men, and in the want of a just recognition of the dignity of the individual conscience, from which this movement may be largely a reaction? One thing is certain: It cannot be put down merely by greater stringency in enforcing confessions of faith, or by dogmatic and intolerant denunciation. This would only strengthen it. Its errors must be calmly and fairly met by the force of truth. It will be well for the Church if she prove herself sufficiently liberal and discriminating to recognize whatever truth the movement may contain, and the lessons it teaches, while holding fast with unabated confidence those great Scripture verities which have inspired her noblest achievements, and nerved the strength of the great "cloud of witnesses" who "through faith and patience inherit the promises."

ART. VII.-MILTON'S EARLY LIFE.

GENIUS AND WORK.

It is a common error to make genius a sort of spontaneity, a perennial jet from Castalian fountains, rather than a Jacob's well produced by labor. Milton's life contradicts all such notions. Whatever other gifts he had, it is certain that of hard work took the lead. In his particular line he was the greatest applicant and hardest worked man in England. He studied himself blind at an early age. His whole history is a rebuke to those lazy dreamers who court genius in idleness. Work makes our great men, and idleness, in most cases, unmakes their children. Hence the rare propagation of distinguished qualities. A Webster and Clay seldom arise from the same families in two successive generations. After one such production, nature, as if exhausted by the endeavor, sinks back into the tamest mediocrity.

BIRTHPLACE.

Milton had a very unpoetical birthplace. He first saw the light on Bread-street, in the heart of the London of 1608, (Dec. 9,) when that renowned city had less than 200,000 inhabitants, about as large as New York was thirty years ago, when

Canal-street was its northern boundary. His exquisite paintings of country life were perhaps an offshoot of its contrast to his own dusty and fetid home, of which contrast he was made feelingly sensible by occasional rural excursions. As much as this he hints at in the following beautiful passage:

"As one who long in populous city pent,

Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
If chance, with nymph-like step, fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed for her, now pleases more;
She most, and in her look seems all delight."

This sort of pleasure, like most of our city denizens, Milton had a higher appreciation of from its being only occasional, and so sweetly different from his ordinary experiences. We of the city enjoy as much perhaps from a month of rural life as countrymen all the year round, and being more condensed it makes a stronger impression, and leaves behind it more salient points in the memory. No one expatiates so beautifully on the pleasures of early rising as Thomson, who was remarkable for his late hours in bed.

Bread-street, in spite of its unpoetical name, was at the time the resort of poets; for the Mermaid Tavern, where Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, and other literary celebrities held their convivial meetings, was located upon it, and not far from the house in which Milton was born. Shakspeare died when Milton was seven years old, and Jonson when he was twenty-eight; and how much acquaintance they may have had in his family, or whether any, we are not informed. If he shared at all in their inspirations, it was not from local contiguity, but from reading their works, which he early devoured, as also much of the extant English literature of that age. He was omnivorous in his reading appetite, as his works abundantly prove.

The first distinct relic of Milton's physique as a child is left us in the form of a portrait of him by a Dutch artist when he was ten years old. No one can gaze on this childish image without peculiar feelings. Its half moon frill around the neck, edged with lace and stiff with starch, its nicely fitting FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVIII.-37

jacket with bands, and its row of buttons down in front, and the general aspect, bespeak a child of genteel training and surroundings, one from a family of the élite in that age. The face is rather long for its width, the eyes large, clear, and expressive, and what is most remarkable of all, is the grave and serious mind which seems to be looking out upon one. Already great ideas had evidently begun to germinate in that childish mind. One in looking upon this young face feels the truth of what Milton says of himself:

"When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,
What might be public good; myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
All righteous things."

He seems to have come from his mother an anointed seer, and hence his early grasp upon all things above, beneath, around, and within, by which to instruct and elevate the coming ages. It may do to have one such child in a thousand years; but that the race would be benefited by having such the general type of childhood, we should be slow to believe. Lambs frisk and leap, and why should not children?

The events whose inspiration he had begun to feel at this early age were by no means insignificant. One of them was the first publication of our common version of the Bible, which took place when he was three years old, so that his earliest reading must have been in this version. And as much learned controversy on the merit of different versions followed its publication, it is to be presumed that the subject must have had place among his first reading recollections, and imparted to him the inspiration of which he speaks, as from

"Siloa's brook that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God."

On his fourth year died the eldest son of James I., thus introducing into the direct line of succession the unfortunate Charles, who lost his head; while in his fifth year Bartholomew Legate was burned at Smithfield for Arianism, an event which may be supposed to have had a strong influence upon a child's mind, and producing in him, perhaps, that repugnance which

he ever manifested to all persecution, or distraints upon liberty and conscience. On his seventh, Carr, Earl of Somerset, the court favorite, was tried for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and was disgraced; while first Villiers, and afterward the celebrated Buckingham, became premier, involving great political changes. In his eighth year occurred the quarrel between the king and the Scotch Kirk, from an attempt to impose bishops on the latter, attended by most exciting debates, which seem to have inspired Milton with a peculiar abhorrence of prelatical power. Sir Walter Raleigh was executed when he was ten, as an act of concession to the Spanish Court; and the same year the Synod of Dort assembled to balance accounts between Calvinism and Arminianism. Milton no doubt gave his early and earnest thoughts to these religious divergencies, and has embodied his conclusion in various passages.

"Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell;

The intuitions of the poet relieved the Calvinic and Arminian controversy of its subtleties and intricacies, and set the subject before us in a light to command the convictions of all ages. God made men free, men made themselves wicked, is a conclusion to which Solomon came three thousand years ago: "God made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions."

FITTING FOR COLLEGE.

From his tenth year onward Milton was in the full career of the immortality which labor and learning are able to impart. His father designing him for the Church, and being in

no great sympathy with King James and his bishops, put his son under the tuition of one Thomas Young, a bluff honest Scotchman, who had been driven from his country by the king's coercive measures. Thus the poet was nourished at the breasts of Dissent and Puritanism; nor to the day of his death did he prove untrue to his training. Young was a man of learning, and earned for himself the warmest eulogiums of his pupil, who speaks of "the incredible and singular gratitude which he owed him ;" and adds, in a Latin poem full of classic allusions, "you are dear to me as Socrates to Alcibiades, Aristotle to Alexander, and as Phoenix and Chiron were to Achilles." Such allusions in our age would be deemed pedantic, but they accorded to the times of Milton. "I have explored," he says, "the recesses of the Muses, and beheld the sacred green spots of the cleft summit of Parnassus, and quaffed the Pierian cups, and, Clio favoring me, thrice sprinkled my youthful mouth with Castalian wine," which means, in our direct way of speaking, that under Young's tuition he had gone deep into Latin and Greek if not into Hebrew, and had begun to think, feel, and perhaps write as a poet.

How hard he worked at this early period may be seen from what he says of himself: "My father destined me while yet a little boy for the study of humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness, that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight; which, indeed, was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent headaches. All which not a little retarding my impetuosity in learning, he caused me to be daily instructed both at the grammar-school and under other masters at home; and then, when I had acquired various tongues, and also some not insignificant taste of the sweetness of philosophy, he sent me to Cambridge, one of our national universities." The ambition of the elder Milton, like that of too many other parents, must have got the better of his judgment, for instead of restraining the dangerous ardor of his son, he rather stimulated it, and gave orders to "the maid-servant to sit up for John " till he wished to retire. This was stimulating a free horse to his death, and the poor son run himself into blindness before half his race was accomplished.