another. 'Twas a great while ere the planets were distinguished from the fixed stars; and some time after that ere the morning and evening stars were found to be the same. And in greater space, I doubt not but this also, and other as excellent mysteries, will be discovered.' Wilkins goes on to discuss the difficulties in the way of accomplishing the aerial journey. He disposes, in sufficiently airy fashion, of the obstacles presented by the natural heaviness of a man's body' and 'the extreme coldness and thinness of the ethereal air'--he held that there was air all the way; and having made it appear that even a swift journey to the moon would probably occupy a period of six months, even if a man could fly a thousand miles in a day (the distance being, as he computed, 179,712 miles), he naturally stumbles on the question, ‘And how were it possible for any to tarry so long without diet or sleep?'

I suppose there could be no trusting to that fancy of Philo the Jew (mentioned before), who thinks that the musick of the spheres should supply the strength of food. Nor can we well conceive how a man should be able to carry so much luggage with him as might serve for his viaticum in so tedious a journey. But if he could, yet he must have some time to rest and sleep in. And I believe he shall scarce find any lodgings by the way. No inns to entertain passengers, nor any castles in the air-unless they be enchanted ones—to receive poor pilgrims or errant knights. And so, consequently, he cannot have any possible hopes of reaching thither.

He has, however, first to make the preliminary large postulate, 'Supposing a man could fly or by other means raise himself twenty miles upwards or thereabouts' above the vaporous atmosphere; then, he believes, he would be beyond the influence of the magnetical virtue of the earth and the force of gravity, and so 'it were possible for him to come unto the moon.' This is seriously argued at length —such was then the state of science. The difficulty as to sleep is a minor one: 'Seeing we do not then spend ourselves in any labour, we shall not, it may be, need the refreshment of sleep. But if we do, we cannot desire a softer bed than the air, where we may repose ourselves firmly and safely as in our chambers.' The necessary supply of food still remains to be provided for:

And here 'tis considerable, that since our bodies will then be devoid of gravity, and other impediments of motion, we shall not at all spend ourselves in any labour, and so, consequently, not much need the reparation of diet; but may, perhaps, live altogether without it, as those creatures have done who, by reason of their sleeping for many days together, have not spent any spirits, and so not wanted any food, which is commonly related of serpents, crocodiles, bears, coockoes, swallows, and such-like. To this purpose Mendoza reckons up divers strange relations: as that of Epimenides, who is storied to have slept seventy-five years; and another of a rustic in Germany, who, being accidentally covered with a hayrick, slept there for all the autumn and the winter following without any nourishment.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty of all is, By whe conveyance are we to get to the moon? and this he is ready to invent a flying-machine :

If it be here inquired, what means there may conjectured for our ascending beyond the sphere the earth's magnetical vigor, I answer: 1. Tis not pe haps impossible that a man may be able to fly by t application of wings to his own body; as angels 2. pictured, as Mercury and Dædalus are feigned, and hath been attempted by divers, particularly by a Ta in Constantinople, as Busbequius relates. 2. If the be such a great ruck [the roc] in Madagascar as Marr. Polus the Venetian mentions, the feathers in whe wings are twelve foot long, which can swoop up a h and his rider, or an elephant, as our kites do a me. why then, it is but teaching one of these to carry a wa and he may ride up thither, as Ganymede does upor 2 eagle. Or if neither of these ways will serve, yet do I serously, and upon good grounds, affirm it possible to mit a flying chariot, in which a man may sit, and give 2 a motion unto it as shall convey him through the a And this perhaps might be made large enough to cr divers men at the same time, together with food for the viaticum and commodities for traffic. It is not the ness of anything in this kind that can hinder its mot if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. a great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eag. flies in the air as well as a little gnat. This engine ray be contrived from the same principles by which Archyt made a wooden dove and Regiomontanus a wooden engk

We set

The particulars of the machine he reserves fr: some other occasion. In 1640 Wilkins published and appended to the new edition of the Discover. a Discourse concerning a New Planet: tending to prove that 'tis probable our Earth is one the Planets-one of the earliest defences of th Copernican system as developed by Galileo 1632. In 1641 Wilkins discussed writing it cipher and shorthand and communication signals, in a work entitled Mercury, or the Secra and Swift Messenger: showing how a Ma may with Privacy and Speed communicate ki. Thoughts to a Friend at any Distance. Here also he pointed out the indubitable advantages of a flying chariot,' if such a thing could be invented; and questioned the possibility of twe friends at a distance communicating by hep of 'needles touched by the same loadstone, dicating by sympathy the same letters on simil alphabets arranged on circular discs, with other possibilities of magnetical operations'-an unrealised dream of a future telegraph. In 1668 he produces a great treatise entitled An Essay towards a Rea Character and a Philosophical Language, which was published by the Royal Society, and was based in the main on the Ars Signorum of George Dalgarno of Aberdeen (1626–87), long a schoolmaster in Oxford, and author of the Didasca.* Wilkins cophus, or Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor.

was the deviser of one of the most ingenious of the impossible schemes for securing perpetual motion : and he wrote on natural theology, and published

sermons.

other dramatic forms, the Puritan poet wrote the last of the masques. But it is wonderfully unlike most earlier masques-loftier and holier in feeling, rather closely modelled in some parts on Greek patterns, and splendid in lyric, monologue, and dialogue. Comus was first published in 1637, not by its author, but by Henry Lawes, who, in a dedication to Lord Bridgewater, says: 'Although not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired, that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction.' Lycidas, written in the end of 1637, is a monody or elegy on a college companion of Milton's, Edward King, who perished by shipwreck on his passage from Chester to Ireland. This exquisite poem, of which Tennyson said to Edward FitzGerald, ‘Lycidas is a touchstone of poetic taste,' formed Milton's contribution to the collection of thirty-six obituary verses, Greek, Latin, and English, to the memory of his friend, which was sent out from the Cambridge University press early in 1638. The four poems of his Horton period are sufficient to lift him into the front rank of English poets; Lycidas shows already traces of the Puritan controversialist. Milton's significance as the most conspicuous literary representative of the Puritan movement has been dealt with by Dr Gardiner above at pages 542-546.

In April 1638 the poet left the paternal roof, taking one English man-servant with him, and travelled for fifteen months in France and Italy. In Paris he was introduced to Grotius. In Italy he visited Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa; remaining four months in Florence, and nearly four in Rome, with a few days in Naples, and returning homewards by the 'Leman lake' to Geneva and Paris. His society was courted by the 'choicest Italian wits;' he made acquaintance with the veteran Manso, formerly the friend of Tasso, to whom one of the finest of his Latin poems is addressed, and at Florence he visited Galileo, then a prisoner of the Inquisition. The poet had been with difficulty restrained from testifying against popery within the shadow of the Vatican; and on his return to his native country he engaged in controversy against prelates and royalists, and with characteristic ardour vindicated the utmost freedom of thought and expression. Between the king and his Scottish subjects the feud had begun that in 1642 was to issue in the great Civil War; Milton, now engaged in tutoring his sister's children, the Phillips boys, had taken a long farewell of poetry, though it may fairly be argued that many of his arguments are dithyrambs rather than prose tracts - all but lyrical embodiments of passion, fervid admiration, and lofty contempt.

Before the commencement of the Civil War he had begun to write against Episcopacy, and he continued during the whole of the ensuing stormy period to devote his pen to the service of his party, even to the defence of that boldest of their measures, the execution of the king; and in the

treatises that thus took origin he fully displayed his stern and inflexible principles on religion azu on civil government. The first, Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England, was pub lished in 1641, and the same year appeared (f Prelatical Episcopacy, a reply to Bishop Hall's Humble Remonstrance in favour of Episcopacy. A defence of the Remonstrance having been puis lished by the Bishop, Milton replied with Aninadversions (1641); and in 1642 An Apoleg for Smectymnuus (another reply to Hall under this name, composed of the initials of the names of five Puritan ministers : Stephen Marshal Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew New comen, and William Spurstow-w in the las name being resolved into a double ), and TA Reason of Church Government urged again! Prelaty, a more elaborate treatise in two books

In 1643 Milton married Mary, the daughter (4 Richard Powell, a cavalier of Oxfordshire, to wher the poet was presumably known, as years before Mr Powell had borrowed £500 from his father. He brought his wife to London; but in the shor space of a month the studious habits and pho sophical austerity of the republican poet proved so depressing to the cavalier's daughter that she lef his house on a visit to her parents, and showed no intention of returning. Milton had already resolved to repudiate her, and published a treatise on divorce. in which he argues that the law of Moses allowed of divorcement for 'unfitness or contrariety of mind as well as for scandalous faults. This dangerous doctrine, which he maintained through life, brought on him much suspicion, dislike, and abhorrence even from his own party. Two years after her desertion-when the poet was practically enforci his opinions by paying his addresses to ‘a ver handsome and witty gentlewoman'-his wife returned to him repentant. He doubtless recog nised that his faults of temper must have proved repellent to a child-wife of seventeen; but r does not appear that their after-life was really happy, though she bore him three daughters He behaved with great generosity to her parents when the further progress of the Civil War involved them in ruin. The year 1643 produced ins Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and next year The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divaro In 1644 appeared a Tractate on Education and th noblest of his prose works, his Areopagitica, e Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. The book on divorce, it has been shown, was written not after his wife had left his house, but before she had paid that lengthy visit to her father. And it was the proceedings taken against Milton for publishing his views on divorce without the license requireu by the Parliament that led him to write Arpage tica, which was also published without the officia imprimatur. The Areopagus (Mars Hill) was the court at Athens that dealt with morality and blasphemy; and the choice of the name Anepagitica by Milton is explained by the passage

in the work that records how for atheism 'the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt and himself banished the territory.' In 1645 he followed up his heretical works on matrimony with Expositions upon the Four Chief Places of Scripture which treat of Marriage, and a pamphlet called Colasterion. Another celebrated work is a reply to the Eikon Basilike, under the title of Eikonoklastes (see GAUDEN, page 587). The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), defending the execution of the king, was written during the trial, and published a fortnight after the execution. It led to the famous controversy with the celebrated scholar Salmasius, or De Saumaise, a French Protestant then a professor at Leyden, who, at the request of Charles II., had in the same year published in Latin a defence of Charles I. Milton's reply was the great Joannis Miltoni Angli pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1650); a second Defensio (1654) was directed against Du Moulin, son of a famous French Calvinist, and Morus (More), son of a Scottish Protestant professor in France. There were numerous continuations and replies; and the war on both sides was carried on with a degree of virulent abuse and personality which, though common in the age of the disputants, is calculated to strike a modern reader with amazement. Salmasius triumphantly ascribes the loss of Milton's sight to the fatigues of the controversy; while Milton, on the other hand, is said to have boasted that his severities had tended to shorten the life of Salmasius. Amid the majestic eloquence of the second Defensio one reads with astonishment a detailed account of alleged amours of Morus with the maid-servants of Salmasius and other people, and his neglect of his illegitimate children; while even the bookseller who published the work must be elaborately shown up as a fraudulent bankrupt, a cheat, an impostor, and a thief! And the same Defensio it is which is so extremely interesting as containing a great deal of autobiographical matter. In 1649 Milton, whose skill as a Latinist was especially valuable when diplomatic correspondence was conducted almost wholly in Latin, had been appointed foreign or Latin secretary to the Council of State. His salary was to be £288 per annum (worth about £1000 nowadays), which was reduced when the duties were shared, first with Meadows, and afterwards with Marvell. At first his special duties were the drafting of letters sent by the Council of State to foreign states and princes; the replies were also examined and translated by him. It fell to him to send the indignant letters on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants to the Duke of Savoy and Louis XIV. pressed his private feelings in the sonnet On the late Massacre in Piedmont (1655).

He ex

For ten years Milton's eyesight had been failing, owing to the 'wearisome studies and midnight watchings' of his youth. The last remains of it were sacrificed in writing his (first) Defensio; he was

willing and proud to make the sacrifice; and by
the close of the year 1652 he was totally blind, ‘dark,
dark, irrecoverably dark.' His wife died about the
same time. In November 1656 he married Katherine
Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of
Hackney; a child was born to them in October
1657, but both mother and child died in the
February following. The poet consecrated to her
memory one of his solemn and touching sonnets :
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,

And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, goodness, sweetness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

In 1659 appeared A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, and Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of the Church. In 1660, on the very brink of the Restoration-and the tide was running strongly against all Milton's ideas of liberty-the eager and fearless poet published The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, in the form of a letter to General Monk (of all people in the world !), containing a scheme for a perpetual Parliament, elections or selections taking place only to fill vacancies caused by death, and a draft measure of local government. The 'inconveniency of readmitting the kingship' is strongly insisted on. The last paragraph begins thus:

What I have spoken is the language of that which is not called amiss the good old cause.' If it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than convincing to backsliders. Thus much I should perhaps have said, though I was sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the prophet: 'O earth, earth, earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen (which thou suffer not who didst create mankind free! nor thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men !) to be the last words of our expiring liberty.

The Restoration deprived Milton of his public employment, and drove him into hiding, but by the interest of his friends-Marvell certainly, and according to a pretty story D'Avenant also-and perhaps partly because his pamphlets showed how little of a practical politician he was, his name was included in the general amnesty. The great poet was now at liberty to pursue his private studies, and to realise the devout aspirations of his youth for an immortality of literary fame. His spirit was unsubdued, and he resolved now to set about 'things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.'

Milton long hesitated on what subject he should write a great epic, and at first thought of the Arthurian legend or some other matter from national history; but finally decided that scriptural history was of more universal and enthralling interest. His disrespectful allusions to old English history shows how little the legendary Arthur could have done to draw out the Puritan's best energies. Paradise Lost, or the fall of man, had long been before his mind as a subject for poetry; and two drafts of a dramatic treatment of this theme are preserved among his manuscripts in Trinity College Library, Cambridge. His genius was better adapted for an epic than a dramatic poem; Samson, though cast in a dramatic form, has little of dramatic interest or variety of character.

Paradise Lost, planned long before, was really begun about 1658, when the division of the secretary's duties had given him greater leisure; it was completed about 1664. He had then married a third time. His helpless state moved him to ask his friend Dr Paget to recommend him a wife. Paget recommended his own cousin, Elizabeth Minshull, daughter of a respectable yeoman living near Nantwich. They were married in 1663, the lady being then in her twenty-fifth year. She had no children, and survived her husband for fifty-three years. We get an interesting glimpse of him soon after this from Ellwood the Quaker, who visited Milton at a cottage at Chalfont, in Bucks, to which the poet had withdrawn from the Plague then raging in the metropolis (1665). The undutifulness of his daughters had added to his unhappiness; and doubtless they found their father harsh and exacting. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. The copyright was purchased by Samuel Simmons, a bookseller, on the following terms: an immediate payment of £5, and £5 more when 1300 copies should be sold; the like sum after the same number of the second edition-each edition to consist of 1500 copies-and other £5 after the sale of the third. The third edition was not published till 1678, when the poet was no more, and his widow sold all her claims to Simmons for £8. It appears that in 1669 the poet became entitled to his second payment, so that 1 300 copies of Paradise Lost had been sold within less than two years of its publication-a proof that the nation was not, as has been vulgarly supposed, insensible to the merits of the divine poem then entering on its course of immortality. In eleven years from the date of its publication 3000 copies had been sold ; some modern critics have doubted whether Paradise Lost, if published in our own time, would have met with a greater demand. The fall of man was a theme well suited to the taste of the serious part of the community in that age, apart from its claims as a work of genius. The Puritans, though depressed, were not extinct, nor was their beatific vision quenched by the gross sensualism of the times. Compared with Dryden's plays, how pure,

how lofty must Milton's epic have appeared! The blank verse of Paradise Lost was, however, a stumbling-block. So long a poem in this measure had not before been attempted, and ere the second edition was published Samuel Simmons procured from Milton a short and spirited explanation of his reasons for departing from the troublesome bondage of rhyming.' In 1671 the poet published his Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. The former we owe to Ellwood's remark when be was asked by Milton for his opinion of the earlier and greater epic, 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?' Samson Agonistes is dramatic in form, but its spirit is lyrical. Both poems show a tendency to greater simplicity in style, even at times to baldness; they were noble pendants to the great work, at worst were 'the ebb of a mighty tide:' Mr Gosse has praised part of Paradise Regained (in Book iv.) as showing greater variety and fullness of technical excellence than any other passage in English poetry.' The survey of Greece and Rome in Paradise Regained, and the description of the banquet in the grove, are as rich in restrained exuberance as anything in Paradise Lost; while the brief sketch of the thunder-storm in the wilderness is perhaps the most strikingly effective passage of the kind in all Milton's works.

Many of Milton's critics have, rather needlessly, regretted that he devoted so much of his time to politics, and did not wholly reserve himself for poetry; forgetting that he was great largely because he was a great and public-spirited Englishman. As Professor Raleigh argues, 'We could not have had anything at all like Paradise Lost from a dainty, shy poet-scholar; nor anything half so great.' Furthermore, Milton's prose works raise every question they touch, even when they cannot be said to solve them. In politics Milton was a thorough-going idealist. Though his pamphlets are occasional and personal, though he wrote with intensely practical aims, his arguments are based on a complete philosophy of life. In 1669 Milton had published his History of England, down to the time of the Norman Conquest (written long before), in which he retold the fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth and other highly unauthentic writers, as useful to poets and orators, and possibly containing in them many footsteps and relics of something true.' The actual history of the struggles of the Angles, Saxons, and Danes, and their contribution to the national history, he treats with as little reverence, calling them the battles of the kites and crows.' The whole is a jejune and perfunctory performance, of interest as showing his and his contemporaries' attitude towards early history. Besides a Latin grammar, a compendium of Ramus's logic, collections of Latin epistles and college exercises, and A History of Moscovia, he wrote ar unimportant Treatise of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and the Best Means to prevent the Growth of Popery (1673). It had been con