occupations of his life. He began to write poetry again, and between 1662 and 1667, at an age when poetical composition is for most poets over, he wrote "Paradise Lost." The publication of this great poem could not fail to make amends for his disgrace. It won its way slowly but surely, so that in the last years of his life he had many admirers and visitors (among others the court-poet, John Dryden), though he was probably still "more admired abroad than at home." It is of these last years we have the most distinct accounts of his person and occupations. From one of them, the notes of the painter Richardson, Macaulay takes the description of him on page 87. In 1671 Milton published "Paradise Regained," and with it "Samson Agonistes," the poem which has a special interest for Milton's admirers, who trace in it a delicate reminiscence of great dramatic scenes in his own life. These were his last poetic works. He died in 1674, at the age of sixtysix, and was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, near the chancel, after a long life nearly coextensive with that of the Stuart monarchy which he tried to overthrow.

18. It is interesting to notice that in these last years of his life, when his friends were chiefly younger men and his active political life ceased, that Milton's thoughts went back to his early avocation as a school-teacher. He published at this time, from old manuscript material, a Latin grammar and a logic, and he left behind him some collections for a history and for a Latin lexicon. Among other such things he was preparing in his last days a book for the instruction of students, to contain a summary of theology. Apparently the title he meant to give it was "Idea Theologiæ." It was to follow the scheme of the manuals in which he used to study divinity in coìlege, at least in the division of subjects and the titles of chapters. But the sole authority for its conclusions was to be directly derived from texts of the Bible quoted in ap

propriate places. This book was left in the hands of one of his young friends, Mr. Daniel Skinner, unfinished. It is a book of curious interest, a sort of summary of the theology of "Paradise Lost" with every particle of poetry evaporated, like the juice out of a dried apple, and yet with poetic suggestion about passages in it. It is this book which Macaulay nominally reviews in the present essay.

19. A few more remarks about the course of Stuart politics after Milton's death will perhaps help the reader in following the latter paragraphs of the essay. The Restoration days were not altogether easy times. England had taken up her Stuart monarchy in 1660, as a refuge from the worse trouble of anarchy, as a man returns, for necessary protection against bad weather, to an old garment once discarded. It did not protect her very well. There were, to be sure, no more sufferings from ostentatious tyranny on the part of King Charles, no rebellious Parliaments in arms against royal authority; but for fifty years more there were continual movements of political parties for the overthrow of government. Protestants suspected Catholics, and passed severe penal laws against that religion. Tories suspected Whigs and procured severe laws against Protestant Dissenters. The side which got uppermost in politics condemned and executed its opponents. Such a disturbance was the Papist Plot in 1678, whose story was probably a figment composed by a band of needy adventurers who made their living as witnesses. For some reason the government pretended to believe them, and many wholly innocent Catholics lost their lives as plotters against the king. In 1680 a bill to exclude James, the king's brother, from the throne because he had become a Catholic, passed the House of Commons. The king

dissolved the Parliament and summoned a new one at Oxford, hoping that the memories of the civil war and the loyalty of that old university might affect the disposition

"

of the members. The conduct of this Parliament, called the "Oxford Parliament," however, was so stubborn and insolent as to create a reaction in the country in favor of the king. Charles dissolved this Parliament after a session of only a few days, and the reaction continued. By 1683 the Tories had won the public confidence again. Some secret party schemes of certain great Whig nobles were discovered by the Tories, and at the same time there came out a plot cooked up by some villainous hangers-on of the Whig party to assassinate the king and his brother near the Rye-house," a farm on the way from London to Newmarket. By a malicious confusion of the two "plots," Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were found guilty of treason and executed. But the death of Charles in 1685 brought his Catholic brother to the throne of England. The Roman danger from which English Protestantism had been safe since the execution of Mary Queen of Scots reappeared in startling form. All other issues were swallowed up in this. In three years James had so alarmed all parties by his tyrannical acts in connection with his efforts to re-establish the Catholic religion, that people of all parties joined in inviting the Prince of Orange to enter England with Dutch troops. Thus came about the revolution of 1688, of which Macaulay says so much. Parliament laid before the Prince of Orange, who was a near heir to the crown himself, and whose wife was next heir after James and his children, a "Declaration of Right." It contains once more an assertion of the principles for which the people of England had been fighting through the lifetime of Milton. Making or suspending laws without consent of Parliament is to cease; ecclesiastical commissions are not to be made into courts; levying money without consent of Parliament is illegal; elections of members of Parliament must be free; and so on. William and Mary accepted the crown then offered them, and were proclaimed king and

queen on condition that they should abide by these principles. Henceforth the Stuart theory of divine right could never be pleaded by any English monarch again. James Stuart and his son, with the adhesion of a smaller number of Englishmen in each generation, represented themselves as kings of England by inheritance till the direct line died out. But the actual monarchs of England have held their authority ever since 1688, not by the law of inheritance, but by the consent of the people. The Stuart theory of divine right was dead.

20. But under the new "constitutional monarchy" the struggle still went on.

There still continued to be two

parties in politics, the party of progress and reform, inheriting most of the Puritan tradition in church and state, and the party representing the English love of precedent, custom, and conventionality. They called themselves Whig and Tory, cant terms of uncertain origin and no meaning.', Addison, like Milton, and, indeed, like Macaulay also in his day, belonged to the party of popular government, the Whigs.

21. In the confusing history of England in Addison's lifetime, this significant fact may be seized and remembered in connection with his career. Almost unconsciously, in the intrigues of the court and the politicians, the great English device of "party-government" was developing a happy device, avoiding evermore the civil wars and blind revolutions of Milton's day, yet providing freedom for the advance of the English nation toward the democratic ideals of the inevitable future.

22. Under "party-government" in its modern shape, the sovereign selects to conduct the affairs of the nation a committee of councillors, called the Cabinet, giving to each member charge of some important department of the executive work of government. By selecting all this Cabinet from one party, and making it represent the majority

in Parliament, the actual governing body of England, the English Government" is made to obey the will of the people. The clumsy and cruel decisions of physical force and civil war need not be resorted to in determining the most exciting questions of domestic and foreign policy.

23. When Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702 it cannot be said that this method of government had been properly developed, at least as a regular part of British constitutional procedure. But the activity of parties in her reign brought it forward very far. The Queen found herself faced at her accession by two parties; and she had ties with each. The Tories, on the whole, represented the principles of her family and her own convictions; but the Act of Settlement which made her Queen was a Whig measure. Her friends the Churchills, like herself, were Tories by education. Marlborough, Anne's most trusted adviser, and in fact the whole body of her councillors, were, however, by the influence of the war which England had to fight with Louis XIV., swept over toward a Whig policy and driven to a Whig support. The reason of this war and of England's connection with it was as follows. After the Revolution of 1688, which banished James II., England found herself curiously entangled with the politics of the continent. William III., her reigning sovereign, was a Dutchman, with Dutch relationships. The banished Stuarts took refuge at the court of Louis XIV., the great historic representative of absolute monarchy (l'état, c'est moi), and enlisted the active aid of France in restoring them to the English throne. The next heirs to the Stuarts were the German princes of Hanover. It is no wonder that the English politics of Addison's lifetime dealt largely with foreign alliances and foreign dynastic questions. The great question of all was, briefly put, how far in general the power of Louis XIV. (le roi soleil) was to extend over Europe, and whether England and the other