A Discovery of Subterraneall Treasure: viz. of all manner of Mines and Minerals from the Gold to the Coale: London 1639, 4to." This is from Lowndes's _Bibliographer's Manual_ by Bohn; where it is added that "Plattes published several other works chiefly relating to Husbandry, and is said to have dropped down dead in the London streets for want of food." Among other things, he was an Alchemist; and in Wood's Athenæ by Bliss (I. 640-1) there is a curious extract from his Mineralogical book, giving an account of a process of his for making pure gold artificially, though, as he says, not with profit. One thinks kindly of this poor inventive spirit hanging on upon Hartlib with his "Schedule of New Inventions," and of Hartlib's interest in him.] Some of my learned friends in France do highly commend one Palissi to be a man of the like disposition and industry. The books which he hath written and printed (some of them in French) are said to contain a world of excellent matter. [Footnote: This, I think, must be the famous Bernard Palissy, "the Potter," who died in 1590, leaving writings such as Hartlib describes. If so, Hartlib was a little behind time in his knowledge, for one might fancy him speaking of a contemporary.] I wish such like observations, experiments, and true philosophies, were more known to other nations. By this means not only the Heavens, but also the Earth, would declare the glory of God more evidently than it hath done.---As for Mr. Durie, by these enclosed [a number of extracts from letters about Durie's business which Hartlib had received from Bishops and others] your Honour will be able to see how far I am advanced in transactions of his affairs. My Lord Bishop of Exeter [Hall], in one of his late letters unto himself [Durie], uses these following words: '_Perlegi quæ_,' &c. [A long Latin passage, which may be given in English: 'I have read through what you have heretofore written to the most illustrious Sir Thomas Roe respecting the procuring of an ecclesiastical agreement. I like your prudence and most sagacious theological ingenuity in the same: should Princes follow the thread of the advice, we shall easily extricate ourselves from this labyrinth of controversies. The Reverend Bishop of Salisbury has a work on the Fundamentals of Faith, which is now at press, designed for the composing of these disputes of the Christian world; doubtless to the great good of the Church. Proceed busily in the sacred work you have undertaken: we will not cease to aid you all we can with our prayers and counsels, and, if possible, with other helps']: I hear the worthies of Cambridge are at work to satisfy in like manner the Doctors of Bremen: only my Lord Bishop of Durham [Morton] is altogether silent. It may be the northern distractions hinder him from such and the like pacifical overtures. I am much grieved for his book _De [Greek: polutopia] corporis Christi_ [on the Ubiquity of Christ's Body], which is now in the press at Cambridge; for both the Bishop of Lincoln [Williams] and Dr. Hacket told me, from the mouth of him that corrects it (an accurate and judicious scholar), that it was a very invective and bitter railing against the Lutheran tenets on that point, insomuch that Dr. Brownrigg had written unto his lordship about it, to put all into a milder strain. I confess others do blame somewhat Mr. D[urie] for certain phrases which he seems to yield unto in his printed treatise with the Danes, '_De Omnipræsentiâ et orali manducatione_' [Of the Omnipresence and Eating with the Mouth]; yet let me say this much--that Reverend Bucer, that prudent learned man, who was the first man of note that ever laboured in this most excellent work of reconciling the Protestants, even in the very first beginning of the breach, and who laboured more abundantly than they all in it (I mean than all the rest of the Reformers in his time): Bucer, I say, yielded so far for peace' sake to Luther and his followers in some harsh-sounding terms and words that the Helvetians began to be suspicious of him, lest he should be won to the contrary side, although the good man did fully afterwards declare his mind when he saw his yielding would do no good. It is not then Mr. D.'s case alone, when so brave a worthy as Bucer goes along with him, a man of whom great Calvin uttered these words when news was brought him of his death, '_Quam multiplicem in Bucero jacturam fecerit Dei Ecclesia quoties in mentem venit, cor meum prope laccrari sentio_' ['As often as it comes to my mind what a manifold loss the Church of God has had in Bucer, I feel my heart almost lacerated']. So he wrote in an epistle to Viret. But enough of this subject.----I have had these 14 days no letters from Mr. D.; nor do I long much for them, except I could get in the rents from his tenant to pay the 70 rixdollars to Mr. Avery's brother in London. The Bishop of Exeter seems to be a man of excellent bowels; and, if your Honour would be pleased to second his requests towards my Lord's Grace of Canterbury, or to favour Bishop Davenant's advice in your own way, perhaps some comfortable effects would soon follow. My Lady Anna Waller doth highly affect Mr. D. and his endeavours; and, if any donatives or other preferments should be recommended to be disposed this way by my Lord Keeper (who is a near kinsman of her Ladyship), I am confident she would prove a successful mediatrix in his behalf. If your Honour thinks it fit, I can write also to my Lord Primate [Usher] to intercede with my Lord's Grace [Laud] for Mr. D. He is about to bring forth a great universal work, or Ecclesiastical History. The other treatise, put upon him by his Majesty's special command, '_De Authoritate Regum et Officio Subditorum,_' ['On the Authority of Kings and the Duty of Subjects'] will shortly come to light.----Thus, craving pardon for this prolixity of scribbling, I take humbly my leave; remaining always

"Your Honour's most obliged and most assured Servant,

SAM. HARTLIB. [Footnote: Copied by me from the original in the S.P.O.]

London: the 10 of Aug. 1640."

Three months after the date of this letter the Long Parliament had met, and there was a changed world, with changed opportunities, for Hartlib, as well as for other people. The following digest of particulars in his life for the years 1641 and 1642 will show what he was about:--

"A Briefe Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiasticall Peace amongst Protestants. Published by Samuel Hartlib. London, Printed by J. R. for Andrew Crooke, and are to be sold at his shop in Paul's Churchyard at the sign of the Green Dragon. 1641."--This little tract is an exposition of Durie's idea, and a narrative sketch of his exertions in its behalf from 1628 onwards.

"A Description of the famous Kingdom of MACARIA, shewing its excellent Government, wherein the Inhabitants live in great prosperity, health, and happiness; the King obeyed, the Nobles honoured, and all good men respected; Vice punished, and Virtue rewarded: An example to other nations. In a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Traveller. London 1641" (4to. pp. 15).--There is a Dedication to Parliament, dated "25th October 1641," in which it is said that "Honourable Court will lay the cornerstone of the world's happiness." The tract is an attempt at a fiction, after the manner of "More's Utopia" and Bacon's "New Atlantis," shadowing forth the essentials of good government in the constitution of the imaginary Kingdom of MACARIA (Happy-land, from the Greek makarios, happy). The gist of the thing lies in the rather prosaic statement that MACARIA has Five Councils or Departments of State: to wit, _Husbandry_, _Fishery_, _Land-trade_, _Sea-trade_, and _New Plantations_.--Although there is no author's name to the scrap, it is known to be Hartlib's; who, indeed, continued to use the word MACARIA, half-seriously, half- playfully, till the Restoration and beyond, as a pet name for his Ideal Commonwealth of perfect institutions. [Footnote: See Worthington's Diary edited by Crossley (L 163). Hartlib's original _Macaria_ is reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, Vol. I.]

In 1641 Hartlib was in correspondence with Alexander Henderson. The reader already knows how "the Scottish business," or the King's difficulty with the Scots, led to the calling of the Long Parliament, and how for six or seven months (Nov. 1640-June 1641) that business intertwined itself with the other proceedings of the Parliament, and Henderson and the other Scottish Commissioners, lay and clerical, were in London all that time, nominally looking after that business, but really co-operating with Pym and the other Parliamentary leaders for the Reform of both kingdoms, and much lionized by the Londoners accordingly (Vol. II. pp. 189-192). Well, Hartlib, who found his way to everybody, found his way to Henderson. lie probably saw a good deal of him, if not of the other Scottish Commissioners; for, after Henderson had returned to Scotland, at least three letters from Hartlib followed him thither. Here is the beginning of the third: "Reverend and Loving Brother in Christ: I hope my two former letters were safely delivered, wherein I gave you notice of a purpose taken in hand here to make Notes upon the Bible. What concurrence you think fit to give in such a work I leave to your own piety to determine. Now I have some other thoughts to impart to you, which lie as a burthen on my heart." The thoughts communicated to Henderson are about the wretched state of the Palatinate, with its Protestantism and its University of Heidelberg ruined by the Thirty Years' War, and the "sweet-natured Prince Elector" in exile; but Hartlib slips into Durie's idea, and urges theological correspondence of all Protestant divines, in order to put an end to divisions. The letter, which is signed "Your faithful friend and servant in Christ," is dated "London, Octob. 1641." All this we know because Hartlib kept a copy of the letter and printed it in 1643. "The copy of a Letter written to Mr. Alexander Henderson: London, Printed in the yeare 1643," is the title of the scrap, as I have seen it in the British Museum. Even so we should not have known it to be Hartlib's, had not the invaluable Thomason written "_By Mr. Hartlib_" on the title-page, appending "_Feb._ 6, 1642" (_i.e._ 1642-3) as the date of the publication.

"A Reformation of Schooles, designed in two excellent Treatises: the first whereof summarily sheweth the great necessity of a generall Reformation of Common Learning, what grounds of hope there are for such a Reformation, how it may be brought to passe. The second answers certaine objections ordinarily made against such undertakings, arid describes the severall parts and titles of workes which are shortly to follow. Written many yeares agoe in Latine by that reverend, godly, learned, and famous Divine, Mr. John Amos Comenius, one of the Seniours of the exiled Church of Moravia; and now, upon the request of many, translated into English and published by Samuel Hartlib for the general good of the Nation. London: Printed for Michael Sparke, Senior, at the Blue Bible in Greene Arbour: 1642" (small ito. pp. 94).--This is, in fact, a reproduction in English of the views of Comenius in his Didactica Magna, &c. As I find it registered in the books of the Stationers' Company "Jan. 12, 1641" (_i.e._ 1641-2), it must have been out early in 1642.

These traces of Hartlib in the years 1641 and 1642 are significant, and admit of some comment:--In the _Description_ _of the Kingdom of Macaria_, I should say, Hartlib broke out for himself. He had all sorts of ideas as to social and economic improvements, and he would communicate a little specimen of these, respecting Husbandry, Fishery, and Commerce, to the reforming Parliament. But he was still faithful to Durie and Comenius, and three of his recovered utterances of 1641-2 are in behalf of them. His _Brief Relation_ and his _Letter to Henderson_ refer to Durie and his scheme of Protestant union. It is not impossible that Hartlib was moved to these new utterances in the old subject by Durie's own presence in London; for, as we have mentioned (Vol. II. p. 367), there is some evidence that Durie, who had not been in London since 1633, came over on a flying visit after the opening of the Long Parliament. It is a coincidence, at least, that the publisher of Hartlib's _Brief Relation_ about Durie brought out, at the very same time, a book of Durie's own tending in the same direction. [Footnote: "Mr. Dureus his Eleven Treatises touching Ecclesiastical Peace amongst Protestants" is the title of an entry by Mr. Crooke in the Stationers' Registers, of date Feb. 15, 1640.] Quite possibly, however, Durie may have still been abroad, and Hartlib may have acted for him. In the other case there is no such doubt. When, in Jan. 1641-2, Hartlib sent to the press his new compilation of the views of Comenius under the title of _A Reformation of Schools_, there was good reason for it. Comenius himself was at his elbow. The great man had come to London.

Education, and especially University Education, was one of the subjects that Parliament was anxious to take up. In the intellectual world of England, quite apart from politics, there had for some time been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the existing state of the Universities and the great Public Schools. In especial, Bacon's complaints and suggestions on this subject in the Second Book of his _De Augmentis_ had sunk into thoughtful minds. That the Universities, by persistence in old and outworn methods, were not in full accord with the demands and needs of the age; that their aims were too professional and particular, and not sufficiently scientific and general; that the order of studies in them was bad, and some of the studies barren; that there ought to be a bold direction of their endowments and apparatus in the line of experimental knowledge, so as to extract from Nature new secrets, and sciences for which Humanity was panting; that, moreover, there ought to be more of fraternity and correspondence among the Universities of Europe, and some organization of their labours with a view to mutual illumination and collective advance: [Footnote: "De Augmentis:" Bacon's Works, I. 487 _et seq._, and Translation of same, III. 323 _et seq._ (Spedding's edition).] all these Verulamian speculations, first submitted to King James, were lying hid here and there in English intellects, in watch for an opportunity. Then, in a different way, the political crisis had brought Oxford and Cambridge, but especially Oxford, under severe revision. Had they not been the nurseries of Episcopacy, and of other things and principles of which England was now declaring herself impatient? All this, which was to be more felt after the Civil War had begun and Oxford became the King's headquarters, was felt already in very considerable degree during the two-and-twenty months of preliminary struggle between the King and the Parliament (Nov. 1640-Aug. 1642). Why not have a University in London? There was Gresham College in the city, in existence since 1597, and doing not ill on its limited basis; there was Chelsea College, founded by Dean Sutcliffe of Exeter in 1610, "to the intent that learned men might there have maintenance to answer all the adversaries of religion" but which, after a rickety infancy, and laughed at by Laud as "Controversy College," had been lost in lawsuits: why not, with inclusion or exclusion of these and other foundations, set up in London a great University on the best modern principles, abolishing the monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge?

Of these rumours, plans, or possibilities, due notice had been sent by the zealous Hartlib to Comenius at Leszno. Ought not Comenius to be on the spot? What had he been hoping for and praying for but a "Collegial Society" somewhere in some European state to prepare the necessary "Apparatus of Pammethodic Books" and so initiate his new system of Universal Didactics, or again (to take the other and larger form of his aspiration), a visible co-operation of kindred spirits throughout Europe towards founding and building the great "Temple of Pansophia" or "Universal Real Knowledge"? What if these Austro-Slavic dreams of his should be realized on the banks of the Thames? People were very willing thereabouts; circumstances were favourable; what was mainly wanted was direction and the grasp of a master-spirit! Decidedly, Comenius ought to come over.--All this we learn from Comenius himself, whose account of the matter and of what followed had better now be quoted. "The _Pansophiæ Prodromus_," he says, "having been published, and copies dispersed through the various kingdoms of Europe, but many learned men who approved of the sketch despairing of the full accomplishment of the work by one man, and therefore advising the erection of a College of learned men for this express business, in these circumstances the very person who had been the means of giving the _Prodromus_ to the world, a man strenuous in practically prosecuting things as far as he can, Mr. S. H. [_strenuus rerum quâ datur [Greek: ergodioktæs], D. S. H._], devoted himself laboriously to that scheme, so as to bring as many of the more forward spirits into it as possible. And so it happened at length that, having won over one and another, he, in the year 1641, prevailed on me also by great entreaties to go to him. My people having consented to the journey, I came to London on the very day of the autumnal equinox [Sept. 22, 1641], and there at last learnt that I had been invited by the order of the Parliament. But, as the Parliament, the King having then gone to Scotland [Aug. 10], was dismissed for a three months' recess [not quite three months, but from Sept. 9 to Oct. 20], I was detained there through the winter, my friends mustering what Pansophic apparatus they could, though it was but slender. On which occasion there grew on my hands a tractate with this title, _Via Lucis: Hoc Est, &c._. [The Way of Light]: That is, A Reasonable Disquisition how the Intellectual Light of Souls, namely Wisdom, may now at length, in this Evening of the World, be happily diffused through all Minds and Peoples. This for the better understanding of these words of the oracle in _Zachariah XIV._ 7, _It shall come to pass that at evening time it shall be light._ The Parliament meanwhile having reassembled, and our presence being known, I had orders to wait until they should have sufficient leisure from other business to appoint a commission of learned and wise men from their body for hearing us and considering the grounds of our design. They communicate also beforehand their thoughts of assigning to us some College with its revenues, whereby a certain number of learned and illustrious men, called from all nations, might he honourably maintained, either for a term of years or in perpetuity. There was even named for the purpose _the Savoy_ in London; _Winchester College_ out of London was named; and again, nearer the city, _Chelsea College_, inventories of which and of its revenues were communicated to us; so that nothing seemed more certain than that the design of the great Verulam, concerning the opening somewhere of a Universal College, devoted to the advancement of the Sciences, could be carried out. But the rumour of the Insurrection in Ireland, and of the massacre in one night of more than 200,000 English [Oct.-Nov.], and the sudden departure of the King from London [Jan. 10, 1641-2], and the plentiful signs of the bloody war about to break out, disturbed these plans, and obliged me to hasten my return to my own people. It happened, however, that letters came to me from Sweden, which had been sent to Poland and thence forwarded to England, in which that magnanimous and energetic man, Ludovicus de Geer, invited me to come to him in Sweden, and offered immediate means of furthering my studies and those of any two or three learned men I chose to associate with me. Communicating this offer to my friends in London, I took my departure, but not without protestations from them that I ought to let my services be employed in nothing short of the Pansophic Design." [Footnote: Autobiographic Introduction to the "Second Part" of the _Opera Didactica_ of Comenius (1657), containing his Didactic writings from 1642 to 1650.] This is very interesting, and, I have no doubt, quite accurate. [Footnote: I have not been able to find in the Lords or Commons Journals for 1641 and 1642 any traces of those communications between Comenius and the Parliament of which he speaks. There may be such, for the Indexes are not perfect; and there is not the least reason to doubt the word of Comenius.] And so, through the winter of 1641-2 and the spring of 1642, we are to imagine Hartlib and Comenius going about London together, Hartlib about forty years of age and Comenius about fifty, the younger man delighted with his famous friend, introducing him to various people, and showing him the chief sights (the law-chambers and house of the great Verulam not omitted, surely), and all the while busy with Pansophic talk and the details of the Pansophic College. We see now the reason of Hartlib's publication in Jan. 1641-2 of Comenius's two treatises jointly in a book called _A Reformation of Schools_. It was to help in the business which had brought Comenius to London.

It was a great chagrin to Hartlib when the London plan came to an abrupt end, and Comenius transferred himself to Sweden. Thither we must follow him, for yet one other passage of his history before we leave him:-- "Conveyed to Sweden in August of the year 1642," proceeds Comenius, "I found my new Mæcenas at his house at Nortcoping; and, having been kindly received by him, I was, after some days of deliberation, sent to Stockholm, to the most illustrious Oxenstiern, Chancellor of the Kingdom, and Dr. Johannes Skyte, Chancellor of the University of Upsal. These two exercised me in colloquy for four days; and chiefly the former, that Eagle of the North (_Aquila Aquilonius_). He inquired into the foundations of both my schemes, the Didactic and the Pansophic, so searchingly that it was unlike anything that had been done before by any of my learned critics. In the first two days he examined the Didactics, with at length this conclusion: 'From an early age,' said he, 'I perceived that our Method of Studies generally in use is a harsh and crude one [_violentum quiddam_]; but where the thing stuck I could not find out. At length, having been sent, by my King of glorious memory [Gustavus Adolphus], as ambassador into Germany, I conversed on the subject with various learned men. And, when I had heard that Wolfgang Ratich was toiling at an amended Method, I had no rest of mind till I had got that gentleman into my presence; who, however, instead of a talk on the subject, offered me a big volume in quarto to read. I swallowed that trouble; and, having turned over the whole book, I saw that he detected not badly the maladies of our schools, but the remedies he proposed did not seem sufficient. Yours, Mr. Comenius, rest on firmer foundations. Go on with the work.' I answered that I had done all I could in those matters, and must now go on to others. 'I know said he, 'that you are toiling at greater affairs, for I have read your _Prodromus Pansophiæ_. We will speak of that to-morrow: I must to public business now.' Next day, beginning to examine, but with greater severity, my Pansophic Attempts, he opened with this question, 'Are you a man, Mr. Comenius, that can bear contradiction? [_Potesne contradicentem ferre_?]' 'I can,' replied I, 'and therefore that _Prodromus_ or Preliminary Sketch was (not by me either, but by friends) sent out first, that it might meet with judgment and criticism. Which if we admit from all and sundry, why not from men of mature wisdom and heroic reason?' He began, accordingly, to discourse against the hope of a better state of things conceived as lying in a rightly instituted study of Pansophia, first objecting political reasons of deep import, and then the testimonies of the divine Scriptures, which seem to foretell for the latter days of the world rather darkness and a certain deterioration of things than light and amended institutions. To all which he had such answers from me that he closed with these words, 'Into no one's mind do I think such things have come before. Stand upon these grounds of yours: either so shall we come some time to agreement, or there will be no way at all left. My advice, however, is (added he) that you proceed first to do a good stroke in the School business, and to bring the study of the Latin tongue to a greater facility, and so prepare a broader and clearer way for those bigger matter.' The Chancellor of the University did not cease to urge the same; and he suggested this as well: that, if I were unwilling to remove with my family into Sweden, at all events I should come nearer to Sweden by taking up my abode in Prussia, say in Elbing. As my Mæcenas, to whom I returned at Nortcoping [Ludovicus de Geer], thought that both advices ought to be acquiesced in, and earnestly begged me that nothing should be done otherwise than had been advised, whether in respect of the place of my abode, or of priority to be given to any other task, I agreed at length, always with the hope that within a year or two there would be an end of the hack-work."--In fact, Comenius went to Elbing in Prussia (Hartlib's native place, as the reader may remember), to be supported there by the generosity of Ludovicus de Geer, with subsidies perhaps from Oxenstiern, and to labour on at a completion of his system of School Education, with a view to its application to Sweden.--"But this good- nature of mine in yielding to the Swedes vehemently displeased my English friends; and they sought to draw me back from any bargain by a long epistle, most full of reasons. 'A sufficient specimen,' they argued, 'had been given in Didactics; the path of farther rectification in that department was open enough: not yet so in Real Science. Others could act in the former department, and everywhere there were rising up Schoolmasters provoking each other to industry by mutual emulation; whereas the foundations of Pansophia were not yet sufficiently laid bare. Infinitely more profit would redound to the public from an explanation of the ways of true Wisdom than from little trifles about Latin.' Much more in the same strain; and S. H. [Samuel Hartlib] added, '_Quo, moriture, ruis? minoraque viribus audes_?' in this poetical _solecism_ [Comenius calls the hexameter a solecism, I suppose, on account of the false quantity it contains in the word _minora_], reproaching my inconsiderateness. Rejoiced by this recall into the road-royal, I sent on this letter to Sweden; and, nothing doubting that they would come round to the arguments there expressed, I gave myself up wholly to my Pansophics, whether to continue in them, or that, at all events (if the Swedish folk did wish me to dwell on in my Scholastics and it were my hap to die in that drudgery), the foundations of Pansophia, of the insufficient exposition of which I heard complaints, might be better dug down into, so that they might no longer be ignored. But from Sweden the answer that came was one ordering me to persevere in the proposal of first finishing the Didactics; backed by saws to this effect: 'One would rather the _better_, but the _earlier_ must be done first,' 'One doesn't go from the bigger to the smaller, but _wicey warsey_,' and all the rest of it. Nothing was left me but to obey, and plod on against my will in the clay of logomachies for eight whole years. Fortunately this was not till I had printed at Dantzic, in the year 1643, my already-made efforts at a better detection of the foundations of Pansophia, under the title of '_Pansophiæ Diatyposis Ichnographica et Orthographica_,' reprinted immediately at Amsterdam and Paris." [Footnote: Introd. to Part II. of _Opera Didactica_.]

Poor Comenius! He had a long life before him yet; but at this point we must throw him off, shunted into his siding at Elbing, to plod there for four years (1642-1646) at his Didactics, while he would fain have been soaring among his Pansophics. [Footnote: Though, as he has told us, his drudgery at the Didactics continued for _eight_ years in all, there was a break of these eight years in 1646 when he returned to Sweden to report proceedings to his employers.] Letters from his London friend, Hartlib, would reach him frequently in Elbing, and would doubtless encourage him in the humbler labour since he could not be at the higher. For Hartlib himself, we find, also laid aside the Pansophics for a time, seeing no hope for them in London without the presidency of Comenius, but continued to interest himself in the Didactics. In fact, however, he was never without interests of some kind or another. Thus, in Feb. 1642-3, or when Comenius may have been about a year at Elbing, Hartlib was again at the Durie business. "A Faithfull and Seasonable Advice, or the Necessity of a Correspondence for the Advancement of the Protestant Cause: humbly suggested to the Great Councill of England assembled in Parliament: Printed by John Hammond, 1643," is the title of a new tract, of a few pages, which we know to be Hartlib's. [Footnote: In the copy in the King's Library, British Museum, there is the MS. note "Ex dono Authoris, S. Hartlib" with the date "Feb. 6, 1642," (_i.e._ 1642-3).] Then, in July 1643, the Westminster Assembly met; and what an accession of topics of interest that brought to Hartlib may be easily imagined. There was the excitement of _The Solemn League and Covenant_ (Aug.-Sept.), with the arrival in London of the Scottish Commissioners, including Hartlib's friend Henderson, to take part in the Assembly; there was the beginning of the great debate between Independency and Presbyterianism; nay, in Nov. 1643, Durie was himself appointed a member of the Assembly by the Parliament (Vol. II. p. 517), and so drawn over from the Continent for a long period of service and residence in England.

That Hartlib _was_ interested in all this, and led into new positions and relationships by it, there is very varied proof.--For example, he was one of the witnesses in Laud's trial, which began Nov. 13,1643, and straggled on through the rest of that year and the next. His evidence was wanted by the prosecution in support of that one of the charges against Laud which alleged that he had "endeavoured to cause division and discord between the Church of England and other Reformed Churches." In proof of this it was proposed to show that he had discouraged and impeded Durie in his Conciliation scheme, on the ground that the Calvinistic Churches were alien from the true faith, and that, in particular, he had "caused letters-patent granted by the King for a collection for the Palatinate ministers to be revoked after they had passed the great seal"; and it was to the truth of both these statements that Hartlib, with others, was required to testify. He was, as we know, a most competent witness in that matter; and he gave his evidence duly, though, as I should fancy, with no real ill-will to Laud. [Footnote: See particulars in Prynne's _Canterburie's Doome_ (1646), pp.539-542. Laud, in this part of his defence, names both Durie and Hartlib. He says he did not discourage Durie, but rather encouraged him, as he could prove by letters of Durie's which he had; to which the prosecution replied that the contrary was notorious, and that Durie had "oft complained to his friends" of Land's coldness.]--Now that Episcopacy was done with, and it was to a Parliament and an Assembly mainly Presbyterian that England was looking for a new system of Church-government, Hartlib's anxiety was, as Durie's also was, to make the best of the new conditions, and to instil into them as much of the Durie idea as possible. Might it not even be that a Reformed Presbyterian Church of England would be a more effective leader in a movement for the union of the Protestant Churches of Europe than the Episcopal Church had been? This explains another short tract of Hartlib's, put forth Nov. 9, 1644, and entitled, "The Necessity of some nearer Conjunction and Correspondency amongst Evangelical Protestants, for the Advancement of the National Cause, and bringing to passe the effect of the Covenant." [Footnote: Though the tract, which consists of but eight small quarto pages, is anonymous, it is verified as Hartlib's by the inscription on the British Museum copy, "By Mr. Hartlib, Novemb. 9th." The tract itself bears only "London Printed 1644."]--Well, but how did Hartlib stand in the great controversy between the Independents and the Presbyterians? This too can be answered. As might be expected, he was in sympathy with the Independents, in as far as their claim for a Toleration was concerned. The reader will remember Edwards's famous _Antapologia_, published in July 1644, in answer to the _Apologetical Narration_ of the Five Independent Divines of the Assembly, and which all the Presbyterian world welcomed as an absolutely crushing blow to Independency and the Toleration principle. Here, then, is the title of a smaller publication which that big one provoked: "A Short Letter modestly entreating a Friend's judgment upon Mr. Edwards his Booke he calleth an Anti-Apologia: with a large but modest Answer thereunto: London, Printed according to order, 1644." Actually it was out on Sept. 14th, or about two months after Edwards's book. The title exactly indicates the structure of the publication. It consists of a short Letter and a longish Reply to that Letter. The Letter begins, "Worthy Sir, I have heard of Mr. Edwards's Anti-Apologeticall Book, as I needs must doe, for all the City and Parliament rings with it," and it goes on to request from the person addressed _his_ opinion of the hook. At the end of the letter we find the writer's name "Sam Hartlib": and the dating "from my house in Duke's Place in great haste, Aug. 5." And who was the friend addressed? He was a Hezekiah Woodward, B.A. (Oxon.), preacher in or near Aldermanbury, about fifty years of age, long a zealous Puritan, latterly a decided Parliamentarian and champion of the Solemn League and Covenant, and already known as an author by some Puritanic books, and one or two of a pedagogic kind, referable to an earlier period of his life when he had been a London schoolmaster. Hartlib had known him, he says in his letter, for sixteen years, that is to say from his first coming to London in 1628 or 1629. It is this long friendship that justifies him in asking Woodward's opinion of Edwards's book. The opinion is given in a reply to Hartlib, signed "Hezekiah Woodward," and dated "from my house in Aldermanbury, 13 Aug. 1644"; and it is, as far as I remember, quite against Edwards, and a real, though hazy and perplexed, reasoning for Toleration.[Footnote: The publication was duly registered, and has a long appended _Imprimatur_ by Joseph Caryl; and the exact date of the publication (Sept 14) is from a MS. note in the British Museum copy, For a sketch of Woodward and a list of his writings see Wood, Ath. III, 1034- 7.]

MILTON'S TRACT ON EDUCATION: HIS METHOD WITH HIS PUPILS.

It had been Hartlib's chance, he himself tells us, to be "familiarly acquainted with the best of Archbishops, Bishops, Earls, Viscounts, Barons, Knights, Esquires, Gentlemen, ministers, Professors of both Universities, Merchants, and all sorts of learned or in any kind useful men." This he wrote at a considerably later date in his life; [Footnote: In Aug. 1660, See Letter in Dircks's Memoir, p. 4.] but, from what we have already seen, we may vote it substantially true even in 1644. In that year, we know for certain, the circle of Hartlib's friends included Milton.

The acquaintanceship may have begun some years before that. It may have begun in 1639 when Milton, on his return from abroad, took lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, or in 1640, when he first set up house in Aldersgate Street. At all events, when Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets of the next two years made him a public man, he is not likely to have escaped the cognisance of Hartlib. I should not wonder if Milton were one of those "more forward spirits" whom Hartlib wanted to enlist in the great scheme of a Pansophic University of London to be organized by Comenius, and whom he tried to bring round Comenius personally during the stay of that theorist in London in 1641-2, when the experiment of some such University was really in contemplation by friends in Parliament, and Chelsea had been almost fixed on as the site. But, if so, I rather guess, for reasons which will appear, that Milton gave the whole scheme the cold shoulder, and did not take to the great Comenius. Quite possibly, however, it was not till Comenius was gone, and was fixed down at Elbing in Prussia, that there was any intimacy between Milton and Hartlib. It may have come about after Milton had been deserted by his wife in July 1643, and when a few pupils, besides the two nephews he had till then had charge of, were received into his wifeless household. Would not this in itself be an attraction to Hartlib? Was not Milton pursuing a new method with his pupils, between which and the method of Comenius there were points in common? Might not Comenius himself, in his retirement at Elbing, be interested in hearing of an eminent English scholar and poet who had views about a Reform of Education akin to his own?

This is very much fancy, but it is the exact kind of fancy that fits the certainty. That certainty is that, before the middle of 1644, Milton and Hartlib were well acquainted with each other, had met pretty frequently at Milton's house in Aldersgate Street, or at Hartlib's in Duke's Place, and had conversed freely on many subjects, and especially on that of Education. Nay more, Hartlib, trying to indoctrinate Milton with the Comenian views on this subject, had found that Milton had already certain most positive views of his own upon it, in some things agreeing with the Comenian, but in others vigorously differing. Hence, after various colloquies, he had made a request to Milton. Would he put a sketch of his views upon paper--no elaborate treatise, but merely a sketch, such as one could read in half-an-hour or so, and, if permitted, show to a friend, or print for more general use? Urged more and more pressingly, Milton complied; and the result was the appearance, on June 5, 1644, on some booksellers' counters, of a thin little quarto tract, of eight pages in rather small type, with no author's name, and no title-page at all, but simply this heading atop of the text on the first page, "OF EDUCATION: TO MASTER SAMUEL HARTLIB." The publication had been duly registered, and the publisher was the same Thomas Underhill, of Wood Street, who had published Milton's first three Anti-Episcopal pamphlets. The inference is that the thing was printed by Milton himself, and not by Hartlib. It would be handier for Hartlib to have it in print than in manuscript. [Footnote: "June 4, 1644: Tho. Underhill entered for his copy under the hands of Mr. Cranford [the licenser] and Mr. Man, warden, a little tract touching Education of Youth," is the entry in the Stationers' books; without which we should not have known the publisher's name. The date of the publication is fixed, and the fact that the authorship was known at the time is proved, by this MS. note of Thomason on the copy among the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum (Press mark 12. F. e. 12./160) "By Mr. John Milton: 5 June, 1644."--Milton reprinted the tract in 1673, at the end of the second edition of his Minor Poems, with the words "Written above twenty years since" added to the original title.]

Hartlib must have been pleased, and yet not altogether pleased, with the opening of the Tract. Here it is:--

"MR. HARTLIB,

"I am long since persuaded that to say or do aught worth memory and imitation no purpose or respect should sooner move us than simply the love of God and of Mankind. Nevertheless, to write now the Reforming of Education, though it be one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for the want whereof this Nation perishes, I had not yet at this time been induced, but by your earnest entreaties and serious conjurements; as having my mind for the present half diverted in the pursuance of some other assertions, the knowledge and the use of which cannot but be a great furtherance both to the enlargement of Truth and honest living with much more peace. [Footnote: This passage, the wording of which clearly implies that Milton was prosecuting his Divorce speculation, with whatever else in addition, sets aside a hypothesis (which may have occurred to the reader as well as to myself) that the Tract on Education, though not published till June 1644, may have been written, and in Hartlib's hands, as early as 1641-2, when Comenius was in London. The hypothesis, which might have been otherwise plausible, will not accord with the particular words of the tract now presented; and the conclusion is that, whether Milton knew Hartlib or not as early as 1641- 2, when Comenius was with him, the tract was not written till shortly before its publication in June 1644, when Comenius had been two years in Elbing.] Nor should the laws of any private friendship have prevailed with me to divide thus, or to transpose, my former thoughts, but that I see those aims, those actions, which have won you with me the esteem of a person sent hither by some good providence from a far country to be the occasion and the incitement of great good to this Island. And, as I hear, you have obtained the same repute with men of most approved wisdom, and some of highest authority among us; not to mention the learned correspondence which you hold in foreign parts, and the extraordinary pains and diligence which you have used in this matter both here and beyond the seas, either by the definite will of God so ruling, or the peculiar sway of nature, which also is God's working, Neither can I think that, so reputed and so valued as you are, you would, to the forfeit of your own discerning ability, impose upon me an unfit and over-ponderous argument, but that the satisfaction which you profess to have received from those incidental discourses which we have wandered into hath pressed, and almost constrained, you into a persuasion that what you require from me in this point I neither ought nor can in conscience defer beyond this time, both of so much need at once and of so much opportunity to try what God hath determined. I will not resist, therefore, whatever it is either of divine or human obligement that you lay upon me; but will forthwith set down in writing, as you request me, that voluntary Idea which hath long in silence presented itself to me of a better Education, in extent and comprehension far more large, and yet of time far shorter and of attainment far more certain, than hath been yet in practice. Brief I shall endeavour to be; for that which I have to say assuredly this Nation hath extreme need should be _done_ sooner than _spoken_. To tell you, therefore, what I have benefited herein among old renowned authors, I shall spare; and to search what many modern JANUAS and DIDACTICS, more than ever I shall read, have projected, my inclination leads me not. But, if you can accept of these few observations, which have flowered off, and are as it were the burnishing of, many studious and contemplative years altogether spent in the search of religious and civil knowledge, and such as pleased you so well in the relating, I here give you them to dispose of."

What must have pleased Hartlib in this was the tone of respectful compliment to himself; what may have pleased him less was the slighting way in which Comenius is passed over. "To search what many modern JANUAS and DIDACTICS, more than ever I shall read, have projected, my inclination leads me not," says Milton, quoting in brief the titles of the two best-known works of Comenius. It is as if he had said, "I know your enthusiasm for your Pansophic friend; but I have not read his books on Education, and do not mean to do so." This was barely polite; [Footnote: The manner of the allusion to Comenius rather forbids the idea that Milton had met him during his London visit. Like most high-natured men, Milton had a kindly side to the merits of those whom he personally knew.] but Hartlib was a man of sense: and he would be glad, in reading on, to find that, with whatever independence Milton had formed his views, not even Comenius had outgone him in denunciations of the existing system of Education. Thus:--

"Seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are taught chiefly the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that Language is but the instrument conveying to us Things worthy to be known. And, though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and Lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother-dialect only. Hence appear the many mistakes which have made Learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful. First, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learnt otherwise easily and delightfully in one year. And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behind is our time lost, partly in too oft idle vacancies given both to Schools and Universities, partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled, by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit: besides the ill habit which they get of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom with their untutored Anglicisms, odious to read, yet not to be avoided without a well-continued and judicious conversing among pure authors digested, which they scarce taste; whereas, if, after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, they were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then forthwith proceed to learn the substance of good Things and Arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning _Languages_, and whereby we may best hope to give account to God of our youth spent herein. And, for the usual method of teaching _Arts_, I deem it to be an old error of Universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that, instead of beginning with Arts most easy (and these be such as are most obvious to the sense), they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of Logic and Metaphysics; so that they, having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of Learning, mocked and deluded ail the while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge; till poverty or youthful years call them importunately their several ways, and hasten them, with the sway of friends, either to an ambitious and mercenary or ignorantly zealous Divinity: some allured to the trade of Law, grounding their purposes not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, which was never taught them, but on promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions and flowing fees. Others betake themselves to State affairs, with souls so unprincipled in virtue and true generous breeding that flattery and court-shifts and tyrannous aphorisms appear to them the highest points of wisdom; instilling their barren hearts with a conscientious slavery, if (as I rather think) it be not feigned. Others, lastly, of a more delicious and airy spirit, retire themselves, knowing no better, to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their days in feasts and jollity; which indeed is the wisest and the safest course of all these, unless they were with more integrity undertaken. And these are the errors, and these are the fruits of mis- spending our prime youth at the Schools and Universities as we do, either in learning mere Words, or such Things chiefly as were better unlearnt."

Having thus denounced the existing system of Schools and Universities, Milton goes on to explain what he would substitute. As he poetically expresses it, he will detain his readers no longer in the wretched survey of things as they are, but will conduct them to a hill-side where he will point out to them "the right path of a virtuous and noble education, laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side, that the Harp of Orpheus was not more charming." The rest of the tract is a redemption of this promise. To represent it by mere continued quotation would be of small use, and is perhaps unnecessary. We will, therefore, try a stricter method.

Milton does not formally concern himself in this tract with the complete problem of National Education. In this respect the passion and the projects of Comenius were a world wider than Milton's. Comenius aimed at, and passionately dreamt of, a system of Education that should, in every country where it was established, comprehend all born in that country, of both sexes, and of every rank or class, and take charge of them from their merest infancy on as far as they could go, from the first or Mother's School through the subsequent routine of the Public Vernacular School, the Latin School or _Ludus Literarius_, and the University. This last stage of the complete routine might extend to the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year of life; and, though few could proceed to that stage, and the majority must, from sheer social necessity, drop off in the earlier stages, yet all were to be carried through the stage of the Vernacular Public School, and progress beyond that, where possible, was not to be denied to girls any more than to boys. Compared with this, what Milton contemplates, or at least discusses, is but an important fragment struck off from the total mass. True, he gives a tolerably broad definition of Education at the outset. "I call therefore a complete and generous Education," he says, "that which fits a man to perform, justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of Peace and War." This definition, if meant as verbally perfect, would not have been satisfactory to Comenius, whose express notion of Education, as we know, was that it included preparation for the life to come as well as for that which now is. But, if he had known Milton, he might have let the omission pass as certainly and most solemnly implied, and might even have liked, for the sake of effect, the practical and straightforward utilitarianism of the definition. But then, when Milton's precise phrasing of the definition was examined, one could not but guess limits in his mind. "That which fits a _man_ to perform" are the words of the definition; and to perform what? "All the offices, both private and public, of _Peace and War_," are the words that follow. And, as one reads on, the conjecture suggested by this phrasing is confirmed. By _man_ Milton did not mean _Homo_, but _Vir_. When he framed his definition of Education, only one of the sexes was present to his mind; and throughout the whole tract, from first to last, there is not a single recognition of girl, woman, or anything in female shape, as coming within the scheme proposed. But more than that. Not only is it the education of one sex only that Is discussed in the tract, but it is the education only of a portion of that sex, and of that portion only at a particular period of life. There is nothing about the Infant Education, or what we should now call the Primary Education, of male children; and there is nothing about ways and means for the secondary or higher education of any others than those whose parents could pay for such education out of their own resources. In short, the tract is a proposal of a new method for the education of English gentlemen's sons between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. It is this, and nothing more, except in so far as hints in the general philosophy of education may be implied in the particular exposition. Milton himself was careful, ere the close of the tract, to avow that he had so restricted himself. It was a "general view," he said, such as Mr. Hartlib had desired, and meant also "for light and direction" to "such as have the worth in them to make trial," but "not beginning as some have done [_e.g._ Comenius] at the cradle, which might yet be worth many considerations," and omitting also "many other circumstances" that might have been mentioned had not brevity been the scope. All this it is necessary to remember in justice to the tract. It is a tract on the education of gentlemen's sons, or of such boys and youths as had hitherto been accustomed to go to the English Public Schools and Universities.

Within his avowed limits, Milton is very like himself, _i.e._ very grand and very bold. At the first start, for example, he tells us that he would abolish Universities altogether, or roll Public Schools and Universities into one. Here is his recipe: "First to find out a spacious house and ground about it fit for an ACADEMY, and big enough to lodge 150 persons (whereof 20 or thereabout maybe attendants), all under the government of one who shall be thought of desert sufficient, and ability either to do all or wisely to direct and oversee it done. This place should be at once both School and University, not needing a remove to any other house of Scholarship, except it be some peculiar College of Law or Physic, where they mean to be practitioners; but, as for those general studies which take up all our time from Lilly to the commencing (as they term it) Master of Art, it should be absolute. After this pattern, as many edifices may be converted to this use as shall be needful in every city throughout this land; which would tend much to the increase of learning and civility everywhere." Milton clearly did not like the deputation of all the higher education of England to two seats of learning, like Oxford and Cambridge, but wanted his Academies to be distributed all over England, in numbers proportionate to the population, and chiefly in cities.

He takes one of these imagined Academies as a model, and shows how it might be conducted. He divides the subject into the three heads of STUDIES, EXERCISES AND AMUSEMENTS, and DIET. On this last, however, he is extremely brief. "For their Diet there cannot be much to say, save only that it would be best in the same house; for much time else would be lost abroad, and many ill habits got; and that it should be plain, healthful, and moderate, I suppose is out of controversy:" _i.e._ Milton would prefer that all the pupils should be boarded in the Academy, and have their meals there at a common table. It is to the Studies and the Exercises and Amusements that most space is devoted.

I. THE STUDIES:--Here Milton appears decidedly as an innovator, but yet with a curious mixture of what would now be called rank Conservatism. The innovation consists in a total departure from the use and wont of his time, in respect of the nature of the studies to be pursued and the order in which they should be taken. There was to be an end of that wretched torture of Latin and Greek theme-making and versifying, and that dreary toiling amid obsolete subtleties of scholastic Logic and Metaphysics, which he had denounced in a previous passage, and which had made University Education, he says, nothing better than "an asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles." Instead of these he would have studies useful in themselves and delightful to ingenuous young minds. Things rather than Words; the Facts of Nature and of Life; Real Science of every possible kind: this, together with a persistent training in virtuous and noble sentiment, and a final finish of the highest literary culture, was to compose the new Education. Here Milton and Comenius are very much at one; here Milton and the modern advocates of the Real or Physical Sciences in Education are very much at one. Given a lofty and varied idea of utility, no man has ever been more strenuously utilitarian than Milton was in this tract. The very novelty of the scheme it proposed consisted in the proclamation of utility as the test of the studies to be pursued and as ruling the order in which they should come.--What, then, was that "rank conservatism," as some might call it now, which accompanied the novelty? It was that the medium of liberal education should still be mainly Latin and Greek. A sentence in one of the passages of the tract already quoted has prepared us for this. Language, Milton had there admitted, is valuable in education only as an instrument of real knowledge, a vehicle of "things worthy to be known." But then all languages were not equally fitted for this function, inasmuch as every people could put into its language only what it had in its head or heart, and so different languages had come down freighted with very different weights and worths of matter. Now, what were the languages pointed out by this principle as apt for the purposes of education? They were Greek, Latin, and Italian, with (on religious grounds) Hebrew and one or two of its cognates. These were the tongues to be taught, and to be taught in, and mainly, of these, Latin and Greek. Of English there is not one word. This may partly be accounted for. The acquisition of useful information in all kinds of subjects was to be a great part of the education in each of the proposed Miltonic Academies; and at that time information on all kinds of subjects was locked up chiefly in Latin and Greek books. All modern or mediaeval books of information, all the standard text-books in the Sciences and Arts, that had been written by Englishmen themselves or by Continentals, were in the common Latin; the library of such books, original or translated, in the vernacular was yet but scanty. One could not be _learned_ by means of English alone. Well, but Milton recognised a culture of the feelings, the imagination, the sense of art and nobleness, as also something needed in education, and to be helped by books; and in this respect, if not in the other, were there not available materials and means in the native English Literature? That Literature contained, at all events, the poetry of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and not a few others, rated more or less highly by Milton himself. That Milton did not, on this account, include some teaching and reading of the vernacular in the curriculum of his Academy, may have arisen from the fact that the best in English Literature was then all recent, and of such small bulk collectively that acquaintance with it might be expected as a matter of mere chance and delicious odd hours in window-corners. Here he but followed the custom. All Public or Grammar Schools were Latin and Greek Schools: English at that stage was, by common consent, to shift for itself. And yet there were dissentients from the custom, and advocates of the claims of the vernacular. Comenius, as we have seen, had blown a blast on the subject for all lands; and in Milton's own school of St. Paul's there had been a rather remarkable tradition of English. Not only had the elder Gill, the Head-master of the school in Milton's time, been a purist in English, and an inventor of new methods for teaching in and through English (see Vol. I. pp. 60-64), but Gill's predecessor in the school, Mulcaster, had pleaded for English. "Is it not a marvellous bondage," he had written as early as 1582, "to become servants to one tongue, for learning's sake, the most part of our time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue with the gain of most time: our own bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom; the Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom and bondage? I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more; I honour the Latin, but I worship the English." [Footnote: Richard Mulcaster's "First Part of the Elementarie; which entreateth chiefelie of the Right Writing of our English Ton.," (1582). My quotation, however, is not directly from the book itself, but from an extract in the Appendix to Mr. Quick's "Essays on Educational Reformers" (1868), pp. 301-2.] After this and the tradition of English in St. Paul's, Milton's total omission of English from the curriculum of his Academy is rather remarkable. There are proofs that, when he wrote his Tract on Education, he had settled in a lower estimate of the worth of all the previous English Literature than is common now, and that he thought the greatness of English still to come. This may have had something to do with the omission. Possibly, however, he reserved a large daily use of English in his Academy which does not appear in the programme.

What does appear in the programme is that the curriculum of eight years or so was to be arranged, not rigidly but in a general way, in four classes or stages, thus:--

(1) _First Class or Stage_ (ætat. l2-l3?):--The business here was to be Latin, Arithmetic, and Elementary Geometry. The Latin rudiments and rules were to be learnt from "some good Grammar, either that now used [Lilly's], or any better," and the Italian or Continental mode of pronouncing Latin, instead of the customary English, was to be carefully taught from the first; but as to the first reading-books to be used along with the Grammar, or any method for simplifying and accelerating entrance into Latin, whether that of Comenius or any other, there is no hint as yet. Neither is there any hint as to the manner of learning Arithmetic and the Elements of Geometry, save that the latter might be picked up "even playing, as the old manner was." On another part of the training of this First Class, however, Milton is more specific. Most especially at this stage, the boys were to be inured to noble and hardy sentiments and a sense of the importance of the education they were beginning; they were to be "inflamed with the study of Learning and the admiration of Virtue"; nay, they were to be "stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages." This might be done by reading to them aloud, from Greek or Latin, "some easy and delightful Book of Education" not yet accessible to themselves. "CEBES, [Footnote: The Pinax (Table) of CEBES of Thebes, a disciple of Socrates. "This Pinax is a philosophical explanation of a table on which the whole of human life, with its dangers and temptations, was symbolically represented, and which is said to have been dedicated by some one to the temple of Cronos at Athens or Thebes. The author introduces some youths contemplating the table, and an old man who steps among them undertakes to explain its meaning. The whole drift of the book is to show that only the proper development of the mind and possession of real virtues can make us truly happy" (Dr. L. Schmitz in Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biog.: Art. _Cebes_.) There were in Milton's time Latin translations of Cebes, and at least one in English.] PLUTARCH, [Footnote: This must be some such portion of PLUTARCH'S "Moral Works" as that relating to Pedagogy. An English translation of the "Morals," by Philemon Holland, had been published in 1603.] and other Socratic Discourses," are mentioned as fit for the purpose in Greek; and, in Latin, "the two or three first Books of QUINTILIAN." [Footnote: I do not find in Lowndes any early English translation of QUINTILIAN'S "Institutes." The first two or three Books of this work are an excellent dissertation on the importance of Education and survey of what it ought to include; and it gives us an idea of Milton's purpose that he wanted them to be read to pupils at the outset. He wanted to fire them with high notions of that business of education on which they were entering.] Most, however, would depend on the explanations and precepts of the master himself at every opportunity, and on the influence of his own example, "infusing into their young breasts such an ingenuous and noble ardour as would not fail to make many of them renowned and matchless men." Always, too, at evening, there was to be Religious teaching and reading of the Bible.

(2) _Second Class or Stage_ (_ætat_. 13-16?):--This stage, it must be presumed, was to be considerably longer than the first; for its business was to consist in Latin continued, with Greek added, and in the acquisition through these tongues, and otherwise, of a knowledge of all the useful Sciences and Arts. Here, indeed, Milton's utilitarian bent, his determination to substitute a pabulum of real knowledge for the studies then customary in schools, asserts itself most conspicuously. Here it is that he approaches most to Comenius in the substance, though with a difference in the manner. For what were the books he would exercise his pupils on at this stage, _i.e._ as soon as they had got through the Latin Grammar, and could make out a bit of Latin? First, CATO, VARRO, and COLUMELLA, the three Latin writers on Agriculture. [Footnote: CATO is the famous "Cato the Censor" of Roman history, or M. Porcius Cato (B.C. 231-141), among whose preserved writing, is an agricultural treatise, _De Re Rustica_; VARRO is M. Terentius Varro (B.C. 116-28), reputed the most learned of all the Romans, and among whose various works is also one _De Re Rustica_; COLUMELLA, the author of a systematic work on Agriculture, in twelve Books, lived in the first century of the Christian era. I do not know that there were any English translations of these Latin works on Agriculture in Milton's time.] If the language of these unusual authors was difficult for the pupils, "so much the better; it is not a difficulty beyond their years." They would, at all events, find the matter useful and interesting, and might, by these readings, and due modern comments, be "incited and enabled" for the great work of "improving the tillage of their country" when they should grow to be men. Hartlib, we may be sure, would like this on its own account; but Milton had an additional reason for it. The pupils, after having read these writers, would have a good grasp of the Latin vocabulary, and would be masters of any ordinary Latin prose. They might then, therefore, learn Geography, with "the use of the Globes and all the Maps," through any good modern (Latin) treatise on that subject, and also the elements of "Natural Philosophy" in the same way. Milton does not specify any manual on either subject. But, about this time, he says, the pupils would be learning Greek. This they would do "after the same manner as was before prescribed in the Latin; whereby, the difficulties of Grammar being soon overcome, all the historical Physiology of ARISTOTLE and THEOPHRASTUS are open before them, and, as I may say, under contribution." In other words, the first Greek readings of the pupils would be in such works of Aristotle as his "History of Animals," his "Meteorology," and parts of his general "Physics," and in the "History of Plants" of Aristotle's disciple, Theophrastus; [Footnote: Lowndes mentions no English translations of ARISTOTLE or THEOPHRASTUS as early as Milton's time.] and the purpose of such readings would be to enlarge their knowledge of the Physical Sciences at the same time that they were breaking themselves into Greek. But now, Latin being thoroughly in their possession, they might be ranging at large, in quest of the same and analogous kinds of information, in VITRUVIUS (Architecture), SENECA's "Natural Questions," MELA (Geography), CELSUS (Medicine), PLINY (Natural History), and SOLINUS (Natural History and Geography). [Footnote: VITRUVIUS and CELSUS do not seem to have been translated into English so early as Milton's time; but there were translations of all the others. The works of SENECA, both Moral and Natural, had been "done into English" by Thomas Lodge (1614); PLINY'S "Natural Historie of the World," translated by Philemon Holland, Doctor of Physic (1601), was a well-known book; and MELA and SOLINUS had been made accessible together in "The rare and singular work of Pomponius Mela, that excellent and worthy Cosmographer of the Situation of the World, most orderly prepared, and divided every parte by it selfe; with the Longitude and Latitude of everie kingdome, &c.; whereunto is added that learned worke of Julius Solinus _Polyhistor_, with a necessarie table for this Booke, right pleasant and profitable for Gentlemen, Merchants, Mariners, and Travellers, Translated into Englyshe by Arthur Golding, gent." (1585-7.)] What next? Why, "having thus passed the principles of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Geography, with a general compact of Physics, they may descend, in Mathematics, to the instrumental science of Trigonometry, and from thence to Fortification, Architecture, Enginry, or Navigation; and, in Natural Philosophy, they may proceed leisurely from the History of Meteors, Minerals, Plants, and Living Creatures, as far as Anatomy. Then also in course might be read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of Physic; that they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and how to manage a crudity." Text-books are not mentioned here; and, though some must have been in view for such subjects as Trigonometry, Fortification, Engineering, and Navigation, yet it is clear, from Milton's language, that he meant a good deal of the miscellaneous instruction to be by lectures and digests of books by the teacher. Nay, there were to be more than lectures. "To set forward all these proceedings in Nature and Mathematics, what hinders but that they may procure, as oft as shall be needful, the helpful experiences of Hunters, Fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries, and, in the other sciences, Architects, Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists; who, doubtless, would be ready, some for reward, and some to favour such a hopeful Seminary." Hartlib must here have rejoiced again. But there comes in a Miltonic touch at the end. Hitherto he has debarred the pupils of his Academy, it will have been noticed, from all the ordinary classics read in schools. But, just about the end of this, the second stage of their studies, devoted to the Real or Physical Sciences and their applications, he would admit them to such classic readings as would impart a poetic colouring to the knowledge so acquired. In Greek, they might take now to ORPHEUS, HESIOD, THEOCRITUS, ARATUS, NICANDER, OPPIAN, and DIONYSIUS, and in Latin to LUCRETIUS, MANILIUS, and the Georgics of VIRGIL. [Footnote: Of the ORPHIC POEMS Milton must here have intended those relating to Nature and her phenomena. Of the "Works and Days" or "Georgics" of HESIOD, there had been an English translation by George Chapman (1618); and at least some of the Idylls of THEOCRITUS had been in English since 1588. The _Phnomena_ and _Diosemeia_ of Aratus (circ. B.C. 270) were, as we know, a favourite book with Milton, and he had had a copy of the Paris edition of 1559 in his possession since 1631 (see Vol. I. p. 234, Note), with MS. notes of his own in the margin. In looking at the specimens of these MS. notes facsimiled by the late Mr. Leigh Sotheby in his Milton _Ramblings_ from the original book, now in the British Museum, I can see, by my test of the shaping of the letter e (Vol. II. p. 121, Note), that, while some of the notes were written before the journey to Italy, or between 1631 and 1638, others were written after the return from Italy, _i. e._ after 1639. This proves that Milton kept using the book in his manhood. There was, I think, then no English translation of it. Neither was there a translation of the _Theriaca_ and _Alexipharmaka_ (Poems on Venomous Animals and Poisons) of the Greek NICANDER (circ. B.C. 150); nor of the _Halieutics_ and _Kynegetics_ (Poems on Fishing and Hunting) of OPPIAN (circ. A.D. 210). There was, however, as early as 1572, an English translation "by Thomas Irvine, gentl." of the _Periegetes_ or Geographical Poem of DIONYSIUS AFER (third century after Christ). Of the Latin Poems mentioned-- LUCRETIUS _De Rerum Natura_, the _Astronomica_ of MANILIUS, and the Georgics of VIRGIL--only the last had been Englished as yet. They had been Englished in 1589 by an Abraham Fleming, and in 1628 by Thomas May.]

Some of these books which were "counted most hard" would be, in the circumstances, facile and pleasant.

(3) _Third Class or Stage_ (_ætat_. 16-19?):--The work of this stage was also to be very composite. It was to embrace Ethics, Economics, Politics, Jurisprudence, Theology, Church History and General History, together with Italian, Hebrew, and possibly Chaldee and Syriac, varied throughout by such carefully-arranged readings in Latin and Greek classics as would harmonize with those studies while they relieved them. For by this stage the reason of the pupils would have been so far matured that they might pass from the Physical to the Moral Sciences. For Ethics, they might be led "through all the Moral Works of PLATO, XENOPHON, CICERO, PLUTARCH, LAERTIUS, and those LOCRIAN REMNANTS; [Footnote: There was then no complete English translation of PLATO, but individual Dialogues had been translated, and he had been accessible complete in Latin since 1484. The _Cyropædia_ of XENOPHON had been twice translated into English, the second translation (1632) being by Philemon Holland; but Lowndes mentions no translation yet of the _Memorabilia_. The _De Officiis_ of CICERO had been translated again and again, and others of his writings. The Morals of PLUTARCH, as we have already seen, were accessible in English. The book on the History of Philosophy by the Greek DIOGENES LAERTIUS was not yet in English, but a Latin translation was extant. By the LOCRIAN REMNANTS seem to be meant reputed remains of those LOCRIAN philosophers from whom PLATO had derived instruction.] but still to be reduced, in their nightward studies wherewith they close the day's work, under the determinate sentence of DAVID or SOLOMON, or the EVANGELS and APOSTOLIC SCRIPTURES." For Economics and Politics, to follow the Ethics, no books are named; but the Greek and Latin books in view may be guessed. In Jurisprudence, which was to come next, they would find the substance "delivered first, and with best warrant, by MOSES"; and then, "as far as human prudence can be trusted, in those extolled remains of Grecian Lawgivers, LYCURGUS, SOLON, ZALEUCUS, CHARONDAS, and thence to all the Roman Edicts and Tables, with their JUSTINIAN, and so down to the SAXON AND COMMON LAWS OF ENGLAND and the STATUTES." [Footnote: To put this in other words, Milton, to ground his English students in the Science of Law, would have begun first with the MOSAIC LAWS in the Pentateuch, and would then have led them through a course of: I. _The Greek Legislation_, so far as it could be recovered, of LYCURGUS the Spartan (B.C. 884, according to Aristotle), SOLON the Athenian (_circ._ B.C. 600), ZALEUCUS, the Lawgiver of the Locrians (_circ._ B.C. 660), and CHARONDAS, the Lawgiver of Catana and other Greek cities in Sicily and Italy (_circ._ B.C. 500); II. _The Roman Law_, in all its ancient fragments, and especially in its great compilation and completion by the Emperor JUSTINIAN (A.D. 527-534); III. _Native English Law_, as represented in the preserved codes of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Kent, Wessex, &c., and in the traditional and written Laws of England since the Conquest.] For History, General or Ecclesiastical, no manuals are spoken of; and, as respects Theology, it is only indicated that this might be the employment of Sundays, though not exclusively so.--The Italian language was to be acquired "at any odd hour" in an early part of this stage, and the Hebrew, with Chaldee and Syriac, farther on; but there is no specification of means, or of the Grammars to be used.--The poetical and oratorical readings interspersed with these various and progressive studies were to be, in the earlier part of the stage, "some choice Comedies, Greek, Latin, and Italian," selected "with wariness and good antidote," and a Tragedy or two of the domestic kind, such as the _Trachiniæ_ of SOPHOCLES, and the _Alcestis_ of EURIPIDES; and so gradually to the chief Historians (HERODOTUS, THUCYDIDES, &c.), the Heroic Poets (HOMER, VIRGIL, &c.), the "Attic Tragedies of stateliest and most regal ornament" (more of SOPHOCLES and EURIPIDES), and "the most famous Political Orations" (DEMOSTHENES and CICERO). [Footnote: Chapman's translation of HOMER into English had been complete in 1616. Nothing of ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, or EURIPIDES, appears to have been translated into English. Two Books of HERODOTUS had been translated into English as early as 1584; and Hobbes' translation of THUCYDIDES had appeared in 1628. There were English translations of some Orations of DEMOSTHENES and CICERO; and of the Æneid of VIRGIL, or separate portions of it, there had been many translations, including Caxton's (1480), Gawin Douglas's in Scotch (1553), the Earl of Surrey's (1557), Phær and Irvine's (1573), and Sandys's (1627).] Milton recommends that passages of the Orators and Tragedians should be got by heart and solemnly recited aloud. He does not name Æschylus among his Tragedians. Euripides, we know, was his favourite.

(4) _Fourth Class or Stage_ (_ætat._ 19-21?):--This was to be the finishing stage, and was to be devoted to Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetics, with practice in Composition. Such training in form and literary theory, Milton argued, would come best after the pupils had acquired a sufficiency of _matter_, or somewhat of "an universal insight into _things_." As to the masters for Logic he says nothing in the tract; but we know otherwise that he had a fancy for Ramus, as qualifying Aristotle. For Rhetoric the masters were to be "PLATO, ARISTOTLE, PHALEREUS, CICERO, HERMOGENES, LONGINUS." [Footnote: PLATO comes in here, I suppose, for his style generally, and for disquisitions on Rhetoric in one or two of his Dialogues; ARISTOTLE, of course, for his _Rhetoric_ (not then translated, I think). PHALEREUS is Demetrius Phalereus, the Athenian orator (B.C. 345--283), and reputed author of a work "On Elocution" (not translated in Milton's time, I think); CICERO is brought in, of course, for his _De Oratore_, &c. (translated into English, I should think, before Milton's time, but I am not sure); HERMOGENES (second century after Christ) is the Greek author of a system of Rhetoric in several Books, all written in his youth (not in English in Milton's time, if yet); and LONGINUS was Longinus' "On the Sublime" (waiting to be put into English).] By Poetics Milton did not mean mere Prosody, which he assumed the pupils to have learnt long ago under the head of Grammar, but "that sublime Art which, in ARISTOTLE'S _Poetics_, in HORACE, and the Italian Commentaries of CASTELVETRO, TASSO, MAZZONI, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic Poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what decorum is, which is the great masterpiece to observe. [Footnote: Lowndes does not mention any very early translation of the _Poetics_ of ARISTOTLE. Of the _De Arte Poetica_ of HORACE there had been at least two translations--one by "Tho. Drant" in 1567, and one by Ben Jonson (published 1640). One work of TASSO referred to in the text is, I suppose, his _La Cavaletta; overo della Poesia Toscana;_ CASTELVETRO (1505--1571) and MAZZONI (_circa_ 1590) were two Italian scholars who had written on Poetry. The omission by Milton here of such English books as Sir Philip Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1595) and Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) is a striking instance of his resolute non-regard of everything English.] This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common Rhymers and Play-writers be, and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent use, might be made of Poetry both in divine and human things." Observe the contempt which Milton here expresses of the English Literature of his age. It had by this time become one of his habitual feelings. He goes on, however, to express the same contempt of the contemporary English Pulpit. By that practice in speaking and writing which he proposed as the final and crowning discipline in his Academy, he hoped to turn out young men fitted to teach the English Pulpit a new style of preaching, as well as to excel in public and Parliamentary life.

II. EXERCISES AND AMUSEMENTS:--These were to be of three kinds: (1) _Gymnastics and Regular Military Drill._ Milton is most emphatic on this subject. He would have the course of Education in his Academy to be as good for war as for peace; and therefore he would blend the Spartan discipline with the Athenian culture. The pupils were to be taught Fencing, so that they might be excellent swordsmen, with "exact use of their weapon, to guard, and to strike safely with edge or point." They were also to be "practised in all the locks and gripes of Wrestling, wherein Englishmen were wont to excel, as need may often be in fight to tug or grapple, and to close." So much for their gymnastics individually. But the main thing was to be their military drill collectively. There was to be no mistake about this; it was to be no mere school-play. The 120 or 130 youths in each Academy, under its head-master, with his twenty attendants, were to be treated sometimes as a single company of Foot, and at other times as two troops of Horse; and they were to be regularly and continually drilled in all the art both of Infantry and Cavalry. As we have already quoted the substance of the passage where this is insisted on (Vol. II. p. 480), we need here note only that portion of the passage in which Milton points out how, by such a system of training, the pupils of his Academy might be expected, "as it were out of a long war," to "come forth renowned and perfect commanders in the service of their country." "Commanders" observe; _i.e._, as we said before, the contemplated Academy was one for gentlemen's sons only. (2) _Music_. There was to be abundance of this in the Academy, both for recreation and for the noble effects of music on the mind. The music was to be both vocal and instrumental; and of the various instruments the organ is named in chief. (3) _Excursions_. "In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with Heaven and Earth. I should not therefore be a persuader to them of studying much then, after two or three years that they have well laid their grounds, but to ride out in companies, with prudent and staid guides to all the quarters of the land, learning and observing all places of strength, all commodities of building, and of soil for towns and tillage, harbours and ports for trade; sometimes taking sea as far as to our navy, to learn there also what they can in the practical knowledge of sailing and of sea-fight."

Dr. Johnson's criticism of Milton's new Method of Education is well known, and is perhaps the criticism most operative to the present day. The scheme is a mere air-hung fancy, the _utinam_ of a sanguine spirit, put forth as a possible institution! But the real question in every such case is, Does the proposal contain some important improvement which _is_ practicable? Does it move in the right direction? This is the question to be asked respecting Milton's plan for a Reformed Education, How does Dr. Johnson answer it? "The truth is that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first object is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists, but are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with Intellectual Nature is necessary; our speculations upon Matter are voluntary, and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergence that one man may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostatics or astronomy; but his moral and prudential character immediately appears. Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians."[Footnote: Johnson's Life of Milton, in his _Lives of the Poets_ (Cunningham's edit. I.91-93)] What an egregious misrepresentation this is of Milton's project the reader, who already knows the project itself in its completeness, will see at once. Milton included all that Johnson wanted to have included, and more largely and systematically than Johnson would have dared to dream of, and for the same reasons. The introduction of Natural and Physical Science into schools was but a portion, though an emphatic portion, of Milton's project. And, with respect to this portion of his project--a novelty at the time, though Milton had Comenius and Hartlib and all the Verulamians with him--subsequent opinion has more and more pronounced, and is more and more and more pronouncing, for Milton and against Johnson. The fairer criticism now would be as to the _mode_ in which Milton proposed to teach Natural and Physical Science, and knowledge generally. Milton, who himself possessed in really encyclopædic extent all the scientific knowledge of his time, must have been right in supposing that the knowledge _could_ then be taught through Latin and Greek books. Even then, however, he perhaps overrated the necessity of Latin and Greek for this particular business of education, and underrated what could be done in sheer English. And, now that Science has burst all bounds of Latin and Greek, and it would be ludicrous to go merely to the Greek and Latin authors named by Milton for our Geography, or Astronomy, or Natural History, or Physics, or Chemistry, or Anatomy and Physiology, it is clear that the claims of Latin and Greek in education must not rest on their instrumental value in giving access to the stores of science, but on quite another basis. In short, that in Milton's scheme which is now obsolete is its determinate intertwining of the whole business of the acquisition of knowledge with the process of reading in other languages than the vernacular. This taken out of the Scheme, all the rest lasts, and is as good now, and perhaps as needful, as it was in Milton's time. Above all, the noble moral glow that pervades the _Tract on Education_, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and written, and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting.

The plan of the tract was not speculative only. Since 1639, when he lived in the St. Bride's Churchyard lodging, Milton had been teaching his two nephews, and had had the younger nephew, Johnny Phillips, boarding with him entirely; when he removed in 1640 to the house in Aldersgate Street, the elder nephew, Edward Phillips, also came under his roof; and in 1643, after his wife had deserted him, and his father had come to live with him, he had received into his house, as boarders or day-boarders, a few additional pupils. How many there were we do not know: probably, with the two nephews, not more than eight or a dozen at most. Part of his daily work, therefore, at the very time when he wrote the tract to Hartlib, was the teaching of these few boys. Accordingly, it is at this point that we may best quote Edward Phillips's account of his uncle's method with his pupils. He had himself had four or five years' experience of the method, and was now (1644) fourteen years of age. In his account, however, though he inserts it as early as the year 1639 in his Memoir, he inweaves recollections that must span from 1639 to 1646, so as to describe in one passage his uncle's training of boys from the age of ten to that of fifteen or sixteen:--

"And here, by the way, I judge it not impertinent to mention the many authors both of the Latin and Greek which, through his excellent judgment and way of teaching, far above the pedantry of common Public Schools (where such authors are scarce ever heard of), were run over within no greater compass of time than from ten to fifteen or sixteen years of age:--Of the Latin, the four grand authors _De Re Rusticâ_, CATO, VARRO, COLUMELLA, and PALLADIUS; a great part of PLINY'S 'Natural History'; VITRUVIUS his 'Architecture'; FRONTINUS his 'Stratagems'; with the two egregious Poets, LUCRETIUS and MANILIUS: Of the Greek, HESIOD, a poet equal to Homer; ARATUS his _Phænomena_ and _Diosemeia_; DIONYSIUS AFER '_De Situ Orbis_'; OPPIAN'S 'Cynegetics' and 'Halieutics'; QUINTUS CALABER his Poem of the Trojan War continued from Homer; APOLLONIUS RHODIUS his 'Argonautics'; and, in prose, PLUTARCH'S '_Placita Philosophorum_' and [Greek: Peri Paidon Agogias]; GEMINUS'S Astronomy, XENOPHON'S _Cyri Institutio_ and _Anabasis_, ÆLIAN'S 'Tactics,' and POLYÆNUS his 'Warlike Stratagems.' Thus, by teaching, he in some measure increased his own knowledge, having the reading of all these authors as it were by proxy.... Nor did the time thus studiously employed in conquering the Greek and Latin tongues hinder the attaining to the chief Oriental languages, viz. the Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac, so far as to go through the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, in Hebrew, to make a good entrance into the Targum, or Chaldee Paraphrase, and to understand several chapters of St. Matthew in the Syriac Testament: besides an introduction into several Arts and Sciences, by reading URSTISIUS his Arithmetic, RIFF'S Geometry, PITISCUS his Trigonometry, JOANNES DE SACRO BOSCO _De Sphæra_; and into the Italian and French tongues, by reading, in Italian, GIOVAN VILLANI'S History of the Transactions between several petty States of Italy, and, in French, a great part of PIEREE DAVITY, the famous geographer of France in his time.----The Sunday's work was for the most part the reading each day a chapter of the Greek Testament and hearing his learned exposition upon the same (and how far this savoured of Atheism in him I leave to the courteous backbiter to judge); the next work after this was the writing from his own dictation some part, from time to time, of a Tractate which he thought fit to collect from the ablest of Divines who had written of that subject (AMESIUS, WOLLEBIUS, &c.)--viz. A Perfect System of Divinity; of which more hereafter." [Footnote: The books named in this extract from Phillips, but not in Milton's tract, may be noted:--The PALLADIUS, who is here added to the three Latin writers on Agriculture mentioned in the tract, lived probably in the fourth century, and left a treatise _De Re Rustica_, very popular through the Middle Ages. It had not been translated into English. FRONTINUS (who had preceded Agricola as Roman Governor of Britain, and died _circ_. A.D. 106) was the author of _Stratagematicon Libri IV._, a kind of anecdotic treatise on the Art of War; ÆLIANUS (time of the Emperor Hadrian) and POLYÆNUS the Macedonian (second century) were Greek writers on the Military Art. Though Milton does not name them in his tract, he doubtless had them in view among Military Books to be read. Two of them had been translated into English--Frontinus, by "Richarde Morysine" (1539), and Ælianus by "John Bingham" (1616-31). QUINTUS CALABER, the nature of whose Poem in 14 Books is sufficiently described in the text (really a native of Smyrna, but called "Calaber" because the best known copy of his Poem was found in Calabria), lived late in the fourth century; APOLLONIUS RHODIUS, so called because he lived long in Rhodes, though born in Alexandria, is a much earlier and much better known Greek poet (_circ._ B. C. 200). Neither of these Greek poets seems to have been translated in Milton's time. GEMINUS was a Greek mathematician of the first century, who seems to have lived in Rome, and who left an [Greek: Pisagogæ kis ta phainomena], or treatise on the Sphere. Lowndes mentions no English version of it. URSTISIUS, who is mentioned for his Arithmetic, is CHRISTIAN WURZTICIUS, an Italian mathematician (1544-1588); RIFF I have not farther identified; PITISCUS is Bartholomew Pitiscus (1561-1613); and JOANNES DE SACRO BOSCO is the famous Englishman John Holywood (died 1256), whose treatise _De Sphæra_, often re-edited and re-published, was the most popular manual of Astronomy in the Middle Ages. VILLANI, the Florentine historian, died 1348; DAVITY, the French geographer, is unknown to me; AMESIUS, author of the _Medella Theo logia_ and other theological works, is the William Ames (1576-1633), already known to us (Vol. II. p 579); and WOLLIBIUS (1536- 1626) was a Divine of Basle and author of _Compendium Theologiæ_.]

What a busy domicile the wifeless house in Aldersgate Street must have been through the year 1644! Pupils and their lessons through the solid part of the day; only a margin, morning and evening, for Milton's own readings and meditations; the father sometimes with him for an hour or so of music, but oftener in his own room, "retired to his rest and devotion, without the least trouble imaginable;" every hour of the day crammed with work; even on the Sundays those expositions of the Greek Testament to his pupils, and those dictations to them in Latin of portions of a System of Divinity which he had resolved to compile from the Scriptures and the works of the best Protestant theologians! And yet it was out of this quiet and industrious household that there had burst upon the English public that thunderbolt of the Divorce heresy!

A SECOND DIVORCE TRACT: COMPILATION FROM BUCER.

The Divorce idea still occupied Milton. On the 15th of July, 1644 (five weeks after the publication of the _Tract on Education_ addressed to Hartlib, and five months and a half after the publication of the Second Edition of the _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_), there was entered at Stationers' Hall another tract, which appeared on that day, or immediately afterwards, with this title: "_The Judgement of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. Writt'n to Edward the Sixt, in his Second Book of the Kingdom of Christ. And now Englisht. Wherein a late Book restoring the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, is heer confirm'd and justify'd by the authoritie of Martin Bucer. To the Parlament of England_. John 3, 10: Art thou a teacher in Israel, and know'st not these things? _Publisht by Authoritie. London, Printed by Matthew Simmons_, 1644." Martin Bucer [Footnote: The entry in the Stationers' Hall Registeris as follows:--"_July 15, 1614: Matt. Symmons cut. for his copie, under which, of Mr. Downham, and Mr. Parker, warden, the Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce, written to King Edw. ye 6th in the 2nd Book of the Kingdom of Xt.: Englished by Mr. Milton._"] The tract consists of 40 small quarto pages in all; of which, however, only 24 are numbered. These numbered pages, forming the body of the tract, are abridged translations by Milton of the passages from Martin Bucer which he wished to introduce to the English public. They are preceded by six pages of "Testimonies of the high approbation which learned men have given of Martin Bucer" (viz. quotations by Milton from Calvin, Beza, Sturmius, and others, to show what a man Bucer was), and then by eight pages of closer type, addressed by Milton to the Parliament and signed with his name in full. At the end, after the numbered pages, there is a postscript of two pages, in which Milton again speaks directly, and winds up the tract.

The title-page of the tract indicates Milton's purpose in it, His original Divorce treatise had been put forth as the result of his own reasonings and meditations, without the knowledge that any had preceded him in the same track to anything like the same extent. While preparing the second edition he had become aware that strong support from learned authorities might be adduced for his doctrine; in especial, he had become aware that he had had a forerunner in the famous Reformer Paul Fagius. Much of the added matter in the second edition consisted, accordingly, in the citation of Fagius and other witnesses to strengthen his argument. Strangely enough, however, he was still unaware that he might have the benefit of a witness more renowned even than Paul Fagius. Not till May 1644 did he chance to learn this fact. "When the book," he says, "had been now the second time set forth well-nigh three months, as I best remember, I then first came to hear that Martin Bucer had written much concerning Divorce: whom earnestly turning over, I soon perceived, but not without amazement, in the same opinion, confirmed with the same reasons, which in that published book, without the help or imitation of any precedent writer, I had laboured out and laid together." The particular writing of Bucer's in which Milton found this extraordinary coincidence with his own views was the _De Regno Christi ad Edw. VI._, written by Bucer about 1550, but first published at Basle in 1557. There was reason, Milton is careful to impress on his readers, why Bucer, and Fagius along with Bucer, should be remembered with unusual reverence by the Protestants of England. Coming over to England in 1549, each with his great continental fame already won, they had been placed in Cambridge by the young Edward VI., then desirous of completing and perfecting the Reformation of his kingdom--Bucer as Professor of Divinity, and Fagius of Hebrew. Fagius had died in Cambridge in the same year, when he had barely begun to teach; Bucer, after he had taught for about eighteen months, died in the same place, Feb. 28, 1550-51. Both had thus breathed the last strength of their spirits into the Protestantism of England. Nay, they might be reckoned among the martyrs of English Protestantism; for, when Mary had succeeded Edward, had not their bodies been dug up, as the bodies of heretics, and publicly burnt to ashes in the Cambridge market-place? Let all this be remembered, and especially let it be remembered that Bucer had addressed his _De Regno Christi_ to Edward VI., and intended its admonitions and instructions for the use of that monarch and his people. In that writing Bucer, though he had been dead a hundred years, was still speaking to the people of England, and telling them what remained to be done before their national reformation could be called thorough. Well, in that treatise there was a great deal about Divorce. Bucer had evidently made a study of the topic, and attached great importance to it. A large portion of the Second Book of the treatise consisted of nothing else; and it was this portion of the treatise only that Milton, partly in delight and partly in amazement at its accordance with his own doctrine, proposed to recover out of the neglected Latin, and present in plain English. Not that such drudgery of translation was to his taste. "Whether it be natural disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of what God made mine own, and not a translator," is his proud phrase of explanation why he could "never delight in long citations, much less in whole traductions." Even in this case he would only digest and epitomize. Beginning at Chap. XV. of the Second Book of Bucer's treatise, he would go on to Chap. XLVII. inclusively, indicating the contents of the successive chapters by headings, omitting what was irrelevant to his own purpose, and translating the passages that were most relevant. This is what is done in the 24 numbered pages which form the body of Milton's tract. They are a concatenation of dryish morsels from Bucer, duly labelled and introduced; but they make it clear that Bucer's notion of marriage was substantially the same as Milton's.

As respects Milton himself, the portion of his new Tract which is of greatest interest is the prefixed Address to the Parliament. It is noteworthy that, whereas the Second Edition of his original Divorce treatise is dedicated to "the Parliament of England _with_ the Assembly," the new tract is dedicated to the Parliament only. The Address makes the reason of this plain. It is here, in fact, that we first hear from Milton himself of the obloquy to which his Divorce Doctrine had subjected him. It had begun, he now tells us (and we have already used the information), almost immediately after the publication of the first, and anonymous, edition of his original treatise--his style then betraying him to be the author, and some of the clergy opening loud cry against him in consequence. This had induced him to bring out the second edition, not anonymous, but openly acknowledged. Though aware of the declared hostility among the clergy, he had not then deemed it proper to descant on that subject, but had, in courtesy, dedicated the Second Edition to the Assembly in conjunction with the Parliament. Even then he had no doubt from which of the two bodies he would receive the fairer treatment. "I was confident," he says in his present address of the Bucer tract to the Parliament, "if anything generous, anything noble and above the multitude, were yet left in the spirit of England, it could be nowhere sooner found, and nowhere sooner understood, than in that House of Justice and true Liberty where ye sit in Council." Here the Assembly is ignored, and the insinuation is that, though he had included _them_ in the dedication, it was rather by way of form than in real trust. This had been in Feb. 1643-4, and now, in July 1644, he knew his position so precisely that there was no need for farther reticence. He had not been disappointed in the Parliament. He had had hope in them; "nor doth the event hitherto, _for some reasons which I shall not here deliver_, fail me of what I conceived so highly." The words I have put in italics can bear no other construction than that Milton had reason to know, from private assurances, which he regarded as confidential, that some leading men in Parliament thought him perfectly entitled to broach his doctrine, and would take care that he should not be troubled for it. He was not uninformed either, he adds, that "divers learned and judicious men," both in and out of Parliament, had "testified their daily approbation" of his treatise. With the Assembly, however, he knew it to be all over. Though from them above all, by reason of "their profession and supposed knowledge," his treatise had deserved a fair hearing, all that he had received was to be "esteemed the deviser of a new and pernicious paradox." He does not, indeed, name the Assembly while intimating this, but only refers to the clergy generally and dispersedly. That he had the Assembly distinctly in view, however, appears not only from the tenor of the whole, but also from a passage in the Postscript, where he hints that such action was at work against him that he might be stopped any day by the official censorship and prevented from printing. If, therefore, this new tract should be permitted to appear, only to the Parliament would he dedicate it. But, while dedicated to the Parliament, it was intended for the Assembly. It was a challenge to _them_. The Reverend gentlemen had refused to consider the Doctrine of Divorce when propounded by their contemporary, a private layman and reasoner. They had thought it worthy only of denunciation as an impious paradox, destructive of morality and social order. What would they now say to the same Doctrine exhibited to them, chapter and verse, as the doctrine of one of the great European Reformers and Divines, whose name was often in their mouths, though they knew so little about him?

While the Address to Parliament thus makes clear Milton's consciousness that the Assembly were watching him and might at any time denounce him, there is yet another curious strain in it, interesting as an illustration of the writer's character. Milton was evidently divided between delight in having found Bucer his predecessor in the doctrine and a proud feeling of his own self-earned property in the same. Not even to Bucer would he yield the palm of this discovery; nay, generally, he did not care though it should be known that, while he reverenced Bucer and such men of the past, he did not think that God's power to create and endow exceptional human spirits had so exhausted itself in that time and that group of men but that work higher than aught of mere discipleship to any of them might be reserved for himself. Here Milton is in one of his constitutional moods; and it is interesting to observe with what constancy to it he treats the small fact of a discovered coincidence in opinion between himself and Bucer. The following passage will suffice in this respect, and also as a specimen of the whole tract:--

"I may justly gratulate mine own mind with due acknowledgment of assistance from above, which led me, not as a learner, but as a collateral teacher, to a sympathy of judgment with no less a man than Martin Bucer. And he, if our things here below arrive him where he is, does not repent him to see that point of knowledge which he first, and with an unchecked freedom, preached to those more knowing times of England, now found so necessary, though what he admonished were lost out of our memory, yet that God doth now again create the same doctrine in another unwritten table [the _tabula rasa_ of Milton's mind], and raises it up immediately out of his pure oracle to the convincement of a perverse age, eager in the reformation of names and ceremonies, but in realities as traditional and as ignorant as their forefathers. I would ask now the foremost of my profound accusers whether they dare affirm that to be licentious, new and dangerous, which Martin Bucer so often and so urgently avouched to be moot lawful, most necessary, and most Christian, without the least blemish. to his good name among all the worthy men of that age and since who testify so highly of him. If they dare, they must then set up an arrogance of their own against all those churches and saints who honoured him without this exception. If they dare not, how can they now make _that_ licentious doctrine in another which was never blamed or confuted in Bucer or in Fagius? The truth is, there will be due to them, for this their unadvised rashness, the best donative that can be given them--I mean a round reproof [_a hint to Parliament about the Assembly?_]; now that, where they thought to be most magisterial, they have displayed their own want both of reading and of judgment: first, to be so unacquainted in the writings of Bucer, which are so obvious and so useful in their own faculty; next, to be so caught in a prejudicating weakness as to condemn that for lewd which, whether they knew or not, these elect servants of Christ commended for lawful, and for new that which was taught by these, almost the first and greatest authors of Reformation, who were never taxed for so teaching, and dedicated without scruple to a royal pair of the first Reforming kings in Christendom [Edward VI., for whom Bucer's _De Regno Christi_ was written, and Christian III. of Denmark, to whom it was dedicated when published at Basle in 1557], and confessed in the public Confession of a most orthodoxal Church and State in Germany [the church and community of Strasburg, in whose Confession, according to Milton, Bucer's Divorce Doctrine had been adopted]. This is also another fault which I must tell them--that they have stood now almost this whole year clamouring afar off, while the Book [Milton's _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_] hath been twice printed, twice bought up, and never once vouchsafed a friendly conference with the author, who would be glad and thankful to be shown an error, either by private dispute or public answer, and could retract as well as wise men before him: might also be worth the gaining, as one who heretofore hath done good service to the Church, by their own confession. ... However, if we know at all when to ascribe the occurrences of this life to the work of a special Providence, as nothing is more usual in the talk of good men, what can be more like to a special providence of God than in the first Reformation of England that this question of Divorce, as a main thing to be restored to just freedom, was written, and seriously commended to Edward the Sixth, by a man called from another country to be an instructor of our nation, and now, in this present renewing of the Church and Commonwealth, which we pray may be more lasting, that same question should be again treated and presented to this Parliament by one enabled to use the same reasons without the least sight or knowledge of what was done before. It were no trespass, Lords and Commons, though something of less note were attributed to the ordering of a Heavenly Power. This question, therefore, of such prime concernment to Christian and Civil welfare, in such an extraordinary manner not recovered, but plainly twice-born to these latter ages, as from a divine hand, I tender to your acceptance and most considerate thoughts."

MR. HERBERT PALMER'S ATTACK ON MILTON FROM THE PULPIT.

Whether up to this time (July 1644) there had been any open mention of Milton and his Doctrine in the Westminster Assembly, anything more than muttered thunder among the Divines in their private colloquies, can be but guessed. It is quite possible that he _was_ publicly named, and not by mere implication, among the Sects and Sectaries generally. There may even be record of the fact somewhere, though I have found none in Lightfoot's Notes of the Assembly, nor in Gillespie's, nor in Baillie's Letters. But the peal was coming, and this daring challenge to the Assembly in his Bucer tract may have helped to provoke it.

When the tract was published, the Assembly was about to break up for that fortnight's vacation (July 23-Aug. 7) which we have represented as so important a notch in its proceedings. Or, indeed, the Assembly may have been _in_ its vacation when the tract appeared; for, though registered at the Stationers' Hall July 15, it may not have been in circulation till a week later. At all events, when the Assembly met again, and when, as we have seen, it fell, as if by concert, on the subject of the multiplication of the Sectaries and their insolences, then Milton was among the first attacked. He was one of a batch of eleven persons, including also Roger Williams, John Goodwin, Clement Wrighter, and some Anabaptists and Antinomians, whom the Assembly denounced to Parliament as prime offenders. This fact, already noticed in its place in our general history, has now again to be presented more in detail.

The first publicly to blow the trumpet against Milton, the reader already knows, was Mr. Herbert Palmer. He did so in his Sermon before the two Houses of Parliament in St. Margaret's, Westminster, on the Extraordinary Day of Humiliation, Tuesday, Aug. 13, six days after the Assembly had resumed its sittings. Here is the particular passage in the Sermon:--

"But against a Toleration in general even the COVENANT itself, in that very Article [Article II.], hath a reason suitable to the Text [Psalm xcix, 8]. 'Lest we partake of other men's sins, and be in danger to receive of their plagues.' saith the Covenant; which in the language of the Text is 'Lest God take vengeance on their inventions' and ours together. It is true that the name of Conscience hath an awful sound unto a conscientious ear. But, I pray, judge but in a few instances whether all pretence of Conscience ought to be a sufficient plea for Toleration and Liberty:--1. There be those that say their conscience is against all taking of an oath before a magistrate. Will you allow an universal liberty of this? What then will become of all our legal and judicial proceedings? which are confined to this way of proof: and so it was by God appointed, and hath been by all nations practised. 2. There be some that pretend Liberty of Conscience to equivocate in an oath even before a magistrate, and to elude all examinations by mental reservations. Will you grant them this liberty; or can you, without destroying all bonds of civil converse, and wholly overthrowing of all human judicature? 3. If any plead Conscience for the lawfulness of Polygamy; or for Divorce for other causes than Christ and His Apostles mention (_of which a wicked look is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his name to it and dedicate it to yourselves_); or for liberty to many incestuously--will you grant a toleration for all this?"

Palmer goes on to instance four other opinions which might ask for toleration, but which are in their nature so subversive of all authority and all civil order that the bare imagination of their being tolerated is, he thinks, a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the idea of a Universal Toleration. What has been quoted, however, will show whereabouts among the Sectaries he placed Milton. He cited him as the advocate of an opinion so monstrous that no sane person could think of tolerating _it_. And it is to be noted that, though he gives other instances of such monstrous opinions tending to practical anarchy, Milton is the only person openly referred to in this extreme category, and his book the only book. On the same day, Mr. Hill, Palmer's fellow-preacher before Parliament, referred by implication to Roger Williams's _Bloody Tenent_, which had been burnt by the hangman a day or two before; and here was Palmer mentioning with less reserve, Milton's _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ as richly deserving the same fate. Williams, we know, was happily on his way back to America at the time; but Milton was at hand, in his house in Aldersgate Street, whenever he should be wanted.

To be preached at before the two Houses of Parliament, on a solemn Fast Day, by an eminent Divine of the Westminster Assembly, was, I should say, a ten times greater trial of a man's equanimity in those days than it would be in these to waken one morning and find oneself the subject of a scathing onslaught in the columns of the leading newspaper. It was positively the worst blast from the black trumpet of the wind-god Æolus then possible for any inhabitant of England; and not even that poor company of suitors to whom, in Chaucer's poem, fickle Queen Fame awarded this black blast from the wind-god, instead of the blast of praise from his golden trumpet which they were expecting, can have been more discomfited than most persons would have been had they been in Milton's place a day or two after Palmer's sermon. [Footnote: Cromwell was away with the Arms, but Vane may have heard Palmer's sermon. Baillie was certainly present, with the other Scottish Commissioners; and he was delighted with Palmer's outspokenness. See _antè_, p 162]

What did this Æolus, but he Took out his black trumpe of brass, That fouler than the Devil was, And gan this trumpe for to blow As all the world should overthrow. Throughout every regioun Went this foule trumpe's soun, As swift as pellet out of gun When tire is in the powder run; And such a smoke gan outwend Out of the foule trumpe's end, Black, blue, greenish, swartish, red, As dote where that men melt lead, Lo! all on high from the tewelle. And thereto one thing saw I well-- That, the farther that it ran, The greater waxen it began, As doth the river from a well; And it stank as the pit of Hell. [Footnote: Chaucer's "House of Fame" III. 516-564. _Teaelle_ is the trumpet's mouth (French _tuyau_, pipe or nozzle).]

THE STATIONERS' COMPANY AND ENGLISH BOOK-CENSORSHIP: THE PRINTING ORDINANCE OF JUNE 1643: MILTON COMPLAINED OF TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS FOR BREACH OF THE SAME.

Among the haunts and corners of London into which the smoke of Mr. Palmer's pulpit-blast against Milton had penetrated, and where it had whirled and eddied most persistently, was the Hall of the Stationers' Company, the centre of the London book-trade. Actually, as the reader has been informed Palmer's sermon, and the general frenzy of the Assembly on the subject of the increase of heresy and schism, had so perturbed the whole society of booksellers that, on Saturday the 24th of August, the eleventh day after the sermon, they presented a petition to the Commons, exonerating themselves from all responsibility in the growing evil, and pointing out that the blasphemous and pernicious opinions complained of were ventilated in unlicensed and unregistered pamphlets, grievous to the soul of the regular book-trade, injurious to its pockets, and contrary to the express ordinance of Parliament. That such was the tenor of the Petition of the Stationers, and that they gave instances of illegal pamphlets of the kind described, and laid stress on Milton's _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ as one most flagrant instance, appears from the action of the House of Commons in consequence. Without a day's delay (Aug. 26), the Commons referred the Petition to "the Committee for Printing," with instructions to hear parties, consider the whole business, consult the existing Parliamentary Ordinance for the regulation of Printing, and bring in a new or supplementary Ordinance with all convenient speed. They were likewise "diligently to inquire out" the authors, printers, and publishers of the Divorce Pamphlet, and of another, then in circulation, against the Immortality of the Soul. That the Committee might have fresh energy in it for the purpose, four new members were added, viz. Sir Philip Stapleton, Sir Thomas Widdrington, Mr. Stephens, and Mr. Baynton. [Footnote: See the text of the order, _antè_, pp. 1645, I now add the names of the new members of Committee from the Commons Journal, Aug. 26, 1641.]

Here then, in the end of August 1644, Milton was not only within the smoke of infamy blown upon him by Palmer's sermon, but also within the clutches of a Parliamentary Committee. They might call him to account not only for publishing dangerous and unusual opinions, but also for having broken the Parliamentary Ordinance for the regulation of Printing. We must now explain distinctly what that Ordinance was.

From the beginning of the Long Parliament, as we know sufficiently by this time, there had been a relaxation, or rather a total breakdown, of the former laws for the regulation of the Press. In the newly-found liberty of the nation to think and to speak, all bonds of censorship were burst, and books of all kinds, but especially pamphlets on the current questions, were sent forth by their authors very much at their own discretion. The proportion of those that went through the legal ceremonial of being authorized by an appointed licenser, and registered in the Stationers' books by the Company's clerk under farther order from one of the Company's wardens, must, I should say, have been quite inconsiderable in comparison with the number that flew about printed anywhere and anyhow. Milton had been conspicuously careless or bold in this respect. Not one of his five Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, published in 1641 and 1642, had been licensed or registered; nor did any one of them bear his name, though he made no real concealment of that, and though each of them bore the printer's or publisher's name, or the address of the shop where it was on sale. Milton's friends, the Smectymnuans, had attended to the legal punctualities in some of _their_ publications; but Milton's practice seems to have been the more general one among authors and pamphleteers. Nor did they need to resort any longer to clandestine presses, or to printers and booksellers who, not being members of the Stationers' Company, had no title to engage in such book- commerce at all, and were liable to prosecution for doing so. Even regular booksellers and printers who _were_ freemen of the Stationers' Company had been infected by the general lawlessness, and had fallen into the habit of publishing books and pamphlets without caring whether they were licensed, and without taking the trouble of registering their copyright; which, indeed, they could hardly do if the books were unlicensed. All Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, I think, were published by such regular printers or booksellers. But worse and worse. Some of the less scrupulous members of the Stationers' Company had found an undue advantage in this lax conduct of the book-business, and had begun to reprint and vend books the copyright in which belonged to their brethren in the trade. This last being the sorest evil, it was perhaps as much in consequence of repeated representations of its prevalence by the authorities of the Stationers' Company as on any grounds of public damage by the circulation of political libels and false opinions, that the Parliament still kept up the fiction of a law, and made attempt after attempt to regain the control of the Press. That they did so is the fact. Entries on the subject--sometimes in the form of notices of petitions from the Stationers' Company, sometimes in that of injunctions by Parliament to the Stationers' Company to be more vigilant--are found at intervals in the Journals of both Houses through 1641 and 1642. Particular books were condemned, and their authors inquired after or called to account, and offending printers and publishers were also brought to trouble. The Parliament had even tried to institute a new agency of censorship in the form of Committees for Printing, and licensers appointed by these Committees. Such licensers were either members of Parliament selected for the duty, or Parliamentary officials, or persons out-of-doors in whom Parliament could trust. Through 1641 and 1642 I find the following persons, among others. licensing books--John Pym, Sir Edward Deering, the elder Sir Henry Vane, Mr. (Century) White, and a Dr. Wykes, but I find evidence that the Parliament and its Committees for Printing had really, in a great measure, to leave the licensing of books to the Wardens of the Stationers' Company. [Footnote: My MS notes from the Stationers' Register for the years named] In short, the Press had escaped all effective supervision whatsoever. This is most strikingly proved by the Stationers' Registers for 1642. While for the previous year, ending Dec. 31, 1641, the total number of entries on the Register had been 240, the total number in this year, ending Dec. 31, 1642, was only 76; of which 76 less than half fell in the second half of the year, when the Civil War had just commenced. Actually, of all the publications which came out this year in England, not more than at the rate of three a fortnight regularly registered throughout the whole year, and hardly more than one a week during the second half of the year! Clearly, censorship and registration had then become an absolute farce.

The same state of things continued into the first half of the year 1643. Between Jan. 1 of that year (Jan. 1, 1642-3, as we now mark it) and July 4, I find the number of entries to have been not more than 35--still a preposterously small number in proportion to the crowd of publications which these six months must have produced. But exactly at the middle of this year the Registers exhibit a remarkable phenomenon. Although in the first half of the year only 35 new publications had been registered, the entries in the second half of the year swell suddenly to 333, or ten times as many as in the first half. In the month of July alone there were 63 entries, or nearly twice as many as in the preceding six months together; in August there were 57; in September 58; in October 48; in November 56; and in December 51. Little wonder that, on going over the Registers long ago, I made this note in connexion with the year 1643: "Curious year: the swelling out in the latter half, so that only 35 in first half and 333 in second: inquire into causes." I ought to have known the chief cause at the time I made the note. It was the parsing, in June 1643, of a new, strict, and minutely framed Ordinance for Printing.

Forced by the public necessities of the case, including the necessity of preventing the diffusion of Royalist tracts and sheets of intelligence, or by the trade complaints of the Stationers' Company, or by both combined, the Commons at last addressed themselves to the subject resolutely. On June 10 an "Ordinance to prevent and suppress the Licence of Printing" was read in their House, agreed to, and sent to the Lords; on June 14 the Lords concurred, and signified their concurrence to the Commons; and, certain farther arrangement of detail having been made by the Commons on the 16th, the 20th, and the 21st of the same month, the Ordinance forthwith came into operation. The Ordinance (with the omission of clauses relative to printing of Parliamentary papers and to mere piracy of copyrights) is as follows:--

"Whereas divers good orders have been lately made by both Houses of Parliament for suppressing the late great abuses and frequent disorders in printing many forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets and Books, to the great defamation of Religion and Government--which orders (notwithstanding the diligence of the Company of Stationers to put them in full execution) have taken little or no effect, by reason the Bill in preparation for the redress of the said disorders hath hitherto been retarded through the present distractions, and very many, as well Stationers and Printers, as others of sundry other professions not free of the Stationers' Company, have taken upon them to set up sundry private printing-presses in corners, and to print, vend, publish and disperse Books, Pamphlets and Papers, in such multitudes that no industry could be sufficient to discover or bring to punishment all the several abounding delinquents.... It is therefore ordered that no ... Book, Pamphlet, Paper, nor part of any such Book, Pamphlet or Paper, shall from henceforth be printed, bound, stitched, or put to sale by any person or persons whatsoever, unless the same be first approved of and licensed under the hands of such person or persons as both or either of the said Houses shall appoint for the licensing of the same, and entered in the Register Book of the Company of Stationers according to ancient custom, and the Printer thereof to put his name thereto.... And the Master and Wardens of the said Company, the Gentleman-Usher of the House of Peers, the Sergeant of the Commons House, and their Deputies ... are hereby authorized and required from time to time to make diligent search in all places where they shall think meet for all unlicensed printing presses ... and to seize and carry away such printing-presses ... and likewise to make diligent search in all suspected printing-houses, warehouses, shops and other places ... and likewise to apprehend all Authors, Printers, and other persons whatsoever employed in compiling, printing, stitching, binding, publishing and dispersion of the said scandalous, unlicensed and unwarrantable Papers, Books and Pamphlets ... and to bring them, afore either of the Houses, or the Committee of Examinations, that so they may receive such farther punishments as their offences shall demerit.... And all Justices of the Peace, Captains, Constables and other officers, are hereby ordered and required to be aiding and assisting to the foresaid persons in the due execution of all and singular the premises, and in the apprehension of offenders against the same, and, in case of opposition, to break open doors and locks.--And it is further ordered that this Order be forthwith printed and published, to the end that notice may be taken thereof, and all contemners of it left inexcusable."

Such was the famous _Ordinance for Printing_ of the Long Parliament, dated June 14, 1643. Within a week afterwards it was brought into working trim by the nomination of the persons to whom the business of licensing was to be entrusted. For Books of Divinity a staff of twelve Divines was appointed, the _imprimatur_ of any one of whom should be sufficient--to wit: Mr. THOMAS GATAKER, Mr. CALIBUTE DOWNING, Dr. THOMAS TEMPLE, Mr. JOSEPH CARYL, Mr. EDMUND CALAMY, Mr. CHARLES HEKLE, Mr. OBADIAH SEDGWICK, Mr. CARTER of Yorkshire, Mr. JOHN DOWNHAM, Mr. JAMES CRANFORD, Mr. BACHELER, and Mr. JOHN ELLLS, junior. The first seven of these, it will be noted (if not also the eighth), were members of the Westminster Assembly; the others were, I think, all parish-ministers in or near London. For what we should call Miscellaneous Literature, including Poetry, History, and Philosophy, the licensers appointed were Sir NATHANIEL BRENT (Judge of the Prerogative Court), Mr. JOHN LANGLEY (successor of Gill the younger in the Head-mastership of St. Paul's School), and Mr. FARNABIE. The licensing of Law-Books was to belong to certain designated Judges and Serjeants-at-law; of Books of Heraldry, to the three Herald Kings at Arms; of Mathematical Books, Almanacks, and Prognostications, to the Reader in Mathematics at Gresham College for the time being, or a certain Mr. Booker instead; and for things of no consequence--viz. "small pamphlets, portraitures, pictures and the like" --the Clerk of the Stationers' Company for the time being was to be authority enough.[Footnote: The Ordinance is printed in the Lords Journals under date June 14, 1644. Rushworth prints it under the same date (V. 335-6), and adds the names of the licensers, as appointed by the Commons June 20 and 21.]

The effects of this new Ordinance of Parliament were immediately visible. Whether because Parliament itself now seemed in earnest for the control of the Press, or because the new staff of licensers were determined to exercise their powers and earn their perquisites, or because the Master and Wardens of the Stationers' Company then in. office felt their hands strengthened and worked hard (Mr. Samuel Bourne was Master, and Mr. Samuel Man and Mr. Richard Whittaker were Wardens), certain it is that authors, printers, and publishers were brought at once into greater obedience. Ten times as many books, pamphlets and papers, we have shown, were duly licensed and registered in the second half of the year 1643, or from the date of the new Ordinance onwards, as had been licensed and registered in the preceding half-year.[Footnote: I ought to note, however, that the swelling out is caused chiefly by the shoals of _Mercuries, Diurnals, Scouts, Intelligencers_,&c. that were now registered. These news-sheets of the Civil War, the infant forms of our newspapers, had previously appeared at will; and there seems to have been particular activity in bringing them under the operation of the Ordinance, so as to deprive Royalism of the aid of the Press.]

Now, it so chanced that the first edition of Milton's _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ had been ready for the press exactly after the new Ordinance had come into operation. What had been his behaviour? He had paid no attention to the Ordinance whatever. He had been one of those "contemners" of it whom the Ordinance itself had taken the precaution of rendering inexcusable by the clause ordering its own publication! The treatise had appeared on or about the 3rd of August, unlicensed and unregistered, just as its predecessors, the Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, had been. Nay, there was this difference, that there was no printer's full name on the title-page of the Divorce treatise, but only the semi- anonymous, declaration "Printed by T. P. and M. S. in Goldsmiths' Alley" [Footnote: See full title-page, _antè_, p. 44. ] That Milton had acted deliberately in all this there can be no doubt. Not that we need suppose him to have made it a point of honour to outbrave the new law in general by continuing to publish without a licence; but because, in this particular case, he had no choice but to do so, and did not mind doing so. He wanted to publish his new Doctrine of Divorce: was he to go the round of the twelve Reverend Gentlemen who had just been appointed licensers of all books of Theology and Ethics, and wait till he found one of them sufficiently obtuse, or sufficiently asleep, to give his _imprimatur_ to a doctrine so shocking? Clearly, nothing remained but to get any printer to undertake the treatise that would print it in its unlicensed state, the printer trusting the author and both running the risk. Whatever hesitations the printer may have had, Milton had none. He had taken no pains to conceal the authorship; and, when he found the doctrine of the treatise in disrepute, he had disdained even the pretence of the anonymous. The second edition, published in February 1643-4, appeared, as the first had done, without licence or registration, and indeed with no more distinct imprint at the foot of the title-page than "_London, Imprinted in the yeare_ 1664"; but, to make up for this informality, it contained Milton's dedication to the Parliament and the Assembly signed with his name. It was as if he said, "I do break your Ordinance for Printing, but I let you know who I am that do so." Since then Milton had published two more pamphlets--his _Tract on Education_, addressed to Hartlib (June 1644), and his _Bucer Tract_, continuing the Divorce subject (July 1644). In both of these he had conformed to the Ordinance. Both are duly registered in the Stationers' Books, the former as having been licensed by Mr. Cranford (_antè_, p. 233), the latter by Mr. Downham (_antè_, p. 255). In licensing the new Divorce Tract, even though it did consist mainly of extracts from Bucer, Mr. Downham must have been either off his guard or very good-natured.

Milton's carelessness or contempt of the Ordinance for Printing had now found him out. The charge of heresy, or of monstrous and dangerous opinion, preferred against him by Palmer and the clergy, was one about which there might be much argument _pro_ and _con_, and with which most Parliamentary men might not be anxious to meddle. But here, in aid of that charge, another charge, much more definite, had been brought forward. The officials of the Stationers' Company were chosen from year to year; and the Master for the year beginning in the middle of 1644 was Mr. Robert Mead, with Mr. John Parker and Mr. Richard Whittaker for Wardens. It was these persons, if I mistake not, who thought themselves bound, either by sympathy with the horror caused by Milton's doctrine, or by sheer official duty, to oblige Mr. Palmer and his brethren of the Assembly by pointing out that both the editions of Milton's obnoxious pamphlet had been published in evasion of the law. There can be little doubt that the Assembly divines and the London clergy generally were at the back of the affair; but it was convenient for them to put forward others as the nominal accusers. "The Stationers' Company," these accusers virtually said, "knows nothing of these two publications, and has none of the discredit of them; they are not registered in the Company's books, and do not appear to have been ever licensed; and, if Mr. Milton, who has avowed himself the author, is to be questioned for the doctrine advanced in them, perhaps it would be well that he should at the same time have the imprints on his two title-pages put before him--_'Printed by T. P. and M. S. in Goldsmiths' Alley,'_ and _'London, Imprinted in the yeare_ 1644'--and asked how he dared defy the law in that way, and who the printers are that abetted him." Such, studying all the particulars, is the most exact interpretation I can put on the Petition of the Stationers' Company to the Commons, Aug. 24, as it affected Milton. There was a trade-feeling behind it. There was a resentment against certain printers and booksellers (probably quite well known to the Master and Wardens) for their contempt of trade-discipline, as well as against Milton for his part in the matter. It was really rather hard on Milton. For, doubtless, the new Ordinance for Printing had been passed by Parliament not with a view to any application of it to sound Parliamentarians like him, but as a check upon writers of the other side; and, doubtless, he was not singular in having neglected the Ordinance. Probably scores of Parliamentarian writers had taken the same liberty. Still, as he had offended against the letter of the law, and as those whom his doctrine had shocked now chose to avail themselves of this offence of his against the letter of the law, he found himself in an awkward position. All depended on the discretion of that "Committee of Printing," reinforced by four additional members, to which the Commons (Aug. 26) had entrusted the delicate task of dealing with him, and the farther task of revising the Ordinance of the previous year and seeing whether it could be improved or extended. They might trouble him much, or they might let him alone.

They let him alone. The Committee, I find, did indeed proceed so far in the general business assigned to them. They must have even drafted some new or supplementary Ordinance for the regulation of Printing, and obtained the agreement of the House to the draft; for, though I am unable to find any record of such proceeding in the _Commons' Journals_, there is this distinct entry in the _Lords' Journals_ under date Sept. 18, 1644: "A message was brought from the House of Commons by Mr. Rous and others, to desire concurrence in two Ordinances--(1) Concerning Ordination of Ministers, (2) Concerning Printing. The answer returned was, That this House will send an answer to this message by messengers of their own." The Lords, it appears in the sequel, did apply themselves to the Ordination Ordinance, so that the Commons received it back amended, and it passed, Oct. 1. But I find no farther mention of the new Printing Ordinance. Cromwell's great Accommodation or Toleration motion, passed in the Commons, in Solicitor St. John's modified form, on the 13th of September, had, it may be remembered, caused a sudden pause among the Presbyterian zealots. It may have helped indirectly to strangle many things; and I should not wonder if among them was the prosecution of the business prescribed to the Committee of Printing by the Order of Aug. 26. The Accommodation Order was a demand generally for clearer air and breathing-room for everybody, more of English freedom, and less of Scottish inquisitorship. If there had been ever any real intention among the Parliamentary people to proceed against Milton, it had now to be dropped.

THE AREOPAGITICA; A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING.

One good effect the incident had produced. It had prescribed for Milton a new piece of work. This Parliamentary Ordinance for Printing with which it had been proposed to crush him; this whole system of Censorship and licensing of books that had prevailed so long in England and almost everywhere else; this delegation of the entire control of a nation's Literature to a state-agency consisting of a few prejudiced parsons and schoolmasters seated atop, to decide what should go into the funnel, and a Company of Stationers seated below, to see that nothing else came out of the funnel:-was not this a subject on which something might be said? Would it not be more than a revenge if Milton were to express his thoughts on this subject? Would it not be a service of moment to England? What might not be hoped for from the Parliament if they were fitly addressed on such a theme? It was the great question of Liberty in all its forms that England was then engaged in. Civil Liberty, Liberty of Worship, Liberty of Conscience, were the phrases ringing in the English air. But in the midst of this general clamour for Liberty no one yet had moved for one form of Liberty, which would be a very substantial instalment of the whole, and yet was practicable and perhaps within sight--the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Let this then be Milton's new undertaking! In the fact that it had been so clearly assigned to him, nay, forced upon him by circumstances, he began to discern a certain regulation, not quite dependent on his own forethought, of the recent course of his life. "When the Bishops at length had fallen prostrate, aimed at by the shafts of all, and there was no more trouble from _them_," he afterwards wrote, reviewing this portion of his life, "then I turned my thoughts to other matters--if I might in anything promote the cause of true and solid liberty; which is chiefliest to be sought for not without, but within, and to be gained not by fighting, but by the right basing and the right administration of life. When, therefore, I perceived that there are in all three sorts of liberty, without the presence of which life can hardly anyhow be suitably gone through--Ecclesiastical, Domestic or Private, and Civil--then, as I had already written on the first, and as I saw that the Magistrate was sedulously occupied with the third, I took to myself that which was left second, viz. Domestic Liberty. That also appearing to consist of three parts--whether Marriage were rightly arranged, whether the Education of Children were properly conducted, and whether, finally, there were the power of free Philosophising--I explained what I thought, not only concerning the due contracting of Marriage, but also, if it were necessary, the due dissolution of the same.... On that subject I put forth some books, exactly at that time when husband and wife were often the bitterest enemies, he at home with his children, and she, the mother of the family, busy in the camp of the enemy, threatening death and destruction to her husband.... Then I treated the Education Question more briefly in one little book.... Finally, on the subject of the liberation of the Press, so that the judgment of the true and the false, what should be published and what suppressed, should not be in the hands of a few men, and these mostly unlearned and of common capacity, erected into a censorship over books--an agency through which no one almost either can or will send into the light anything that is above the vulgar taste--on this subject, in the form of an express oration, I wrote my _Areopagitica_." [Footnote: The Latin of the passage will be found in the _Defensio Secunda pro Popalo Anglicano._] In this passage, written in 1654, there is a slight anachronism. _All_ Milton's Marriage and Divorce tracts had not yet been published: two of them were still to come. At the moment at which we have arrived, however, that mapping out of his labours on the Domestic or Private form of the general question of Liberty which the passage explains must have already been in his mind. He had written largely on a Reform in Marriage and Divorce, and more briefly on a Reform in Education. In the Marriage and Divorce subject he had found himself met with an opposition which did not permit him yet to lay it aside; but meanwhile, in consequence of that opposition, nay, of the very form it had taken, there had dawned on him, by way of interlude and yet of strictly continuous industry, a great third enterprise. In any lull of war with the Titans what is Jove doing? Fingering his next thunderbolt. Released from all trouble by the Committee of the Commons, and left at leisure in Aldersgate Street, through September, October, and November, 1644, what was Milton doing? Preparing his _Areopagitica_.

It appeared November 24, a month after the Second Battle of Newbury, and the very day before that outbreak by Cromwell, against the Earl of Manchester for slackness in the battle, which led to the Self-Denying Ordinance and the New-Modelling of the Army. It was a small quarto of 40 pages with this title:--

AREOPAGITICA;

A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicens'd Printing, to the Parlament of England.

[Greek: Touleutheron d'ekeino, ei tis thelei polei Chræston ti bouleum eis meson pherein, echon. Kai tauth o chræzon, lampros esth, o mæ thelon, Siga ti touton estin isaiteron polei;] _Euripid. Hicetid._

This is true Liberty, when free-born men Having to advise the public may speak free, Which he who can, and will, deserv's high praise, Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace; What can be juster in a State than this? _Euripid. Hicetid_. London, Printed in the yeare 1644.

There was no printer's or bookseller's name to the pamphlet; and it came forth unlicensed and unregistered. It would have been indeed absurd to ask one of the Censors to license a pamphlet cutting up the whole system of Censorship. Still here was another deliberate breach of the law by Milton. It was probably to soften and veil the offence that the pamphlet was cast into the form of a continuous Speech or Pleading by Milton to Parliament directly, without recognition of the public in preface or epilogue. [Footnote: That Nov. 24, 1644, was the day of the publication of the _Areopagitica_ I learn from Thomason's MS. note "Novemb. 24" in the copy among the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum; Press Mark 12. G. e.9./182.]

The _Areopagitica_ is now by far the best-known of Milton's pamphlets, and indeed the only one of his prose-works generally read. Knowing his other prose-writings, I have sometimes been angry at this choice of one of his pamphlets by which to recollect him as an English prose-writer. I have ascribed it to our cowardly habit of taking delight only in what we already agree with, of liking to read only what we already think, or have been schooled into considering glorious, axiomatic, and British. As there are parts of Milton's prose-writings that would be even now as discomposing and irritating to an orthodox Briton as to an orthodox Spaniard or Russian, a genuine British reader might be expected perhaps to tend to those parts by preference. Hence there is something not wholly pleasing in the exclusive rush in our country now-a-days upon the _Areopagitica_ as representative of Milton's prose. And yet the reasons for the fact are perhaps sufficient. Though the doctrine of the Treatise is now axiomatic, one remembers, as one reads, that the battle for it had then to be fought, that Milton was the first and greatest to fight it, and that this very book did more than any other to make the doctrine an axiom in Britain. But, besides this historical interest, the book possesses an interest of peculiar literary attractiveness. It is perhaps the most skilful of all Milton's prose- writings, the most equable and sustained, the easiest to be read straight through at once, and the fittest to leave one glowing sensation of the power of the author's genius. It is a pleading of the highest eloquence and courage, with interspersed passages of curious information, keen wit, and even a rich humour, such as we do not commonly look for in Milton. He must have taken great pains to make the performance popular.

After an exordium of respectful compliment to the Parliament, the rhetorical skill of which is as masterly as the sincerity is obvious, Milton announces his purpose. He thinks so highly of the Parliament that he will pay them the supreme compliment of questioning the wisdom of one of their ordinances and asking them to repeal it. He then quotes the leading clause of the Printing Ordinance of June 14, 1643, enacting that no Book, Pamphlet, or Paper should thenceforth be printed unless it had previously been approved and licensed by the official censors or one of them. He is to challenge, he says, only that part of the Ordinance. He is not to challenge the part for preventing piracy of copyright; which he thinks quite just, though he can see that it may be abused so as to annoy honest men and booksellers. From a passage farther on we learn also that Milton did not object to a prohibition of anonymous publication; for he refers with entire approbation to a previous Parliamentary Ordinance, enacting that no book should be printed unless the names of the author and printer, or at least that of the printer, were registered. If Parliament had stopped at that Order, they would have been well advised; it is the licensing Enactment of the subsequent Order of June 1643 that he is to reason against. Books, indeed, were things of which a Commonwealth ought to take no less vigilant charge than of their living subjects, "For Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are." All the more reason to beware of violence against books. "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 burden 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." And how had this slaying of books, and even the prevention of their birth, by a Censorship, grown up? After a historical sketch of the state of the law and practice respecting books among the Greeks, the Romans, and the early and mediaeval Christians, Milton arrives at the conclusion that the system of Censorship and Licensing was an invention of the worst age of the Papacy, perfected by the Spanish Inquisition. He gives one or two specimens of the elaborate _imprimaturs_ prefixed to old Italian books, and makes much fun of them. The Papal invention, he continues, had passed on into Prelatic England. "These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies that so bewitched our late prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made, and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly _imprimatur_, one from the Lambeth House [the Archbishop of Canterbury's Palace, where MSS. had to be left by their authors for revision by his chaplains], another from the west end of Paul's [the site of Stationers' Hall]."

Yes! but, whoever were the inventors, might not the invention itself be good? To this question Milton next proceeds, and it leads him into the vitals of the subject.

He contends, in the first place, for the scholar's liberty of universal reading at his own peril, his right of unlimited intellectual inquisitiveness. What though there are bad and mischievous books? "Books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance, and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said, without exception, 'Rise, Peter, kill and eat.'" Good and evil are inextricably mixed up together in everything in this world; and the very discipline to virtue and strength consists in full walking amid both, distinguishing, avoiding, and choosing. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out to see her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for notwithstanding dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." There is much more in the same strain, a favourite one with Milton, with instances of readings in evil books turned to good account. Plato's Censorship of Books, or general regulation of literature by the magistrate, is handled gently, as only Plato's whimsy for his own airy Republic. What if the principle of State- licensing were carried out? "Whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or conversing, may be fitly called our book." Well, shall the State regulate singing, dancing, street-music, concerts in the house, looking out at windows, standing on balconies, eating, drinking, dressing, love-making? "It would be better done to learn that the law must needs be frivolous which goes to restrain things uncertainly, and yet equally, working to good and to evil. And, were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing." Besides, suppression even of such tangible things as books by a Censorship was really impracticable, and everybody knew it. In spite of the existing Censorship, were not Royalist libels against the Parliament in everybody's hands in London every week, wet from the press? The system was a monstrous injustice and annoyance, and it did not answer its own end.

If the end were honestly the suppression of false and bad books, and if that end were in itself proper, and also practicable with sufficient means, all would still depend on the qualifications of the Licensers. And here Milton frankly lets the existing English licensers of Books, and especially the twelve parish-ministers among them, know his opinion of their office:--

"It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of Books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious: there may be else no mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not; which is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behoves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain seasons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believe how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensible nostril, should be able to endure. In this one thing I crave leave of the present Licensers to be pardoned for so thinking: who doubtless took this office up, looking on it through their obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all things seem easy and unlaborious to them. But that this short trial hath wearied them out already, their own expressions and excuses to them who make so many journeys to solicit their license (!) are testimony enough. Seeing therefore those who now possess the employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it, and that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own hours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put himself to the salary of a press-corrector, we may easily foresee what kind of Licensers we are to expect hereafter--either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary.... How much it hurts and hinders the Licensers themselves in the calling of their ministry, more than any secular employment, if they will discharge that office as they ought, so that they must neglect either the one duty or the other, I insist not, because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience how they will decide it there."

Closely following this glance at the Licensers and _their_ business is a description of the true Author and _his_ business, and of the indignities and discomforts put upon him by the Licensing system:--

"When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends: after all which done he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him. If in this, the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities, can bring him to that state of maturity as not to be still mistrusted and suspected unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured Licenser--perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing; and, if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in print like a punie [child] with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title, to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer;--it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the Author, to the Book, to the privilege and dignity of Learning. And what if the Author shall be one so copious of fancy as to have many things well worth the adding come into his mind, after licensing, while the book is yet under the press-- which not seldom happens to the best and diligentest writers, and that perhaps a dozen times in one book? The Printer dares not go beyond his licensed copy: so often then must the Author trudge to his leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a jaunt will be made ere that Licenser (for it must be the same man) can either be found, or found at leisure. Meanwhile either the press must stand still (which is no small damage) or the Author lose his accuratest thoughts, and send the book forth worse than he had made it; which is the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall. And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching, how can he be a _doctor_ in his book, as he ought to be or else had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction, of his patriarchal Licenser, to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the hide-bound humour which he calls his judgment?"

The last half of the pamphlet is perhaps more knotty and powerful than the first. Milton's well-known retrospect of what he had seen in Italy, with his reminiscence of Galileo, occurs here. But his drift has now been made sufficiently apparent; and we shall best discharge what remains of our duty by presenting certain pieces of autobiographical information which the pamphlet supplies:--

We learn, for one thing, that Milton did not stand alone in his detestation of the Censorship, but represented a considerable constituency in the matter, and had even been solicited to be their spokesman and write this pamphlet. Those very words of complaint, he says, which he had heard, six years before, uttered by learned men in Italy against the Inquisition, it had been his fortune to hear uttered of late by "as learned men" in England against the Licensing Ordinance of the Parliament. "And that so generally," he adds, "that, when I had disclosed myself a companion of their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an honest quæstorship had endeared to the Sicilians [Cicero] was not more by them importuned against Verres than the favourable opinion which I had among many who honour ye, and are known and respected by ye, loaded me with entreaties and persuasions that I would not despair to lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind toward the removal of an undeserved thraldom upon Learning. That this is not therefore the disburdening of a particular fancy, but the common grievance of all those who had prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, thus much may satisfy."

Again, in a pamphlet the subject of which is Books and Authors, we have naturally some incidental indications of Milton's literary tastes and preferences. The most interesting of these are perhaps the following:--He was as fond as ever of Spenser, "our sage and serious poet" as he calls him, "whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." He thought Arminius "acute and distinct," though perverted. He would be no slave even to Plato, but would take the liberty of quizzing any of the oddities even of that gorgeous intellect. On moral grounds, he could not bear Aristophanes, and wondered how Plato could have recommended "such trash" as the comedies of that writer to the tyrant Dionysius. His great liking for Euripides is shown by his taking four lines from that poet's _Hiketides_ as the motto for the pamphlet. Lord Bacon is again mentioned reverently, once as "Sir Francis Bacon" and again as "Viscount St. Albans." There is a tribute of high admiration to the Parliamentarian peer, Lord Brooke, so recently lost to England, and to the tract on the _Nature of Episcopacy_ he had left behind him: those last words of his dying charge which "I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard with _ye_, so full of meekness and breathing charity that, next to His last testament who bequeathed love and peace to his disciples, I cannot call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild and peaceful." Selden is again referred to and complimented: "one of your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land." Acquaintance, on the other hand, is implied or avowed, on Milton's part, with some of the most notoriously ribald writers that the world had produced: with Petronius Arbiter, and him of Arozzo "dreaded and yet dear to the Italian Courtiers," and an Englishman whom he will not name, "for posterity's sake," but "whom Harry the Eighth named in merriment his Vicar of Hell." We may add, that Wycliffe and Knox are both honourably mentioned in the _Areopagitica_: Knox as the "Reformer of a Kingdom," and Wycliffe as an Englishman who had perhaps had potentially in him all that had since come from the Bohemian Huss, the German Luther, or the French Calvin.

A more special piece of information supplied, or rather only confirmed, by the _Areopagitica_, is that Milton, when he wrote it, had broken off utterly from the Presbyterians, and regarded the domination of that party in the Westminster Assembly with complete disgust. "If it come to inquisitioning again, and licensing," he says, "and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are,--if some, who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please,--it cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over Learning; and will soon put it out of controversy that Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us, both name and thing." Again, a little farther on, "This is not, ye Covenants and Protestations that we have made, this is not to put down Prelaty: this is but to chop an Episcopacy; this is but to translate the Palace _Metropolitan_ from one kind of dominion into another." Again, "A man may be a heretic in the Truth; and, if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." Again, "He who hears what praying there is for light and clearer knowledge to be sent down among us would think of other matters to be constituted, beyond the discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands." Again, of Ecclesiastical Assemblies in general, and the Westminster Assembly in particular, "Neither is God appointed and confined where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for He sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places, and Assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our faith one while in the old Convocation House, and another while in the Chapel at Westminster; when all the faith that shall be there canonized is not sufficient, without plain convincement and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can there be made--no, though Harry the Seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend them voices from the dead to swell their number," [Footnote: The original meeting-place of the Westminster Assembly, and their meeting-place in the summer months, was Henry the Seventh's Chapel. In winter it was the Jerusalem Chamber--which had been the Convocation House of the English clergy before the Long Parliament.] Again, he says that, if the Presbyterians, themselves so recently released from Episcopal tyranny, should not have been taught by their own suffering, but should continue active in suppressing others, "it would be no unequal distribution in the first place to suppress the suppressors themselves."

Milton, however, the _Areopagitica_ proves, had not passed away from Presbyterianism only to become an ordinary Congregationalist or Independent. In the fight between the Presbyterians and the Independents of the Assembly he would now, undoubtedly, have taken part with the Independents; but Messrs. Goodwin, Nye, and the rest of them, had they interrogated him why, would have found him a strange adherent. For he had passed on into an Independency, if it could be called "Independency," more extreme than theirs, and resembling rather the vague Independency that Cromwell represented, and that was rife in the Army. The very notion of an official "minister of Religion," anyhow appointed, had become comical to him. It had come to seem to him supremely ridiculous that there should be anything like a caste of Brahmins or officers of Religion in England, by whatever means that caste should be formed or recruited. To curtail proof under this head, let me give but one extract. It is the richest bit of sheer humour that I have yet found in Milton, and is better and deeper, in that kind, than anything in Sydney Smith:--

BEING RELIGIOUS BY DEPUTY: OR THE USE OF A POPULAR LONDON CLERGYMAN.

"There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than the charge and care of their Religion. There be--who knows not that there be?--of Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrant and implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and profits, finds Religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going on that trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious; fain he would bear up with his neighbours in that. What does he therefore but resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs: some Divine of note and estimation _that_ must be. To him he adheres; resigns the whole warehouse of his Religion, with all the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his Religion--esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his Religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his Religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supt and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted; and, after the malmsey or some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted than He whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his Religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his Religion."

What light does the _Areopagitica_ throw on Milton's notion of Toleration, or Liberty of Conscience, and on his feelings towards the Sects and Sectaries generally among whom he was now ranked? It is not uncommon to regard the _Areopagitica_ as one of the first and greatest English pleas for Liberty of Conscience; and, broadly viewed, it is. But strictly it is not a plea for Liberty of Conscience or for Toleration, but only for the liberty of unlicensed Printing. Milton's views of Liberty of Conscience appear only by implication in the course of this one argument. So far as they do appear, it cannot be said that Milton advocated a Liberty of Conscience so complete and absolute as Roger Williams's or John Goodwin's. He even saves himself from the imputation of doing so. "If all cannot be of one mind," he says, "this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated Popery and open superstition; which, as it extirpates all religious and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate--provided first that all charitable and a compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled. That also which is impious or evil absolutely, either against faith or manners, no law can possibly permit that intends not to unlaw itself." There are hints also to the effect that, while Milton wanted liberty of unlicensed publication for all kinds of books, he did not deny the right of the magistrate to call writers to account, in certain cases, for the opinions they had published. On the whole, therefore, in his theory of Toleration, Milton was decidedly behind some of his contemporaries. One can see, however, that he was uneasy in his exceptions, and had little care for them in comparison with the principle he meant them to limit. Practically he stands forth in the _Areopagitica_ as the advocate of a Toleration that would have satisfied all the necessities of the juncture, by giving full liberty not only to orthodox Congregationalists, but also to Baptists, so-called Antinomians, and Seekers, and perhaps all other Protestant sects that had any real rooting at that time in English society. His whole oration breathes the full principle rather than the exceptions. "Give me," he says, "the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all liberties." And he makes a brave defence of the existing Sects, without putting a mark of exclusion on any. Those Sects and Schisms, Sects and Schisms, which weak men were bewailing, and the Presbyterians were calling on Parliament to crush, appeared to Milton not only something that must be permitted because it could not be prevented, but positively the finest English phenomenon of the time, and the richest in promise:--

"The light which we have gained was given us not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a Priest, the unmitring of a Bishop, and the removing him from off the Presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of Schisms and Sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from _their_ maxims.... Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.... Now once again, by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself. What does He then but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen--I say, as his manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of his counsels and are unworthy? Behold now this vast City, a city of refuge, the mansion-house of Liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His protection. The shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas, wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies?... Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for Opinion in good men is but Knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of Sect and Schism we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of we rather should rejoice at, should praise rather this pious forwardness among men to reassume the ill- deputed care of their Religion into their own hands again.... As in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital, but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of art and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so, when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of Truth and prosperous virtue destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of Sects and Schisms."

After this it is bathos to speak of the Stationers' Company; but we must do so. For, at the end of the _Areopagitica_ there is a distinct insinuation by Milton that the Ordinance he was asking the Parliament to repeal was less the invention of Parliament itself than of some cunning Stationers. "If we may believe those men," he says, "whose profession gives them cause to inquire most [_i.e._ some worthy booksellers of Milton's acquaintance] it may be doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees and monopolisers in the trade of bookselling; who, under pretence of the poor in their Company not to be defrauded, and the just retaining of each man his several copy--which God forbid should be gainsaid--brought divers glozing colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving to no end except it be to exercise a superiority over their neighbours." Milton makes a farther and worse insinuation. "Another end," he says, "is thought was aimed at by some of them in procuring by petition this order--that, having power in their hands, malignant books might easier scape abroad [_i.e._ get about the country], as the event shows." Here was a hit for some of the good people about Paternoster Row.

SECOND PROSECUTION OF MILTON BY THE STATIONERS' COMPANY: CONDUCT OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS IN THE CASE.

It might have been safer for Milton to let the Stationers alone. For, within five weeks after the publication of the _Areopagitica_, I find him again in trouble, and all by the doing of the Stationers' Company, in revenge for his past offences and this new insult. The story, as I have dug it out of the _Lords' Journals_, with some help from old pamphlets, is as follows:--

Monday the 9th of December, 1644, there being twenty-one Peers present, and Lord Grey of Wark in the chair, "a scandalous printed libel against the Peerage of this realm was brought into the House and read; and this House ordered, that the Master and Wardens of the Company of Stationers shall attend this House at four of the clock this afternoon, to know of them whether they do know of the print and can discover the author of it." That same afternoon, accordingly, there being now but fifteen peers present, the three gentlemen who had been sent for--Messrs. Mead, Parker, and Whittaker--appeared, and with this result: "The Master and Wardens of the Company of Stationers desired some longer time, and they will do their best endeavours to find out the printer that printed the scandalous libel brought into this House this day; and this House gave two or three days longer." On Friday the 13th of December they have not yet found either the author or the printer; but they have caught a poor fellow, George Jeffrey, apprentice to a hosier in Cornhill, who had been dispersing copies of the libel in London. Examined by the Earls of Salisbury and Kent, aided by the Judges, this George Jeffrey confesses all about it. On Monday morning last (the very day on which the Lords first discussed the subject) he had found two-and-twenty copies of the thing between the stall-boards of his master's stall, put there by he knew not whom. He had taken them into the shop, read one of them, and been so greatly amused by it that he had told his neighbours of the prize. Some of the more unruly of the neighbours had snatched at copies and carried them off, so that he had only two left. When he found that there was a hue and cry on the matter, and that he had got himself into trouble, he had done what he could. He had sent his own two remaining copies to the Lord Mayor, and had recovered six of the other copies and sent them to the Mayor too, naming the persons from whom he got them back. One was an exciseman, one an oilman; and one or two were apprentices like himself; but there was also one Thomas Heath, who was actually the Lord Mayor's kinsman. This was positively all he knew of the matter; and he could not tell where the papers came from, nor where any more were to be found. Apparently the Peers believed him, for he was discharged on his own promise to attend again if he should be called for.

The libel, however, seems to have been unusually flagrant. The Peers sent a copy of George Jeffrey's examination to the Lord Mayor, with instructions that he should both give an account of what he had already done in the business and also prosecute it farther. It is not till Dec. 26 that we hear more. On that day, two-and-twenty Peers being present, and nothing having been farther reported either by the Lord Mayor or the Stationers, it was ordered "that the Lord Mayor of London and the Printers be sent to, to give an account of the scandalous paper printed and dispersed, what they have done in discovering the Author, Printer, and Publisher." The Mayor and the Stationers still not responding, the order was repeated more peremptorily on Saturday, Dec. 28, one-and-twenty Peers being present. The gentleman-usher of the House went there and then for the two Wardens of the Stationers' Company, who forthwith appeared and gave this account: "They have used their best endeavours to find out the printer and author of the scandalous libel, but they cannot yet make any discovery thereof, the letter [type] being so common a letter; and further _complained of the frequent printing of scandalous Books by divers, as Hezekiah Woodward and Jo. Milton._"--Here was an extremely clever trick of Messrs. Parker and Whittaker! They were themselves in trouble for not being good detectives: what if they diverted the attention of the Peers, while they were in this angry mood, upon other objects? It is as if they said to the Peers, "It is a very hard matter sometimes to find out the authors and printers of scandalous tracts; but really the abuse has attained to frightful dimensions, and perhaps the leniency of your Lordships in cases where the authors of scandalous tracts are well enough known encourages others. Last August, for example, we took the liberty of calling the attention of the House of Commons to a Tract on Divorce by Mr. John Milton, which the Assembly unanimously condemns as containing horrid doctrine, and which Mr. Palmer denounced on that ground in the hearing of your Lordships. It was our duty to do so, because the Tractate, in any case, was unlicensed and unregistered, and therefore a violation of the Printing Ordinance. The Commons referred the subject to their Committee for Printing, but nothing appears to have been done. And now, as your Lordships have sent for us on this other matter, in which we are sorry not to have succeeded as we could have wished, allow us to mention that the same Mr. Milton has since then--in fact, only last month-put forth another pamphlet, called _Areopagitica_, with his name to it certainly and addressed to your Lordships and the other House, but with no printer's name, and unlicensed and unregistered, like most of its predecessors. The pamphlet contains some very injurious personal reflections on us; but we should not think of mentioning it merely on that ground. It is very bold and strange altogether, very disrespectful to the Assembly, and is an attack on the whole Ordinance for Printing which it wilfully breaks. Besides Mr. Milton there are others as bad: for instance, Mr. Hezekiah Woodward."

Who Mr. Hezekiah Woodward was the reader already, in some degree, knows. He was that old friend of Samuel Hartlib's to whom Hartlib, in Aug. 1644, had addressed a letter requesting his opinion of Edwards's _Antapologia_, and who had furnished that opinion, which was published, with Hartlib's letter, in the following month (_antè_). He must have been fond of using his pen; for I find him to have been the author of at least seven other pamphlets, published before our present date, viz. _The Kings Chronicle_ (1643); _Three Kingdoms made One_ (1643); _The Cause, Use, and Cure of Fear_ (1643); _A Good Soldier maintaining his Militia_ (1644); _The Sentence from Reason and Scripture against Archbishops and Bishops, with their Curates_ (1644); _As you were_ (1644); _Inquiries into the Causes of our Miseries_ (1644). The last-named but one of these pamphlets gives at least one additional particular about Woodward. Its full title is "_As you were: or a Reducing (if possibly any) seduc't ones to facing-about, turning head-front against God, by the Recrimination (so intended) upon Mr. J. G. (Pastor of the Church in Coleman Street) in point of fighting against God. By an unworthy auditor of the said (Juditious pious Divine) Master John Goodwin._" This may have been the very pamphlet, or one of the pamphlets, of Woodward which the Stationers had in view when they complained of him; for it was published Nov. 13, 1644, or exactly eleven days before the _Areopagitica_, and it appeared anonymously and without a licence. Out of the confused wording of the title we gather that Woodward was a hearer and admirer of John Goodwin, and that the tract was intended as in some sort a vindication of that Sectary against attacks that had been made upon him in connexion more especially with a pamphlet of his entitled _Theomachia_. All this, though slight, is not uninteresting. It presents to us Woodward as a London citizen of what maybe called the Hartlib-Goodwin connexion, and possibly therefore known to Milton personally. He lived in Aldermanbury, and was addicted to writing pamphlets. From what I have read of them I judge him to have been a mild, hazy-headed person, with a liking for indefiniteness and elbow-room rather than Presbyterian strictness, and therefore ranking among the Sectaries, but of such small mark individually that, but for his incidental association with Milton in the business under notice, we should not now have had any particular interest in inquiring about him. For some reason or other, however, the Stationers thought him worth their hostility. Had they any trade dislike to Hartlib? It is somewhat curious that the two persons they selected to be complained against were two of Hartlib's friends. [Footnote: For particulars here about Woodward, in addition to those already given (_antè_ pp. 230-1), my authorities are (1) The British Museum Library Catalogue: _Woodward, Hezekiah_; (2) The two publications named as consulted by myself, viz., Woodward's _As You Were_, and his joint-tract with Hartlib, _A Short Letter, &c., with a large but modest answer_, which last is not given in the Museum Catalogue among Woodward's publications, but came in my way in my researches for Hartlib; (3) MS. notes of Thomason in Museum copies of these two publications: viz., in the first the words "suposed to be Ezech. Woodward's," and the date "Novemb. 13, London;" in the second the date "Sept 14."]

To resume our story from the _Lords' Journals_:--The device of the two Wardens for diverting the attention of the Peers was for the moment successful. The Peers on the same day (Sat. Dec. 28), as soon as the Wardens had withdrawn, passed this order: "Hereupon it is ordered, that it be referred to Mr. Justice Reeves and Mr. Justice Bacon to examine the said Woodward and Milton, and such others as the Master and Wardens of the Stationers' Company shall give information of, concerning the printing and publishing their Books and Pamphlets, and to examine also what they know concerning the Libel [the Libel against the Peers of which George Jeffrey had dispersed copies], who was the author, printer, and contriver of it; and the Gentleman-Usher shall attach the parties, and bring them before the Judges; and the Stationers are to be present at their examinations, and give evidence against them."

This was clearly a tighter action against Milton than the former one by the Commons. What came of it?--Woodward's business came up on the next Tuesday, Dec. 31, when Mr. Justice Bacon informed this House of some papers which Ezechiell Woodward [it was "Hezekiah" before] confessed he made: "Hereupon it is ordered, that Mr. Serjeant Whitfield shall peruse them over, and report them to this House; and, because the said Woodward is now in custody of the Gentleman-Usher, it is ordered, He shall be released, giving his own bond to appear before this House when he shall be summoned." Woodward's offence, it would therefore seem, was considered venial. He had nothing to do with the Libel that was the special subject of inquiry; and, though he had confessed to the authorship of some anonymous papers recently published, there seemed to be nothing formidable in them. He might go back to his house in Aldermanbury on his own recognisances. [Footnote: "_Soft Answers unto Hard Censures_, London 1645," is the title of a tract of Woodward's subsequent to the incident of the text, and possibly referring to it; after which I find him, so far as there is evidence, totally silent till 1656. In that year he published four new religious or politico religious pamphlets; which is the last I know of him at present.] But what of Milton? Not a word about _him_ in the Journals of the same day. He was not in the custody of the Gentleman-Usher then at all events; and so far he had been more fortunate than Woodward. Possibly, he had had a call from the Usher in his house in Aldersgate Street on the Saturday or Monday, had accompanied him to the chambers of Mr. Justice Reeve or Mr. Justice Bacon, had confronted the Master and Wardens of the Stationers' Company there, and had there given such a satisfactory and straightforward account of his questioned pamphlets that there was no need for detaining him, or troubling him farther. Some report may have been made to the Peers by the Justices; but if so, it was of such a kind, and the Peers themselves had such information about Milton, that they thought it best to let the matter drop without the least farther mention of it. If even two or three of them had read the _Areopagitica_ (and probably even more had), that alone would have honourably acquitted him. It appears, however, from a subsequent allusion by Milton himself, as if the _Doctrine and Discipline_ of Divorce was still the real stumbling-block. On that subject too the Peers may have been a little liberal by this time. Was not the great Mr. Selden understood to hold opinions on Marriage and Divorce very much the same as those Mr. Milton had published? So the Peers may have reasoned for themselves; and it is not at all improbable that Selden, Vane, and others of the Lower House may have given them a hint what to do. And so the Booksellers were baulked again. Baillie and Gillespie, who did not leave London for their Scottish holiday till Jan. 6, 1644-5, may have been a little disappointed, and the Presbyterians generally. [Footnote: Authorities for this curious story are the entries in the Lords' Journals of the dates named--Vol. VII. pp. 91, 92, 97, 115, 116, and 118. The one-and-twenty Peers who were present on Saturday, Dec. 28, when the order for Milton's examination was issued were--Lord Grey of Wark, as Speaker; the Lord General the Earl of Essex; the Lord High Admiral the Earl of Warwick; Earls Rutland, Kent, Pembroke, Salisbury, Bolingbroke, Manchester, Nottingham, Northumberland, Denbigh, and Stamford; Viscount Saye and Sele; and Lords North, Montague, Howard of Escrick, Berkeley, Bruce, Willoughby of Parham, and Wharton. The same Peers, with the omission of the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Wharton, and the addition of the Earl of Suffolk (_i.e._ twenty Peers in all), were present on Dec. 31, when a report was made on Woodward's case, but none on Milton's.--Selden's _Uxor Ebraica_ was published in 1646, and was then much welcomed by Milton.--That the Divines of the Westminster Assembly were at the back of this second prosecution of Milton, though the authorities of the Stationers' Company were the nominal accusers, is not only probable in itself, but is distinctly implied by Anthony Wood's reference to the affair (Fasti I. 483). "Upon the publication of the said three books of marriage and divorce," says Wood, with a slight error as to the number of the books on that subject then published, "the Assembly of Divines then sitting at Westminster took special notice of them; and thereupon, though the author had obliged them by his pen in his defence of _Smectymnuus_, and other their controversies had with the Bishops, they, impatient of having the clergy's jurisdiction (as they reckoned it) invaded, did, instead of answering or disproving what those books had asserted, cause him to be summoned before the House of Lords: but that House, whether approving the doctrine, or not favouring the accusers, did soon dismiss him."]

THE DIVORCE CONTROVERSY CONTINUED: HERBERT PALMER'S SERMON PUBLISHED: OTHER ATTACKS ON MILTON.

And now we are in the winter of 1644-5, when Parliament and all London, and all England, were astir with the two great businesses of the New- Modelling of the Parliamentary Army and the Self-Denying Ordinance. It was with public talk about these matters, and about such contemporary matters as the execution of Laud, the death of Century White, and the abortive Treaty of Uxbridge, that any immediate influence from Milton's _Areopagitica_ must have mingled. In the midst of it all he had other labours on hand. They were still on the woful subject of Divorce.

Not only had the subject fastened on Milton with all the force of a propagandist passion, urging him to repeated expositions of it; there were, moreover, fresh external occasions calling on him not to desist. Of four such external occasions, amid others now unknown to us, we may here take note:--[Footnote: Palmer's Dedication of the Sermon.] Herbert Palmer's sermon, with the attack on Milton still remaining in it, had now been published. "Some bodily indispositions" had prevented Palmer from at once complying with the request of the two Houses that he would print the sermon; but at length, in September or October 1644, it had appeared. [Footnote: "By William Prynne, of Lincoln's Inn, Esquier: London, Printed for Michael Sparke, Sem., and are to be sold at the Blew Bible in Green Arbour, 1644." The Exact date of publication I ascertain from Thomason's note, "Sept. 16," in a copy in the British Museum.] About the same time (more precisely the 16th of September, 1644) there appeared one of Prynne's interminable publications, entitled "_Twelve considerable serious Questions touching Church government: sadly propounded (out of a Reel Desire of Unitie and Tranquillity in Church and State) to all sober- minded Christians, cordially affecting a speedy settled Reformation and Brotherly Christian Union in all our Churches and Dominions, now miserably wasted with Civill Unnaturall Wars, and deplorably lacerated with Ecclesiastical Dissensions._" Though with so long a title, the thing consists but of eight largish quarto pages, with a bristle of marginal references. "Having neither leisure nor opportunity," says Prynne, "to debate the late unhappy differences sprung up amongst us touching Church-government (disputed at large by Master Herle, Doctor Steward, Master Rutherford, Master Edwards, Master Durey, Master Goodwin, Master Nye, Master Sympson, and others), ... I have (at the importunity of some Reverend friends) digested my subitane apprehensions of these distracting controversies into the ensuing considerable Questions." Accordingly, the Tract consists of 12 Queries propounded for consideration, each numbered and beginning with the word "Whether." We are concerned mainly with Query 11. It runs as follows:--"Whether that Independent Government which some contend for ... be not of its own nature a very seminary of schisms and dangerous divisions in the Church and State? a floodgate to let in an inundation of all manner of heresies, errors, sects, religions, destructive opinions, libertinism and lawlessness, among us, without any sufficient means of preventing or suppressing them when introduced? Whether the final result of it (as Master Williams, in his late dangerous licentious work, _A Bloudy Tenent_, determines) will not really resolve itself into this detestable conclusion, that every man, whether he be Jew, Turk, Pagan, Papist, Arminian, Anabaptist, &c., ought to be left to his own free liberty of conscience, without any coercion or restraint, to embrace or publicly to profess what Religion, Opinion, Church government, he pleaseth and conceiveth to be truest, though never so erroneous, false, seditious, detestable in itself? And whether such a government as this ought to be embraced, much less established among us (the sad effects whereof we have already experimentally felt by the late dangerous increase of many Anabaptistical, Antinomian, Heretical, Atheistical opinions, as of _The Soul's Mortality, Divorce at Pleasure_, &c., lately broached, preached, printed in this famous city; which I hope our Grand Council will speedily and carefully suppress), &c." Here, and by no less a man than Prynne, Milton's Divorce Doctrine is publicly referred to as one of the enormities of the time, and coupled, as of coequal infamy, with the contemporary doctrine of the Mortality of the Soul vented in an anonymous tract. (3) Farther, in the month of November, or while the _Areopagitica_ was in the press, there had appeared the first distinct Reply to Milton's original Divorce Treatise. It was a pamphlet, in 44 pages of small quarto, with this title:--"_An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, or A Plea for Ladies and Gentlewomen, and all other Married Women, against Divorce. Wherein Both Sexes are vindicated from all bondage of Canon Law, and other mistakes whatsoever: And the Unsound Principles of the Author are examined and fully confuted by Authority of Holy Scripture, the Laws of this Land, and Sound Reason. London, Printed by G. M. for William Lee at the Turk's-Head in Fleet Street, next to the Miter Taverne._ 1644." [Footnote: Entered at Stationers' Hall, Oct. 31, 1644 (my notes from the Registers); Licensed Nov. 14 (the pamphlet itself); out in London, Nov. 19 (Thomason's note in copy in British Museum, Press Mark 12 G. o. 12/181)] Milton had now his wish: one of his adversaries had written a book, and could be wrestled with. Nay more, though the writer had not given his name, the licenser, Mr. Joseph Caryl, had, in his prefixed "Imprimatur," applauded the sentiments of the tract, and spoken slightingly of Milton. Mr. Caryl, therefore, on his own account, might deserve a word. (4) Finally, in January 1644-5, Dr. Daniel Featley, from his prison in "the Lord Peter's house in Aldersgate Street," close to Milton's own dwelling, had sent forth his "_Dippers Dipt, or the Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over Head and Eares_" [Footnote: See _antè, p._ 138.] dedicating it publicly to the Parliament and privately to his "Reverend and much-esteemed friend, Mr. John Downam,"-- the very person, by the bye, who had good-naturedly licensed Milton's Bucer pamphlet. Now, Featley, in this book, had been at Milton among others. Denouncing the Anabaptists on all sorts of grounds in his Epistle Dedicatory to the Parliament, he charges them especially with originating odious heresies beyond their own. "For they print," he says, "not only Anabaptism, from whence they take their name, but many other most damnable doctrines, tending to carnal liberty, Familism, and a medley and hodge-podge of all Religions. Witness the Book, printed 1644, called _The Bloudy Tenent_, which the author affirmeth he wrote in milk; and, if he did so, he hath put some ratsbane in it [Footnote: Featley blunders here. Roger Williams did not say he had written his book in milk, but that the Baptist Tract of 1620 which he reprints in his book was said to have been written in milk in prison on pieces of paper sent to the writer as stoppers to his milk-bottle--his friends outside deciphering the writing by heating the papers.]--as, namely, 'that it is the will and command of God that, since the coming of his son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Anti- Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries,' ... Witness a Tractate on Divorce, in which the bonds of marriage are let loose to inordinate lust and putting away wives for many other causes besides that which our Saviour only approveth, viz. in case of Adultery. Witness a Pamphlet newly come forth, entitled _Man's Mortality_, in which the soul is cast into an Endymion sleep from the hour of death to the day of Judgment. Witness," &c. One other dreadful pamphlet is mentioned; but it is worthy of note that the persons with whom Milton now, as before, is most pertinaciously associated are Roger Williams and the author of _Man's Mortality_.

These external occasions and provocations co-operating with his unabated interest in the Divorce doctrine on personal and general grounds, Milton was busy, through the winter of 1644-5, on two new Divorce Treatises. They both appeared on the same day--March 4, 1644-5. The one was his TETRACHORDON; the other was his COLASTERION. Neither was licensed, and neither was registered. [Footnote: The date of publication is ascertained from copies of both among the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum-- both with the Press Mark 19. G. e. 11/195. In both the printed year of publication on the title-page is 1645; but in both Thomason, the Collector, has put his pen through the 5, and has annexed in manuscript the date "March 4, 1644." Books published near the 25th of March were generally dated in the year then to begin.] Some account of these two Treatises must conclude our present section of Milton's Biography.

TETRACHORDON.

We shall take the TETRACHORDON first. It is a bulky treatise, consisting, in the original edition, of 104 small quarto pages; of which 6, not numbered, are occupied with a Dedication to Parliament, and the remaining 98 are numbered and form the body of the work. The following is the complete title:--

TETRACHORDON:

Expositions upon the foure chief places in Scripture, which treat of Marriage, or nullities in Marriage.

On: Gen. i. 27-28, compar'd and explain'd by Gen. ii. 18, 23, 24 Dent. xxiv. 1-2. Matth. v. 31-32, with Matth. xix., from the 3 v. to the 11th. 1 Cor vii., from the 10th to the 16th.

Wherein the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, as was lately publish'd, is confirm'd by explanation of Scripture, by testimony of ancient Fathers, of civill lawes in the Primitive Church, of famousest Reformed Divines, and lastly, by an intended Act of the Parlament and Church of England in the last yeare of Edward the Sixth. By the former Author J. M.--

[Greek: skaioisi kaina prospheron sopha doxeis achreios k oy sophos pephykenai ton d ay dokounton eidenai ti poikilon kreisson nomistheis en polei lupros phanæ.] _Euripid. Medea_ London: Printed in the yeare 1645.

As the title indicates, the body of the Treatise consists mainly of an elaborate examination and comparison of the four chief passages of Scripture relating to Marriage and Divorce, viz. _Genesis_ i. 27-28, with ii. 18, 23, 24; _Deuteronomy_ xxiv. 1-2; _Matthew_ v. 31-32, with xix. 3-11; and 1 Corinth, vii. 10-16. This labour of Biblical exegesis Milton had undertaken, he tells us, in consequence of the representations of some judicious friends, who thought that, while there was "reason to a sufficiency" in his first Divorce Treatise, a fuller discussion of the texts of Scripture there alleged might be desirable. How he performed the labour--how he plods through the four passages in succession, explaining, commenting, answering objections, and in the end construing each and all together into a ratification of his own Doctrine of Divorce, or at least into consistency with it--must be learnt, if it is learnt at all, from the _Tetrachordon_ itself. Very few now-a-days will care to read it. For it is decidedly, according to our modern ideas, a heavy pamphlet. The _Areopagitica_ bites into modern interests and the constitution of the modern intellect; the _Tetrachordon_, though it must have occupied the author longer, has, I should say, quite lost its bite, except for students of Milton, and for reasoners who would debate his Divorce Doctrine over again by the same method of the interpretation of Biblical texts. For Milton is most submissive to the Bible throughout. Clearly it was his opinion that whatever the Bible could be found to have ruled on any point must be accepted as the decision. There is no sign of any dissent by him from the most orthodox idea of the verbal inspiration of Scripture. Not the less he contrives that the Bible shall support his own free conclusions. It is evident that the method of his exegesis was not so much to extract positive injunctions from particular texts as to let the doctrine of the Bible as a whole invade and pervade his mind, uniting there with whatever of clear sense or high views of affairs it could find, and so forming a kind of organ of large and enlightened Christian reason, by which the Bible itself could then, in all mere particulars, be safely interpreted. Once and again, in the course of his _Tetrachordon_, he expresses his contempt for the grubbing literalists, who, in their microscopic infatuation over one text at a time, miss the view of the whole waving field of all the texts together. Yet he shows much ingenuity in parts of the verbal proof, and produces also commentators of repute who agreed with him.

There is, and doubtless purposely, in order to give weight to the new book, a large display of learning in its pages. Besides the motto from Euripides to begin with, there are references, in the course of the commentary, to Plato, Philo, Josephus, Cicero, Horace, Cellius, Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Tertullian, St. Augustine, Beza, Paræus, Rivetus, Vatablus, Dr. Ames, Spanheim, Diodati, Marinaro, Cameron, and many more. At the end of the commentary on the Texts, also, there is an express synopsis of testimonies, for the benefit, as Milton is careful to explain, of the weaker sort who are led by authorities, and not because he sets much store on that style of proof himself. Here we have Justin Martyr again, Tertullian again, Origen, Lactantius, several early Councils, Basil, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine again, the Laws of Theodosius and Valentinian, Leo, Wycliffe, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Bucer of course, Fagius of course, the Confession of the Church of Strasburg, Peter Martyr, Musculus, Gualter of Zurich, Hemingius, Hunnius, Bidenbachius, Harbardus, Wigandus, Beza again, Aretius of Berne, Alciat of Milan, Corasius, Wesembechius, and Grotius. When he quotes one of the Fathers, I may observe in passing, Milton is true to the Puritan instinct, and never prefixes to the name the title of Saint; it is always "Austin," for example, and not "St. Austin." Also it may be noted that he is punctual in making it clear whether he quotes from his own knowledge or at second hand. Thus, referring to Wycliffe's view of Marriage as put forth in one of his writings, he says, "This book, indeed, through the poverty of our Libraries, I am forced to cite from Arnisæus of Halberstadt on the Right of Marriage, who cites it from Corasius of Toulouse, _c._ 4., _Cent. Set._, and he from Wicklef _l._ 4. _Dial c._ 2l."--Appended to the collation of Testimonies, and winding up the whole treatise, is a historical statement to which Milton attached great importance, and which is really interesting. It was only by chance, he says, that a notion of Divorce not far short of his own was not then actually part and parcel of the Law of England. For, when young Edward VI. had abolished the Canon Law out of his dominions, a Committee of two- and-thirty select persons, Divines and Lawyers, had been appointed by Parliament--Cranmer, Peter Martyr, Walter Haddon, and Sir John Cheke, the King's tutor, being members of this Committee--to frame a new set of ecclesiastical laws. The draft was actually finished, and it included a law of Divorce substantially such as Bucer had then recommended to the English. It allowed complete Divorce not only for the causes usually esteemed grave and capital, but for such causes as desertion, cruel usage, or even continued contentiousness and wrangling. The untimely death of the young King alone had prevented this Law from coming into effect. This fact in English history, it is evident, together with the knowledge of such an amount of scattered opinion in his favour lying in the works of other authors besides his formerly quoted Bucer, Fagius, Erasmus and Grotius, had been acquired by Milton by fresh research since he had published his Bucer Tract. And here again there is the curious struggle between Milton's delight in finding auxiliaries and his feeling of property in his own idea. "God, I solemnly attest him," he says, "withheld from my knowledge the consenting judgment of these men so late until they could not be my instructors, but only my unexpected witnesses to partial men that in this work I had not given the worst experiment of an industry joined with integrity, and the free utterance though of an unpopular truth." Again, in a passage where he points out that a truth is never thoroughly sifted out in one age, and that some of those who had preceded him in the Divorce notion had only hinted it in vague terms, and others who had been more explicit in the assertion of it had still left it to be fully argued, he concludes with a gentle remark that perhaps, after all, it will be his fortune "to meet the praise or dispraise of being something first."

There is no abatement in the _Tetrachordon_ of the bitterness of Milton's feeling on the subject of an unsuitable marriage. Rather the bitterness is more concentrated and intense. It is as if eighteen months of rumination over his own unhappy condition had made him savage. There is careful abstinence still from all direct allusion to his own case; but there are again the repeated phrases of loathing with which he contemplates, chiefly from the man's side, the forced union of two irreconcileable or ill-matched minds:--"a creature inflicted on him to the vexation of his righteousness"; "a carnal acrimony without either love or peace"; "a ransomless captivity"; "the dungeon-gate as irrecoverable as the grave"; "the mere carcase of a marriage"; "the disaster of a no-marriage"; "counter-plotting and secret wishing one another's dissolution"; "a habit of wrath and perturbation"; "heavenly with hellish, fitness with unfitness," &c. "God commands not impossibilities," he bursts out, "and all the ecclesiastical glue that Liturgy or Laymen can compound is not able to sodder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage." Or take this remarkable passage, repeating an opinion we have already had from him, "No wise man but would sooner pardon the act of adultery once and again committed by a person worth pity and forgiveness than to lead a wearisome life of unloving and unquiet conversation with one who neither affects nor is affected, much less with one who exercises all bitterness, and would commit adultery too, but for envy lest the persecuted condition should thereby get the benefit of his freedom." This assertion that adultery is more venial than mental unfitness is reiterated in another place, with a bold addition: "Adultery does not exclude her other fitness, her other pleasingness; she may be otherwise loving and prevalent." Occasionally, it may be added, in a less startling way than this, Milton leaves the man's point of view and tries to be considerate about the woman. Not that he recants his doctrine of the inferiority of her sex to man's. On the contrary he repeats it, extracting out of Genesis the absolute certainty that it was Man that was made primarily and immediately in the image of God, and that the image of God is in Woman only by derivation from Man. But he qualifies the doctrine at once gallantly and shrewdly. "Nevertheless," he says, "man is not to hold woman as a servant, but receives her into a part of that empire which God proclaims him to,--though not equally, yet largely, as his own image and glory; for it is no small glory to him that a creature so like him should be made subject to him. Not but that particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield; for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female."

This may be taken as the summary of Milton's doctrine about Woman's Rights. Incidentally also the Treatise furnishes us with his opinion on Teetotalism and the Permissive Bill. It comes in thus:--The Mosaic Law (Deut. xxiv. 1-2) allowing a man to give his wife a writing of divorcement and send her away, if he did not like her, had been interpreted by some, in consequence of Christ's comment upon it (Matt.