MILTON

Jeannis Miltoni, Angli, de Doctrinâ Christianâ libri duo posthumi. A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone. By JOHN MILTON, translated from the Original by Charles R. Sumner, M. A. &c. &c. 1825.

OWARDS the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon,1 deputy

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Keeper of the state papers, in the course of his researches

among the presses of his office, met with a large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected copies of the foreign despatches written by Milton while he filled the office of Secretary, and several papers relating to the Popish Trials 3 and the Rye-house Plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope, superscribed To Mr. Skinner, Merchant. On examination, the large manuscript proved to be the long lost Essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, which, according to Wood 5 and Toland,

1 Robert Lemon, 1779-1835, became a clerk in the State Paper Office in 1795, and Deputy Keeper in the same office in 1818. Besides discovering the De Doctrina Christiana, he did much in arranging the national records and preparing them for publication.

2 In March, 1649, Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State, the supreme executive authority of the Commonwealth. He continued to hold this office till within some months of the Restoration, his latest Latin letter being dated the 16th May, 1659.

These trials followed upon the information given in 1678 by Titus Oates and others of a Roman Catholic plot to murder the King and overturn the constitution in Church and State. Although the information was false, it terrified the public, and many persons were executed as conspirators.

• When the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament (see below) and the reaction against the excesses of the Whigs had freed Charles II. from restraint, many of the Whigs, despairing of constitutional resistance, began to conspire. Richard Rumbold, an old Parliamentary soldier, and some others laid a plan to capture or kill the King on his way to London from Newmarket. The spot chosen for the attack was close by Rumbold's dwelling, known as the Rye House, which has given its name to the plot.

Anthony Wood, 1632-1695, the celebrated Oxford antiquary and diarist. The passage to which Macaulay refers will be found in his Fasti Oxonienses, part i., col. 486 (ed. 1817).

John Toland, 1670-1722, who is now remembered chiefly as the first exponent of the deism of the eighteenth century, wrote a Life of Milton which was prefixed to the edition of Milton's prose writings, published in 1698.

Milton finished after the Restoration, and deposited with Cyriac Skinner.1 Skinner, it is well known, held the same political opinions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have fallen under the suspicions of the government during that persecution of the Whigs which followed the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, and that, in consequence of a general seizure of his papers, this work may have been brought to the office in which it has been found. But whatever the adventures of the manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it is a genuine relic of the great poet. Mr. Sumner, who was commanded by his Majesty to edite and translate the treatise, has acquitted himself of his task in a manner honourable to his talents and to his character. His version is not indeed very easy or elegant; but it is entitled to the praise of clearness and fidelity. His notes abound with interesting quotations, and have the rare merit of really elucidating the text. The preface is evidently the work of a sensible and candid man, firm in his own religious opinions, and tolerant towards those of others.

The book itself will not add much to the fame of Milton. It is, like all his Latin works, well written, though not exactly in the style of the prize essays of Oxford and Cambridge. There is no elaborate imitation of classical antiquity, no scrupulous purity, none of the ceremonial cleanness which characterizes the diction of our academical Pharisees. The author does not attempt to polish and brighten his composition into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He does not, in short, sacrifice sense and spirit to pedantic refinements. The nature of his subject compelled him to use many words

"That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp."4

1 A pupil and friend to whom Milton addressed two of his sonnets.

2 The last Parliament of Charles II., and the last held anywhere but at Westminster, met at Oxford on the 21st of March, 1681. The Whig leaders were about to reintroduce the bill for excluding James, Duke of York, from the succession, as being a Roman Catholic, when Charles, trusting to the change of feeling in the country, dissolved the Parliament a few days after it had assembled.

3 Charles Richard Sumner, 1790-1874, was appointed historiographer to the Crown and royal librarian in 1820. He thus was chosen to edit the De Doctrinâ Christiana. He afterwards became Bishop of Llandaff, whence he was translated to Winchester.

4" Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek
That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp."

-MILTON, sonnet xi.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, A.D. 35-95, although a Spaniard by birth, was the best Latin critic and one of the most elegant Latin writers of the imperial epoch. His great work was the Institutio Oratoria.

But he writes with as much ease and freedom as if Latin were his mother tongue; and, where he is least happy, his failure seems to arise from the carelessness of a native, not from the ignorance of a foreigner. We may apply to him what Denham 1 with great felicity says of Cowley. He wears the garb, but not the clothes of the ancients.

Throughout the volume are discernible the traces of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated from the influence of authority, and devoted to the search of truth. Milton professes to form his system from the Bible alone; and his digest of scriptural texts is certainly among the best that have appeared. But he is not always so happy in his inferences as in his citations. Some of the heterodox doctrines which he avows seem to have excited considerable amazement, particularly his Arianism,3 and his theory on the subject of polygamy. Yet we can scarcely conceive that any person could have read the Paradise Lost without suspecting him of the former; nor do we think that any reader, acquainted with the history of his life, ought to be much startled at the latter. The opinions which he has expressed respecting the nature of the Deity, the eternity of

1

Horace's wit and Virgil's state

He did not steal, but emulate:

And when he would like them appear

Their garb but not their clothes did wear.'

4

'On Mr. Abraham Cowley's Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets." John Denham, Sir, 1615-1669, whose poems, once famous, are now almost entirely forgotten with the exception of four lines in his Cooper's Hill, alluding to the Thames :

"O could I flow like thee and make thy stream

My great example as it is my theme,

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

*Abraham Cowley, 1618-1667, the most distinguished of that school of poets known as the "metaphysical" (i.e., remarkable for ingenious conceits and farfetched expressions) which flourished under James I. and Charles I.

The Arian doctrine that the Son was not co-equal or co-eternal with the Father is adopted in Milton's treatise above referred to, but it seems, as Macaulay says, to be implied in various passages of Paradise Lost, especially book v., line 600 et

Milton's opinions concerning marriage are stated in several pamphlets, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643; The Judgment of Martin Bucer Conarning Divorce, 1644; Tetrachordon, Expositions upon the Four Chief Places in Scripture which Treat of Marriage, 1645; and Colasterion, A Reply to a Nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1645. According to his nephew, Edward Phillips, Milton, when his first wife, Mary Powell, left him and refused to return, thought of taking a substitute. But if this were so, his reconciliation with his wife changed his mind. To this statement Macaulay seems to refer.

matter, and the observation of the Sabbath, might, we think, have caused more just surprise.1

But we will not go into the discussion of these points. The book, were it far more orthodox or far more heretical than it is, would not much edify or corrupt the present generation. The men of our time are not to be converted or perverted by quartos. A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf.2 The name of its author, and the remarkable circumstances attending its publication, will secure to it a certain degree of attention. For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then, to borrow the elegant language of the play-bills, be withdrawn to make room for the forthcoming novelties.

We wish however to avail ourselves of the interest, transient as it may be, which this work has excited. The dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint, until they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him, a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood. On the same principle, we intend to take advantage of the late interesting discovery, and, while this memorial of a great and good man is still in the hands of all, to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities. Nor, we are convinced, will the severest of our readers blame us if, on an occasion like the present, we turn for a short time from the topics of the day, to commemorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion and the martyr of English liberty.4

It is by his poetry that Milton is best known; and it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By the general suffrage of

1 In the De Doctrinâ Christiană Milton inclines to a somewhat anthropomorphic conception of the Deity. He holds that the world was not created out of nothing, and he denies that the ordinance of the Sabbath is binding on Christians.

2 In March, 1651, Milton published his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, a reply to the Defensio Regia written by the learned Salmasius (Claude Saumaise) in vindication of Charles I. and in denunciation of those who put him to death. Both pamphlets were in Latin and so much disfigured with scurrility as to be now offensive.

3 The Capuchins, so styled from their hoods (Ital. cappuccio), were a branch of the Franciscans erected into a separate order by Clement VII. in 1528. They have been distinguished by their energy as preachers and missionaries.

4 Milton was assuredly the glory of English literature and the champion of English liberty, but certainly not a statesman, scarcely a philosopher and only a martyr in the sense in which every earnest adherent of a vanquished party may be so termed.