a sentence which, well pondered, might serve as a text for the whole humanistic indictment of the scientific preoccupations of today. In religion he does not rest with " vague intuitions of the infinite," though he is not without them, but soberly worships the God of righteousness whose dwelling is the heart of man. Finally, in art he knows what he wants and knows how to attain it. Creative and original, untrammelled in his effort to realize to the full his imaginative conception and untouched or nearly so by the formalism of the neo-classic creed, he is yet obediently loyal to the laws of a disciplined taste and he is wisely regardful of the ancients, those "models as yet unequalled of any " in excellence of literary form.

These profound convictions put Milton clearly on the side of contemporary humanism, a humanism which, however "new," is not without its essential community with the old. Such in future appreciation he will more and more be felt to be. We have insisted too long on the supposed austerity of his temper and on the narrowness of his Puritan thought; we have misinterpreted the character of the change in viewpoint of his later years and have failed to perceive that instead of passing farther from the Renaissance he had moved nearer to its central truths. Finally, adopting Arnold's hard and fast distinction of Hebraism and Hellenism, we have assumed too readily that the Reformation and the Renaissance are in Milton contradictory and irreconcilable motives, omitting to credit him with a conscious and consistent endeavor to harmonize them, which at least challenges attention. This, indeed, is Milton's peculiar contribution to the cause and philosophy of humanism, and there is a special significance in the fact that his is the final word of the whole era. Not earlier perhaps, was even an attempt at such a conscious synthesis possible, and without the aid of poetry it could hardly even so have been accomplished. Due allowance being made for an antiquated manner of expression, Milton has given as goodly and comprehensive a formula for the aim and method of education as is to be found in the literature of the Renaissance or as any humanist could wish:

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge

of God and things invisible, as by conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kinds of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom. . . . I call therefore a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.

Complementary to this is his description of the poet's function:

These abilities, wheresoever they may be found, are the gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet to some (though most abuse) in every nation; and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with his providence in his church; to sing the victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapse of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable and grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within; all these to paint out and describe with a solid and treatable smoothness.

There is little need to quarrel with the didactic bias of Milton's theory. It imposes no necessary limitation on the scope of his art, but merely commits him to a high seriousness of purpose which is in accord with the best traditions of the age. Its practical results are Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, works in which the total Renaissance is summed up and revealed as one, through a harmony of its great ideals of beauty, righteousness, and truth. Such a harmony, though made, no doubt, in the special language of the times, is valid for all times. We shall yet learn, it may be, to regard Milton as a more authentic spokesman than we had believed of three great centuries by no means silent, and we shall know him as a powerful voice of guidance amid the chaos of the present day.

The University of North Carolina.

MILTON'S KNOWLEDGE OF GEOGRAPHY

BY ELBERT N. S. THOMPSON

Although the controversies in which he ardently engaged have been long forgotten, Peter Heylyn is still remembered by students of seventeenth-century literature and history. That he was delegated by King Charles to defend the Anglican idea of the Sabbath against the arguments of the Puritans; that he prepared the case against William Prynne, the encyclopedic opponent of stage-plays, and at Oxford contributed to the first royalist newspaper, Mercurius Aulicus; or even that his old enemy, Bishop Williams, interrupted one of Heylyn's sermons in Westminster Abbey by rapping with his cane on the stone floor and calling out, "No more of that point, Peter," all now are matters of little import. But Heylyn was something more than theologian and controversialist. At the age of seventeen he began to lecture at Oxford on historical geography, and a few years later he published the famous Microcosmos, A Little Description of the Great World. By an unfortunate remark in this work he was forced to travel through France, almost as unwillingly as Tartarin of Tarascon set out to hunt the lions of Atlas. Heylyn had thoughtlessly noted in his geography that, in comparison with England, France "is the greater and more famous kingdom," and even more thoughtlessly he had presented a copy to the Prince of Wales. King James took offense at the slur on England, and, though the author laid all blame for the use of the present tense on the printer and insisted that he had spoken of the kingdoms in ancient times, he was forced to seek in France materials for a survey" of the country that might ease the wounded pride of his sovereign. He never travelled elsewhere, yet he became one of England's noted geographers. In 1640, as he was going to answer the summons of a Parliamentary committee, he was rabbled on the streets of London, and a burly fellow in the crowd cried "in a hoarse voice these words, Geography is better than Divinity." The insulted divine was puzzled to know just what the gibe might mean. But posterity, it seems, has formed its own conclusions, and is

1

grateful to Peter Heylyn only for the quaint gossip and learning of the Microcosmos and the Cosmographie.

A widespread interest in geography is still plainly discernible in the writings of the men of Heylyn's time. John Donne, naturally, traveler and adventurer that he was, drew many of his strange fancies from maps and globes and the marvelous reports of the "sea-discoverers." But even the more "home-keeping" author of the Tempest used the story of the Sea-Venture's narrow escape from shipwreck and the devil-haunted Bermuda islands for the basis of his play. Returned travelers walked the streets of London in strange attire, distressing men less caustic than the youthful satirist, Donne, with their strange jargon and their incredible tales. Just as frequently, however, scholars might be found in their libraries studying their charts, or, like genial Tom Fuller, working laboriously on their maps. And the boy Richard Hakluyt, enkindled by the enthusiasm of an older cousin, took as the motto of his life's work the verse of the Psalmist, "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters: these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep." What wonder that all men felt the passion! The newly discovered truths appealed both to the scholarly and to the merely curious. Into the explorations went England's hope of national expansion, its patriotism and long pent-up hatred of Spain, its fervor for the Protestant faith.

No scholar of the seventeenth century felt a keener interest in geography than did John Milton. Apparently, he had but slight sympathy with the far-reaching plans for colonial expansion. At least, he regretted that such "numbers of faithful and freeborn Englishmen, and good Christians, have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean, and the savage deserts of America, could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops." 2 Nevertheless, he knew what the explorers had found in the western world, as references in Paradise Lost show. He considered foreign travel one means " of completing juvenile studies, and of picking up knowledge wherever it may be found"; and in his blindness, as he wrote his

...

'Of Ref., 2, p. 399.

3

See, too, Areopagitica, p. 69, "Far easier and shorter than an Indian voyage, though it could be sailed either by the north of Cathay eastward, or of Canada westward."

Familiar Letters, 23.

epic, he recalled the scenery that he had enjoyed, long before, in Italy. "The study of geography" seemed to him "both profitable and delightful." And because other writers in this field had erred either through too close an adherence to bare fact or through an excessive fondness for the "absurd superstitions, ceremonies, quaint habits, and other petty circumstances" of foreign peoples, he advised, and in his History of Moscovia began, a series of monographs dealing with different countries then but slightly known to Englishmen. Lastly, several years after he had become totally blind, he arranged with a friend on the Continent for the purchase of a newly published atlas of the world."

In Milton's pursuit of geographical knowledge one finds the same eclectic habits of mind that he displayed in all his other varied intellectual and artistic employments. Whether he was writing a pastoral elegy, or systematizing his theories of education, or discussing the function and origin of kingship, he had, as mental equipment, the best that either the ancient or the modern world could offer for his aid. The part of the Bee in Swift's clever fable precisely represents Milton's eclecticism. Herodotus and Plutarch had familiarized him with the geography of classical history. He knew, as well, Strabo's work and advised the use of Pomponius Mela's De Chorographia in the schools. But, at the same time, he had read the discoveries of recent explorers in the great collections of Purchas and Hakluyt, and had followed their journeyings closely in the best available atlases. Where he used the information as fact, he was accurate and sure; where his purpose was poetical, he transmuted fact into artistic forms. The finely colored reference in Lycidas to Arethusa is only a poet's vision of an old myth, contained, for example, in that barren little table of facts, the De Chorographia, where it is said, "fons est in quo visuntur iacta in Alpheum amnem ut diximus Peloponnesiaco litori infusum: unde ille creditur non se consociare pelago, sed subter maria terrasque depressus huc agere alveum atque hic se rursus extollere." In the same way the legend connected with St. Michael's

'Bk. 2, 117. In the tract Of Education, in connection with the study of Mela and the geographers in general, Milton noted: "It will be then seasonable for them to learn in any modern author the use of globes, and all the maps, first, with the old names, and then with the new."