try and founded the present South American republics. All this movement was watched in England with much sympathy for the insurgents. Young Englishmen even served in the armies and navies of the South American rebels. Next came Italy. In Naples also there was at this time an absolute monarch of Spanish descent. Here, also, the people rebelled and secured a constitution. But, though not successful in Spanish affairs, the Holy Alliance succeeded in Italy in crushing the popular movement. Austrian troops were sent in and took away, in the name of religion and good government, the hopes of freedom which the Neapolitans and Sicilians had begun to enjoy. Still another uprising was in Macaulay's mind as he wrote the story of Milton. Greece had just revolted against her Turkish masters. Even while this essay was penned, the heroic defence of Missolonghi was taking place; and with the enthusiastic support of many cultured and high-spirited young men from all the nations of the Christian world, Greece was just winning for herself her title to independence. With these great struggles all over the world going on before his eyes, there was a peculiar zest for Macaulay, who loved to identify present politics and past history, in discussing just then the great historic conflicts of the Stuarts and the people of England over the same momentous problems of government which were then agitating the nations of Continental Europe. Lastly, Macaulay wrote this essay with a heart full of interest in a great political movement in England itself, namely, the effort making in 1825 for the relief of his Catholic fellowcitizens from their civil disabilities. The laws against Catholics in Great Britain, and still more in Ireland, since the time of William and Anne, had been, as is well known, most severe. Catholics were excluded from the succession to the crown of England after the Revolution of 1688. But they were also excluded from the right to sit

in Parliament, or to hold any magistracy or receive degrees at the universities. Irish Catholics were practically put in absolute subjection to a Protestant Parliament supported by English arms in Dublin. This Parliament, during the eighteenth century, ordained that no Catholic might carry arms, buy or inherit real estate, or own a horse worth more than £5. Under such laws the country was almost ruined commercially and socially, though the Catholic church rather increased in numbers. Now in 1825 Ireland was struggling to obtain some relief. The country had been agitated by this effort for a generation. Ireland was now divided into two camps, the Orange lodges of Protestants on one side, the Catholic Association and the Ribbonmen on the other. The two sides vied with each other in hatred and outrage. The English nation divided over them. Liberals in both parties took up the cause of Catholic emancipation. Lord Althorp, afterward the champion of the Reform Bill, and the Whig Lord Lansdowne, who, in 1830, helped Macaulay into Parliament, were endeavoring once more to obtain civil equality for their Catholic fellow-citizens. The "unbending Tories," like Wellington and Peel, on the other side, resisted change, quoting, to defend their ideas of the proper method of dealing with Irish Catholics, the example of the great Whig hero, William the Third. But a bill for the relief of the Catholics had just passed the Commons. It was, however, rejected in the Lords under the influence of the Tories. The Duke of York, at that time a possible heir to the throne, came down and made a speech on the extreme Protestant side, which was very influential in defeating the bill. The "victory" of the antiCatholics was celebrated with rejoicing. The Protestants had a public dinner in London in honor of it, at which the Duke of York drank the "glorious and immortal memory of William III.” amid wild cheering

9. In a year of such political excitement we can imagine the feelings which were animating the young author of this paper. Such are the feelings we must in a measure understand if we would appreciate his work rightly. We must not gauge it solely as a contribution to the study of Milton's place in English literature. We must be prepared to find political sympathies getting uppermost in the author's interest in the subject, and we shall consequently find that his political paragraphs, as, for example, the eulogy of the Puritans on page 78, are far the best part of the essay. Let us freely admit that there is much justification for this way of treating Milton. With all due respect to English literature, in which Milton's poetry is so bright a glory, the making of verses has not been the only service or even the chief service of the English race to mankind. When the final account of things is made up, England will be able to say of her history something in the strain of Virgil's proud verses about Rome in the Sixth Book of the "Eneid." Whatever artistic and literary glories other nations may have had, the English have built the greatest political structures of popular representative government in all the world. And it has been again and again due to Anglo-Saxon history, in both hemispheres, especially of the last three hundred years, that "government of the people, for the people, by the people" has not perished from the earth. So that Milton, the Puritan Secretary of the Commonwealth, may well be remembered in any critical account of him as gratefully as Milton the poet and scholar. As Heine, the German poet, said of himself, Macaulay's essay seems justly to say of Milton, “Lay not laurel-leaves on that coffin, but a sword. For he was a good soldier in the warfare of the liberation of humanity." 10. John Milton had three threads of three widely different destinies spun into one for him by the Fates. The first part of his life, his boyhood and family history, his

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study and private reading, connected him with the England of his father, with music and song, with the happy singers of Elizabeth's day, whose influence is so plain in his early poetry. The second part of his life, his education at school and college, tied him to the Puritans, to the rigorous teachers who seized his youth," moulding his life by the high religious purposes of that noble but unhappy party; and the third cord, red and dismal, running through the life and occupations of his manhood, bound him to the troubled life of political dissension in the bloodstained England of Charles and of Cromwell. In "Paradise Lost" one sees at last these influences erecting together an harmonious whole of unique beauty. That is a great song of a true-born singer relating in the imagery of an immortal epic the origin of all the world's sorrows as a blind Puritan of the lost Commonwealth had had knowledge of them. The first part of his life promised him only happiness in the joy of his chosen art of poetry. He was born in 1608, and like Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley, and Keats, in the city of London itself. The name of the house of his birth was the "Spread Eagle." It was in Bread Street, Cheapside; but like the other houses which Milton lived in, it exists no longer. Though not the eldest, he was the very dearest son of his father, described as "an ingeniose man delighting in musique," who gave him a careful education at St. Paul's school and at home also. In books John Milton was from the tenderest years a student. His brother relates that "when he went to schoole, when he was very younge, he studied very hard and sate up very late commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night, and his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for him; and in those yeares [10] he composed many copies of verses which might well become a ripe age. And was a very hard student in the University and performed all his exercises there with very good applause." He went to Christ's College in

the Puritan University of Cambridge at the age of seventeen, remaining there till he was twenty-four. The boys there called him "The Lady" because of his fair complexion, graceful appearance, and a certain haughty delicacy of taste and habit. While here he wrote among other things the great "Ode on the Nativity," the "Sonnet on arriving at the Age of Twenty-three," and a good deal of Latin verse. After leaving college he had been meaning to take orders. But he felt himself at that time unable to become a minister of the English Church, as his family had apparently expected. He was not in harmony with the church government of that day, and he already cherished the purpose of giving his life to the making of great poetry. So he retired to his father's country-house in Horton, and lived in quiet, reading classic and Italian authors, and writing. What he wrote here was already of the greatest poetic excellence. If his life had gone on as it began at Horton, he would have ranked among the sweetest of the lyric poets of England, with a strong resemblance to the singers of the previous generation, the beautiful minstrels of the age of Elizabeth. In these days of happiness "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Comus" came into being; and the beautiful Latin poem to his father; and finally, just as he was going on his Italian journey, he composed, as a memorial to a dead college friend, the great "Lycidas."

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11. After three years in the country at Horton, Milton spent fifteen months in Italy.) He enjoyed, we may believe, Cone of the happiest periods of his life there.) He visited Paris, Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, stayed two months (August and September) in Florence, (where occurred his famous visit to the blind Galileo, "a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than as the Franciscan and Dominican licensers taught." He met in Florence many young Italian literary men, who became his