chance, while allowing God, in their conception of him, to absorb by foreordination all the sins of men. into his own constitution. What we most need are eyes to see what God is about, and in this every great artist helps us.

The works of God are broader than our broadest works, fuller of sympathies, richer in beauties, more fruitful in affections. It is the part of inspiration to see some new portion of this wealth, and of teachableness to be taught it.

Shakespeare is moral, then, by the full torrent and truthfulness of his overmastering genius, and immoral by the ooze and drainage of adjacent times. Shakespeare is surprisingly impersonal. He has written much, yet we know very little of him-William Shakespeare. He is back of his characters creatively, not sympathetically. He yields them one and all, without haste, without delay, to the laws of the world into which he has brought them. This one fact gives him a serene moral elevation. It is also surprising that Shakespeare should have been so apparently indifferent to posthumous fame. In the years that intervened between his retirement and his death, he seems to have done nothing for the editing or publishing of his plays; but to have left them to their chances, an abandoned literary progeny. There is in this a wonderful alienation from ordinary human feeling.

LECTURE VI.

Milton, his youth, manhood, old age.-Criticism on his Works. A Transition Period.-Revolutionary Times Critical.—(a) Antagonism of political Parties.-The Literature of each.-Hudibras.— The Drama.-Its Degeneracy, reasons of,—(1) Pecuniary Interests, (2) Moral Influences,—(3) Scenic Effects,—(4) Unfitness of Deep Emotions for a Spectacle.—(6), Antagonism between French and English Tendencies; (c), between Criticism and Creation.-Dryden, position, character, powers.

THE third great name of the Elizabethan age is that of Milton. As Spenser's stands at its commencement, opening its portals backward on the past, where the glow of the fading day of chivalry still rests on the horizon; so does Milton step forth at its close, as one who has caught the prophetic force of its spirit, and sees the light of new ideas, of dawning ages, deeply penetrating the spaces before him and about him. Spenser is animated by a gentle, erudite and meditative spirit, a piety and poetry that soften and veil the harsh, unholy facts of life; that rearrange and represent them with a mellow light that quite conceals the conflicts of good and evil, and brings to the world as it is, and yet more to it as it has been, a cheerful and benign aspect. He is the poet of conventional forms, and a conventional religion. Shakespeare moves amid the sturdy, strong passions that play into and under social events, whether they be right or wrong. He is the poet of natural, constitutional forces,

He

and thus of natural religion and morality. deals with the fearful shocks of the moral world; because the intellectual atmosphere of the human soul is penetrated and convulsed by them. There can be no terrific storms without these thunderclaps of justice, this sharp lightning of conscience; and Shakespeare is the poet of natural religion, because he cannot otherwise present nature. Milton

is the poet of definite and progressive dogma, a revealed religion that lives to conquer, that casts off the past, and bestirs itself in perpetual resistance and struggle to win a new future. The religious sentiment had divided itself. A portion lingered; another portion pushed onward, accepted the civil and reformatory conflicts of the hour, and gave itself unreservedly to a social and religious ideal. This spirit the soul of Milton gathered with full force into itself. His life was spent beyond the calm of the strictly Elizabethan age. He ripened under the conflict of its dissevered elements, adopted its progressive forces, and opened the way before them. In a reactionary hour, that brought quiet and neglect to his old age, he gave, in poetry, a rehearsal, in their grandest phase, to the same ideas that had ruled his actions.

Milton was the poet of revealed religion under its Puritanic type. The style and thought of Milton, are native to this earnest and extended insight of his mind. From the beginning he manifested the same scope and majesty. He always spread a broad wing, and floated serenely; moving at ease from peak to peak. His literary life dropped into

three periods, youth, manhood, and old age; and each, under one general impulse, fell to different and fitting tasks. The Hymn on the Nativity rightly opened his literary labors. There were gathered with this into his early life secondary poems, brief morning flights of the imagination, which serve to disclose the nature of the powers he held in reserve for the real labors of the day. These first hours of song were displaced by a long, sultry midday, in which Milton, forgetful of poetry, gave himself to the vigorous championship of ideas-ideas the most significant the world then held, the most formidable in` action, the most pregnant in theoretical and practical results, ideas that plucked at thrones and laid the foundations of commonwealths. Without regret, driven by the earnestness of his own nature, Milton turned to the conflict of argument, and called up his imagination only that it might arm and furnish forth. the truth; and send it as a thundering train of artillery to speedy conquest. The storm having passed by, a sombre, reactionary evening having set in, the heavens still cloaked with clouds, the blind warrior, finding nothing more to be done, in this hush of the senses turned again to poetry, and in the ripeness of a ripe mind took up his great labor.

An epic poem on King Arthur had been among the early dreams of Milton. From this the stern midday duties of his life had diverted him, not only diverted him, but fitted him for quite another theme. Long tossed in the most protracted, progressive and critical conflict of the century, he

naturally found himself, at its close, nerved for the narration of a more real and pungent strife than that of the thrice told tales of chivalry. His eye was directed to the earliest, highest, most germinant struggle of spirits, rebellious to the moral law; one that opened the wide chasm that divides hell from heaven, and sowed broadcast on earth the seeds of sedition. Here the full tension of his thoughts, his deep toned sentiments, found sufficient and sympathetic play. There is still preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, a dramatic sketch by Milton, on the same theme as Paradise Lost, the fall of angels and of men. This was not completed, or at least published. It seems probable that the subject may have opened unexpected vistas, and been recommitted in his mind for this later and larger presentation.

The style of Milton, not less than his depth of conviction and stirring experience, fitted him for the labor he undertook. So thoroughly possessed was he by classical scholarship, so crowded was his imagination with antique imagery, that nothing but the most overruling and dominant impulse could give to him originality, could set afloat and convoy these borrowed treasures of traffic. Under an independent and superior thought, they gave scope and grandeur to the movement, and richly furnished it out with scenic effect.

The subject of Paradise Lost is such as to render impossible a treatment satisfactory to all minds. Many would deny it any treatment, as in