A great part of Antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their Souls--a good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of their passed selves make accumulation of Glory unto their last durations.

Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet consistencies, to attend the return of their Souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Misraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.

JOHN MILTON.

MILTON, our greatest poet next to Shakspere, was, like his great predecessors Chaucer and Spenser, born in London. His forefathers were landed proprietors at Milton, in Oxfordshire; but the poet's father was a London scrivener or solicitor carrying on a prosperous business in Bread Street, Cheapside, and taking also great delight in music. His son John was born in December 1608; was sent in course of time to St. Paul's School, where he was happy with his tutors; and in 1624 he went to Cambridge. Here his course was not so peaceful, and for some unexplained reason he was rusticated for a time. He returned and took his degrees in regular course, but in later years he does not seem to have looked back with feelings of love upon his University. He had intended to enter the Church, but scruples as to subscription prevented him, and

he thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.

He left Cambridge in 1632, and came to live at Horton, the pleasant Buckinghamshire village to which his father had retired. Here he spent five years of studious seclusion and meditation, and some of his friends feared that he had given himself up to dream away his years in the arms of studious retirement like Endmyion with the moon on Latmus Hill.' To these friends he sent in answer a beautiful sonnet in which mingled with some feelings of sadness there is expressed the steady conviction that his time is not being wastedHow soon hath Time, the suttle theef of youth

Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentith yeer!
My hasting dayes flie on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arived so near,

And inward ripenes doth much less appear,
That som more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,

Towards which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Task-master's eye.

'Milton's life is a drama in three acts.

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The first discovers him in the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas " are the expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained,' and "Samson Agonistes" are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind,

Wisdom's self

Oft seeks to sweet retired Solitude,

Where with her best nurse Contemplation

She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort

Were all to ruffled, and sometimes impaired.

He that has light within his own cleer brest

May sit i' th' center, and enjoy bright day:

But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts,
Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.

In the close of the poem the song of the attendant spirit compares in beauty with Ariel's song in the Tempest,' though it lacks the sweet simplicity of the original—

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To the Ocean now I fly

And those happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the sky:
There I suck the liquid ayr

All amidst the Gardens fair

Of Hesperus, and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree.

The exact date of the composition of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' is not known; but they belong to this period. The two idyls breathe the free air of spring and summer, and of the fields round Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our language has yet found of the fresh charm of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn, or at sunset, into the fields from his chamber and his books.'1 Both poems are very beautiful, but Milton probably reveals himself more truly in Il Penseroso.'

1 Mark Pattison.

'No mirth,' says Johnson, 'can, indeed, be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth.'

What picture could be finer than that of Milton's lonely midnight studies?

Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may out-watch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear
The spirit of Plato to unfold

What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook.
Somtime let gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptred pall come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops line,
Or the tale of Troy divine,

Or what (though rare) of later age
Ennobled hath the buskind stage.

His picture of the nightingale and of the midnight

moon is also very beautiful

Sweet bird that shun'st the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy!

The chauntress of the woods among

I woo to hear thy even song;

And missing thee I walk unseen
On the dry smooth shaven green,
To behold the wand'ring Moon
Riding neer her highest noon,
Like one that hath bin led astray

Through the Heaven's wide pathles way,

And oft as if her head she bowed

Stooping through a fleecy cloud.

The poem of Lycidas' belongs to 1637, and was occasioned by the drowning of Milton's dear friend and college companion Edward King while he was crossing