ation, illegal and sanguinary tribunals, corrupted and mercenary law, bigotted and desolating persecution. With that ardent love of liberty therefore, which always burns brightest in the most expanded and elevated bosoms, and fresh from the schools of Greece and Rome which had educated the masterspirits of the world, it was natural for him to turn with delight from the scene in which he was engaged, to those specious forms of government, the splendid operations of which were obvious while the defects were withdrawn in a great measure by distance from the sight. He preferred a republic, (and who can blame him?) to that unascertained and unprotected constitution, which on every quarter was open to successful invasion, which gave the promise of liberty only, as it were, to excite the pain of disappointment, and which told men that they had a right to be free in the very instant in which it abandoned them to oppression.

spe

With Milton, the idea of liberty was associated with that of the perfection of his cies; and he pursued the great object with the enthusiasm of benevolence, and with the consciousness of obedience to a high and imperious duty. Against tyranny or the abuse power, wherever it occurred and by what

of

ever party it was attempted, in the church or the state, by the prelate or the presbyter, he felt himself summoned to contend. From his continuance in office under the usurpation of Cromwell, he has been arraigned of inconsistency and a dereliction of principle. But, not to repeat what has already been advanced upon the subject, his office did not in any way blend him with the usurpation; he had no connexion with the confidence.or the counsels of the Protector; and he conceived, with the most perfect truth, that he was the servant of his country when he acted as the organ of her intercourse with

foreign states. We have seen his magnanimous address to the usurper; and from some of his private letters we may collect his acute feelings of mortification and disappointment in consequence of the afflicted state of the commonwealth, and the abandonment of that cause which was always the nearest to his heart.

But sanguine, or, if it must be so, rash and blind as was his affection for liberty, he was not prepared to receive it from the government of the multitude; or to believe that, what he considered as the offspring only of wisdom and virtue, could ever be generated by the ferment of an uneducated and

unenlightened rabble. From his prose-writings and his poems many passages might be adduced to prove that, drawing the just line between liberty and licentiousness, he regarded the latter as the ignorant and destructive demand of the many, while to love and cultivate the former was the privilege of the favoured and gifted few. His liberal and elevated sentiment seems to have been precisely the same with that of the excellent Sir William Jones: "that the race of man, to advance whose manly happiness is our duty, and ought of course to be our endeavour, cannot long be happy without virtue, or actively virtuous without freedom, or securely free without rational knowledge."

Though no doubt can exist of the sincerity and fervour of Milton's Christian faith, some questions have resulted from the peculiarities of his religious' opinions and practice. In the early part of his life he zealously adhered, as we know, to the system of Calvin, and classed himself with those severer religionists who were then indiscriminately branded with the name of Pu

I Not of his theological opinions, for these, as far as it appears, were orthodox and consistent with the creed of the Church of England. The peculiarity of Milton's religious opinions had reference to Church government and the externals of devotion.

ritans. Disgusted, subsequently, with the intolerance and the spiritual domination of the Presbyterians, he passed into the ranks of the Independents; and latterly, as Toland asserts, he ceased to be a professed member of any particular sect, frequenting none of their assemblies, and using none of their peculiar rites in his family.

From this assertion of Toland's, and from the general silence of Milton's biographers respecting his use either of family or of closet prayer, some inferences have been deduced to the disadvantage of his devotional character. It has been insinuated that, without the existence of external rites, religion would insensibly slide even from such a mind as Milton's; that in these instances of omission he was probably acting without his own approbation, and that death perhaps intercepted him in his daily resolutions to reform a scheme which his reason must have condemned. The greater part of the premises, from which these conclusions are not after all very fairly drawn, rests upon nothing more than the weakness of negative evidence.

The fact of Milton's not frequenting in the latter period of his life any place of pub

• Johnson's Life of Milton.

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lic worship, may possibly, though still with caution, be admitted on the single testimony of Toland: but the cause of this fact will more properly be sought in the blindness and infirmities, which for some of his last years confined the great author to his house, than in any disgust, with which he had been affected by a nearer insight into the imperfections of the contending sects. On any determination of this question, narrow must be the mind of that man who can suspect the devotion of Milton, merely because it was not exercised within the consecrated precincts of a church. We are fully aware of the usefulness and the duty of public worship, and in us the omission of it would be criminal: but the degree of the obligation must be measured by the standard in the bosom of the individual; and we believe that a good man may offer his homage to God, with as strong an assurance of acceptance,

When I speak of the diffidence with which Toland's testimony in this instance ought to be received, I refer to those unhappy prepossessions on the subject of religion, with which this respectable biographer is known to have been biassed; and which would naturally induce him to lessen the distance as much as he possibly could, in this essential respect, between Milton and himself. If it could be proved that Milton in his latter days had contracted a general indifference for religion, a great point would be carried for the cause of infidelity.