may be certain, many a rich effusion of fancy, on which we might have dwelt with exquisite delight: but we have gained by it the spectacle of a magnificent mind in a new course of action, throwing its roaring fulness over a strange country, and surprising us with the force and the flexibility of the human intellect. We are presented by it, also, with the affecting exhibition of very extraordinary magnanimity and self-devotion; and we may, perhaps, number the political writings of Milton, how erroneous soever and incompatible with the present system and happiness of Britain may be their principles, among that mass of incongruous materials and events, from the collision and conflict of which have arisen the beauty, the harmony, the vigour, and the self-balanced revolution of the English constitution.

On his arrival in England, preferring the busy scene of the capital, as better suited to his present views than the retirement of his father's country seat, he hired lodgings in St. Bride's church-yard, and consented to receive, as his pupils, his two nephews, John and Edward Philips. By this measure, and by his subsequent assent to the importunity of some of his most intimate. - friends to allow their sons also the benefit

of his instruction he has exposed himself to the title of schoolmaster, which his enemies, who employed it as a reproach, conceived to be a degrading one. Whether he received money from his pupils cannot now be certainly known; but, while the universality of the practice, and the acknowledged narrowness of his income might induce the belief that he did, that singular disinterestedness, stamped on every action of his life, and that enthusiastic desire of communicating knowledge, which could induce him, when covered with literary glory, to publish an accidence for the instruction of children, would urge us to entertain the contrary opinion, and to conclude that he made a gratuitous communication of the treasures of his mind. This was the report, as Richardson informs us, in his time; and a mere feather thrown into this scale must infallibly, as I think, give it the preponderance. Let us hear what he says on the subject of converting his learning and talents into the means of pecuniary profit, and then let us reject a report, so perfectly in harmony with his sentiments, if we can. "Do they think that all these meaner and superfluous things come from God, and

q

"Rich. Remarks on Milton, &c. p. lxxi.

the divine gift of learning from the den of Plutus or the cave of Mammon? Certainly never any clear spirit, nursed up in brighter influences, with a soul enlarged to the dimensions of spacious art and high knowledge, ever entered there but with scorn; and thought it ever foul disdain to make pelf or ambition the reward of his studies, it being the greatest honour, the greatest fruit and proficiency of learned studies to despise these things."

Let this point, however, be determined at the reader's pleasure; Milton, in his little circle of scholars, was usefully, if not splendidly engaged; and he could not, perhaps, conceive, while he was essentially promoting the highest interests of some of his species, that he was degrading himself in the estimation of the rest. In his conduct to his pupils, as we are informed by Aubrey, severity was happily blended with kindness: he was familiar and free where he could be; distant, and rigid where he was compelled to be. His plan of instruction was formed on a peculiar, and, in my judgment, an erroneous principle. It respected things more than words; and attempted to communicate knowledge, when the understanding was, perhaps, incapable of

receiving more than the key, which opened the important gate.

Many able men, offended at the number of years, devoted by our public schools to the attainment of language, have indulged in some similar speculations, and have endeavoured to crowd the immature and growing mind with a variety of intellectual food, adapted to oppress rather than to nourish it. But the success of these philanthropic projectors has been very partial; and calculated, on the whole, to attest the wisdom of our established system; which, instilling into the boy the first principles of religion, and, with them, the sanctions and the objects of moral duty, contents itself with cultivating the attention and the taste of its pupil; and with giving him the means of access to the knowledge of his riper years.

But Milton's benevolence was always restless in the pursuit of innovation, as it tended to improvement; and, like Cæsar in the field, he never thought any thing done, while any thing more, in his opinion, remained to be done. Not content with the common school authors, he placed in the hands of boys, from ten to fifteen years of age, such writers, as, not remarkable for the

beauty or the purity of their diction, were capable of giving information in some of the departments of science. The books selected for this purpose from the Roman authors were, according to Philips, the agricultural works of Cato, Columella, Varro, and Palladius; the medical treatise of Cornelius Celsus; Pliny's natural history; Vitruvius's architecture; Frontinus's stratagems, and the philosophical poems of Lucretius and Manilius: from the Greek, Hesiod, Aratus, Dionysius's Periegesis, Oppian's Cynogetics, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, some of Plutarch's philosophical works, Geminus's astronomy, the Cyropædia and Anabasis of Xenophon, Polyænus's stratagems, and Ælian's tactics.

Admitting for a moment the propriety of Milton's system of instruction, and the solidity of its foundation, we may reasonably doubt whether many of these authors were calculated to promote it. Vitruvius may be read with instruction on the subject of architecture; but, while the Roman agricultural writers impart no useful information to the natives of Britain, the Roman philosophical poets, (if Manilius-the perplexed, the prosaic, the astrological Manilius can be called either a philosopher or a poet,) com