here I appeal, whether this be not the surest, the safest, and most effectual way of teaching; especially if we add this further consideration, that, as it suits the lowest capacities of reasonable creatures, so it reaches and satisfies, nay, enlightens the highest. The most elevated understandings cannot but submit to the authority of this doctrine as divine; which, coming from the mouths of a company of illiterate men, hath not only the attestation of miracles, but reason to confirm it, since they delivered no precepts but such, as though reason of itself had not clearly made out, yet it could not but assent to when thus discovered, and think itself indebted for the discovery. The credit and authority our Saviour and His apostles had over the minds of men, by the miracles they did, tempted them not to mix (as we find in that of all the sects of philosophers and other religions) any conceits, any wrong rules, anything tending to their own by interest, or that of a party, in their morality; no tang of prepossession or fancy; no footsteps of pride or vanity; no touch of ostentation or ambition, appears to have a hand in it: it is all pure, all sincere; nothing too much, nothing wanting; but such a complete rule of life, as the wisest men must acknowledge, tends entirely to the good of mankind, and that all would be happy if all would practise it.

The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.

MILTON.

[IT is not creditable to the present age that Milton is neglected as a poet, and that many persons approach the "Paradise Lost" and the "Paradise Regained" as if they were entering upon a hard and disagreeable task. This is one of the caprices of fashion which will not last. There is nothing in our language, with the exception perhaps of Shakspere, Spenser, and Wordsworth, that can so fill and satisfy the mind which conceives of poetry as possessing higher capacities than that of mere entertainment, as the poetry of Milton. We cannot expect that his prose works should be equally read, nor have they any just claim to the pre-eminence of his poems. They are formed upon Latin models; and, however eloquent and grand in occasional passages, are necessarily constrained and artificial. The extract which we give is from

one of the most famous of his prose compositions, "Areopagitica, a Speech tor the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." John Milton was the son of John and Sarah Milton. He was born on the 9th of December 1608, in London. He was educated at St Paul's School, and at Christ's College, Cambridge. He spent seven years in the University, and afterwards resided for five years in his father's house, during which time it is supposed he wrote "Comus," and his other minor poems. In 1637 he travelled into Italy; he returned after an absence of fifteen months, and, whilst devoting himself to the education of his nephews, became deeply interested in the great political questions of his day. In 1641, he published his first political tract on "Reformation." In 1643, he married Mary Powell; but repudiated her shortly afterwards, and in consequence published his four "Treatises on Divorce." Milton and his wife became reunited after a brief separation. In 1644, he published his "Tractate on Education" and his "Areopagitica.' After the execution of Charles I. appeared his tract on "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates;" and after his appointment as Latin secretary to Cromwell in 1649, his "Eiconoclastes,” and other tracts. In 1654, he became blind, after his second marriage. He mar ried for the third time in 1660. He published "Paradise Lost” in 1667, and "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes" in 1671. He died on the 8th of November 1674, and was buried in St Giles's, Cripplegate.]

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. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and able judgment, have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Cæsar, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hyrcanian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to learn our language and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before

any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huss and Jerome, no, nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin, had been ever known; the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. 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 English-men? 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 beleagured 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? We reckon more than five months yet to harvest-there need not be five weeks; had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already. 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 fan

tastic 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 rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grains of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite into one general and brotherly search after truth, could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should come among us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and how to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would. cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage; if such were my Epirus, I would not despair the greatest design that could be attempted to make a church or kingdom happy. Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries, as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay, rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties, and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected. For now the time seems come, wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets. No marvel,

then, though some men, and some good men too, perhaps but young in goodness, as Joshua then was, envy them. They fret, and out of their own weakness are in agony, lest these divisions and subdivisions will undo us. The adversary again applauds. and waits the hour; when they have branched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties and partitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm root, out of which we all grow, though into branches; nor will beware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of his illunited and unwieldy brigade. And that we are to hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, and that we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps, though over timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have these reasons to persuade me :

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches; that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues first a singular good will, contentedness, and confidence in your prudent foresight, and safe government, Lords and Commons; and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment. Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory. For 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 wit and subtilty, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as it has not only wherewith to