So far from being ashamed at, he gloried in the bad eminence which these scandalous writings attained, as is evident from his work entitled "Colasterion," written in reply to a nameless answer against "the doctrine and discipline of divorce," and two sonnets written "on the detraction which followed upon my writing certain treatises"; one of which sonnets, as Johnson remarks, is contemptible, and the other not excellent. But the reader shall judge for himself.

"I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs,
By the known rules of ancient liberty,

When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latona's twin born progeny,

Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearls to hogs;
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,

And still revolt when truth would set them free."

The "hogs," so gracefully alluded to in the above passage, were no doubt the Presbyterians, whose opposition on this occasion Milton never forgave. In one of his last works, he declares their lives to be types of worldliness and hypocrisy, and without the least true pattern of virtue, righteousness, or self-denial, in their whole practice.

But Milton did not wait for the conviction of others as regards his notions of divorce, and he began to exemplify his principles by seeking a successor to his wife, who was still unwilling to return to her husband. Eventually, however, she yielded her own feelings to the entreaties of her friends and a sense of duty, and sought a reconciliation.

When the treatises now under consideration were published, a not unreasonable outcry was made against the press which was permitted to send forth such poison unrestrained. Milton soon came forward in its defence, in a speech entitled "The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," in which he advocates something of the same licentiousness of the press as we now see is so injurious to good literature and good morals.

After returning to England from his travels, he commenced a kind of private school, where he instructed two of his nephews with a few other pupils. To this occupation we are doubtless indebted for his treatise on education, in which he attacks the good old systems pursued in our Grammar Schools and at the Universities, and propounds what he considers to be a better and easier path to a complete and generous education, i.e. an education, as he defines it, which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war. The course of study requisite to this high attainment, was to be gone through between the ages of twelve and twenty-one." For we do amiss," he remarks, "to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year." The students were to reside in a spacious house and ground about it fit for an academy, standing in the stead both of school and university, and large enough to accommodate about a hundred and fifty persons. He divides the day's work of these students into three parts-their studies, their exercise, and their diet. Their course of study is much the same

as that which is pursued by most scholars, only he arranges it differently from the usual course. As to their amusement, he observes, that "the interval of unsweating themselves regularly, and convenient rest before meat, may both with profit and delight be taken up in recreating and composing their travailed spirits, with solemn and divine harmonies of music heard or learned."

In the vernal season of the year, when the air was calm and pleasant, he pronounces, that it were an injury and sullenness against nature, not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicings with heaven and earth.

As regards travelling, he recommends that we should see our own country first. For then we should "not need the Monsieurs of Paris to take our hopeful youths into the slight and prodigal custodies, and send them over back again transformed into mimics, apes, and kickshows." Foreign travel, however, he recommends at the age of about twenty-four, but not for the sake of learning principles, but to enlarge experience and make wise observation. So much for Milton's scheme of education, some of which no doubt is excellent: the means, however, are impracticable, and if practicable, impolitic:-there is no royal road to learning.

The storm of civil and religious discord to which allusion has already been made as overhanging England at this period, was in the inscrutable providence of ALMIGHTY GOD, permitted to fall in overwhelming violence upon the altar and the throne; and the King and Primate were immolated to the demons rebellion and fanaticism. As Milton's pen had been no slight aid in accelerating this catastrophe, he was not slow to defend it. While to some the shock of the "unparalleled murder and parricide" of Charles I. had occasioned instantaneous death; and while even some of the perpetrators of that "crest unto the cest of murderous deeds," shuddered to reflect upon it, Milton was sufficiently composed to send forth a treatise, "the Tenures of Kings and Magistrates," wherein the dreadful doctrine, that it is lawful and hath been so held in all ages, for any who have the power, (by which he means physical power,) to call to account a tyrant or wicked king; and after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it a doctrine, which, of course, quite contravenes the teaching of S. Paul, who exhorted his converts to honour the king, when that king was the wicked Nero.

:

Not content with stating this principle in the abstract, he proceeded to attack the memory of the royal martyr, on the appearance, a few days after his murder, of a well-known book said to have been written by the king himself during his troubles, entitled "Ekwv Basiriky), or the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitude and sufferings." So eagerly was this work sought after, that it passed through fifty editions in a twelvemonth: and so great a reaction of popular feeling to the king's memory did the reading of it produce, that Milton likened it to the effect of Cæsar's wall upon the tumultuous Romans. He feared not, however, to denounce the work in a treatise, with the insulting name of Eikóvokλaoτηs, i.e. image breaker; and which is upon the whole, the coarsest and bitterest—we need not add, the least excusable of

his writings. He sneers at the very name of king, and describes our saintly Charles as "a man who had offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties, and put tyranny into an art, than any British king before him; whose reputation of wisdom had been won by selfishness and subtle shifts, of goodness by multiplying evil, of piety by endeavouring to root out true religion." He eulogises the regicides for having given judgment upon the king himself, or rather upon an enemy who had been their king, caught as it were by a net in his own laws; who alone of all mortals, challenges to himself impunity by a divine right. Thus did Milton dare to traduce the sainted memory of that royal martyr, who has been truly described by one that knew him well, as the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father, and best Christian, that the age in which he lived produced: and the shedding of whose sacred and innocent blood we are admonished to supplicate with prayer and fasting, that God, through Whom kings reign, will not visit it upon us or our posterity.

CORNWALL CHURCHES.

NO. I.-THE POSITION OF EARLY CORNISH CHURCHES.

THERE is a record in the legend of good Saint Chad, that when the King, in those days, had offered him a choice of many rich and fertile places, wherein to build himself a stately church, that Holy Bishop and Martyr rejected them all. But, in their stead, he chose out a wild and a solitary scene among the rocks, more fit, they said, to be the haunt of the satyr and the wild beast, than the home of a sanctuary for the Living GOD. They inquired, therefore, with great surprise, into the reasons which had thus guided the preference of Saint Chad; and his answer was, that he had chosen that ground in memory and fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah, which said that, "in the place of dragons where each lay there should be grass with reeds and rushes."* Now the motives which would seem to have impelled our Cornish fathers in their selection of holy ground are, at the first blush of secular thought, alike singular and strange. Ever and anon as we traverse the moorlands of Cornwall we light upon some grey and lonely sanctuary of the former men, which stands before us suddenly. We have wandered away, perchance, from the homes and the houses of men, and all at once, as we wind along the valley, or trace the turns of the rocky shore, there is the solemn church with its spectral tower, like some unlookedfor pillar of the wilderness, some stony monument of a race unknown. Yonder, on the cliff, bold and beetling, the shrine of a forgotten Saint will look along the sea, the beacon of the pilgrims of the waters for many generations! Here, in the leafy glen, this simple sanctuary, roofed with Saxon wood, will gather the simple folk into its quiet breast

* Isaiah xxxv. 7

every worship day, the native and the natural home of the souls of the people. But when we stand and search thoughtfully these solemn and selected scenes of the hearts that have long been cold, we discover that there were certain fixed and careful reasons, which usually guided the feet of the Fathers to these favourite foundations of old. The principles of ancient choice, however, were not such as lead the preference of our own misguided time. The builder of a church, now-a-days, will look around him for some concourse of homes, populous with busy life; he will search for the gathered assemblage of peopled roofs, rife with a throng of ready worshippers, and thither, into their midst, he will carry with hasty zeal, the shrine, not of Diana of Ephesus, but of the Living GOD! Now the wiser hearts of the ancient men avoided the multitude, and sought, instead, for solitude in the scenery of worship, and the appointed place of prayer. They had in their mysteries a favourite text: "He went up into a mountain apart to pray, and when evening was come, He was there alone." Neither were these men wrong. The houses and the homes of this world are troubled and overshadowed with many associations of sorrow, trial, sin. The remembrances of miserable life cleave to the roofs of human habitation, and there is the leprosy of transgression visible, with a dark spot," on their walls. Every door is unclosed as it were with the footsteps of some haunting anxiety; the stone will cry out with the voice of an ancient grief, and the beam out of the timber will answer it with a memory of pain. But the sanctuary of the soul should stand apart from all such contact with the earthly and the past. It was made therefore, aforetime, a lonely structure, unapproached by recollections of this world, a building which the spirit of a man would not people with the images of mournful and ordinary life. Nothing evil should dwell among Christian tombs. No dark dream of mortality ought to waken into life around sacred walls; the busy schemes, the earthly occupations of this miserable world should never find within the scenery of a church, a single memorial-token, one sympathetic stone. Let the house of the altar stand, like some awful solitary pyramid of the Egyptian wilderness, separate from the mansions of sinners, and all alone with GOD.

But beside this desire of the departed ones to establish their shrines in solitude, and to worship, as the shuddering Patriarch did, upon one of the lonely mountains "which God had told him of," we find that, in the days that are gone, distance also recommended the scene. Whereas the usage now is to carry the church as it were to the people; to save men trouble; to enable them to worship, so to speak, next door; and to render adoration easy and convenient to the multitude; the forefathers of Cornwall said not so. They adopted the saying which said, "I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." All who are conversant with existing boundaries, and the dates of our domestic architecture in the West, will discover, that as the church was usually the first and earliest structure within the parish land, so was it originally placed afar off from the probable population. Like the altars of the Syrian Fathers, and the groves of the Patriarchal dispersion; as it was with the Temple on the Mount Sion, so far away from the Tribes, so the early sanctuaries of Christian

Cornwall stood in the distance evermore. Not without reasons manifold and good. Those ancients loved a church-path for the journey of their worship-day. It was a road of preparation for father and son. There was the old man and the wife of his youth, who had trodden together such long years the one accustomed way: did not their hearts burn within them as they travelled side by side? Had they not time to take sweet counsel together as they went to the house of GoD as friends? There was the altar of their early troth; the font that had healed the children of the house. There was the grave that would enfold them at the last, and they conversed about that chosen ground, as their custom is to this day, as men will talk about the place of their daily abode, or the couch of nightly rest. These were the thoughts and words that occupied the solemn passage of their churchward way. Again, it was a path of good instruction also to the young. They heard along the fields, from the language of their parents, all about God. Churchhistories fell by the way-side-old legends, pleasant and pious thoughts, --and therewithal did the young man cleanse his way. If they paused by the Cross of S. James, or lingered by the Well of S. John, as they listened to the old man's tale, such as he had heard with his ears, and his fathers had told him; nay, more, if they knelt to rehearse the Collect of an Apostle, or to chant some Martyr's hymn, let their piety be pardoned and their faith forgiven. But the distant travel was, moreover, a pilgrimage of zeal. The more toilsome the length of that way, the stronglier, the more visibly, the good old church-love came out. They had a saying on their lips, that the more footsteps the Angels counted in the church-path of a man, the sweeter were their songs in Heaven. Theirs was not the lazy love that seeks the nearest church. They did not complain of difficult distance, as though they thought it troublesome to go to commune with their GoD.

But, beside the distant and the solitary place, these men sought for foundations on the holy hills, along the borders of the sea. They were fain to blend the records of their worship with the signs of that vast volume of the waters, which is filled with such mighty memorials of the LORD and His Church. The early wonders were accomplished by the shore of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the Nations. From the breast of the Great Lake, Apostles came. The Draught of the Fishes signified the capture of many multitudes by twelve men, sons of the net. In paths of water all the family of GoD must needs go home, and there be born. Christians all are sons and daughters of the sea. Therefore, in memory of Him Who walked the waters, and so loved the shore that after He was risen from the dead, JESUS sought again the Galilæan sands, the fathers reared them chosen walls, and set up bulwarks of the dark grey towers that look along the wave this day, as though they were the messengers of GOD in stone.

Neither let us forget to keep in memory the wild and wondrous beauty of these old selected scenes. There is exceeding loveliness in all the places of the lowly west, chosen in departed ages for the living God. They called to mind-the wise of heart, in wood and stone, that "the sea was His, and He made it, and that His hands prepared the dry land." So they commanded shrines of