, that in the latter part of his life, Milton was not a professed member of any particular sect of Christians, that he frequented no public worship, nor used any religious rite in his family. Whether so many different forms of worship as he had seen had made him indifferent to all forms; or whether he thought that all Christians had in some things corrupted the purity and simplicity of the Gospel; or whether he disliked their endless and uncharitable disputes, and that love of dominion and inclination to persecution, which he said was a piece of popery inseparable from all churches; or whether he believed that a man might be a good Christian without joining in any communion; or whether he did not look upon himself inspired, as wrapt up in God, and above all forms and ceremonies, it is not easy to determine: to his own Master he standeth or falleth: but if he was of any denomination, he was a sort of Quietist, and was full of the interior of religion, though he so little regarded the exterior.' It has been candidly and judiciously stated, in a note upon this passage, by Mr. Hawkins, to which Dr. Sumner refers, 'that the reproach which has been thrown upon Milton, of frequenting no place of public worship in his latter days, should be received, as Dr. Symmons observes, with some caution. His blindness and other infirmities might be in part his excuse; and it is certain that his daily employments were always ushered in by devout meditation and study of the Scriptures.' This observation, too, may be strengthened by Milton's expressly admitting, in the present treatise, the duty of uniting in practice external and internal worship, (B. ii. ch. 4.) though he also says, that with regard to the place of prayer, all are equally suitable,' as in his 'Paradise Lost' he makes a similar assertion (B. xi. 836)."

It is not surprising that Milton's religious character should have been thus misunderstood, and especially by Johnson. That the latter was a devout man, need not be questioned; but his religion seems to have been made up,

in no small measure, of a gloomy and temperamental fear of God; while his theological views were singularly limited and crude. In the view of Milton, religion was an intimately and intensely personal thing: with Johnson it was corporative and national. Milton's religion was, except in its expansive tendencies, a solitary spirituality: Johnson's coarsely effloresced in material and obtrusive mechanism. In the realm of conscience, freedom was with Milton a sacred passion: subservience was with Johnson a stolid fate. No wonder that Milton was misunderstood, not only by Johnson, but by numerous biographers besides. It requires some sympathy with his sentiments, to enable us to perceive that his religion was the result of Divine grace, operating on a mind inspired with the highest order of genius, and endowed with the most elaborately cultivated taste. The former would lead him to eschew the coarse materialism of the then established churches; and the latter would incline him to withdraw, though in a spirit of respectful and affectionate consideration, from a community whose unseemly management of church affairs resulted from the combination of very slender qualifications, with the most fervid religious zeal, and an intense and most natural hatred of spiritual tyranny. Such a character was too vast to be weighed in any balances available to a mind like Johnson's. He had nothing to draw with, and the well was deep. His criticisms remind us of the satire of Bishop Watson on the geologists of his day, whom he compares to a gnat on the back of an elephant, pronouncing on his interior anatomy from the it observed upon his appearances

hide.

To this I shall only add a single sentence, illustrative of Milton's views of ministerial qualifications. "Any believer," he says, "is competent to act as an ordinary minister, according as convenience may require; provided only he be endowed with the necessary gifts; these gifts constituting his mission."

Milton's last publications were given to the world in the year 1674, which terminated his career. These were entitled respectively, "Epistolarum Familiarium Liber unus,” and "Prolusiones quædam Oratoriæ in Collegio Christi habitæ," both of which have been already sufficiently noticed. In November of this year, the gout, from which he had long suffered, prevailed over the enfeebled powers of life, and he expired so peacefully that the attendants in his chamber were not aware of the precise time of his departure. On the 12th of that month, his remains were interred, beside those of his father, in a vault in Cripplegate church. The chief monumental memorials of him are a bust from the chisel of Bacon, in the same church, and a monument in Westminster Abbey, which bears the following needlessly-apologetic inscription from the pen of Dr. George, Provost of King's College, Cambridge :

Augusti regum cineres, sanctæque favillæ

Heroum! vosque O venerandi nominis umbræ!
Parcite quod vestris infensum regibus olim
Sedibus infertur nomen; liceatque supremis
Funeribus finire odia, et mors obruat iras.
Nunc sub fœderibus coëant felicibus unà
Libertas et jus sacri inviolabile sceptri.
Rege sub Augusto fas sit laudare Catonem."

"Ashes of regal and of holy fame,

Forgive the intrusion of a hostile name!
Cease human enmities with human life!
And Death, the great composer, calm your strife!
Lo! now the king's and people's rights agree:
In freedom's hand the hallow'd sceptre see!
No jealous fears alarm these happier days:
And our AUGUSTUS Smiles at CATO's praise."

The person of Milton was singularly beautiful, and his complexion especially was so fine as to give him an appearance of juvenility in middle life. His eyes were dark grey, and retained their lustre after their vision was extinguished. His hair, which was light brown, he wore parted at the top, and "clustering," as he describes that of Adam,

upon his shoulders. His person was of the middle height, not fat or corpulent, but muscular and compact. His deportment, according to his contemporary, Wood, was affable, and his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and undauntedness. His ordinary habits are described with little variation by all his biographers. In his earlier life he was fond of robust exercises, and excelled in the management of the sword, which he commonly wore by his side. When blindness and the gout, with which he was early afflicted, confined him in a great degree to his house, he contrived a swing for the purposes of exercise; and to exercise, in one form or another, as the essential preservative of health, he regularly allotted one hour in the day.* Having injured his constitution in his youth by night studies, whence immediately proceeded those pains in his head of which we have before spoken, and that weakness in his eyes which terminated in the loss of sight, he corrected this practice as he advanced in years, and retired to his bed at the early hour of nine. He rose, however, as early as four o'clock in the summer, and five in the winter. The opening of his day was uniformly consecrated to religion. A chapter of the Hebrew Scriptures being read to him as soon as he was up, he passed the subsequent interval, till seven o'clock, in private meditation. From seven till twelve o'clock he either listened while some author was read to him, or dictated, as some friendly hand supplied him with its pen. At twelve commenced his hour of exercise, which before his blindness was commonly passed in walking, and afterwards, for the most part, in the swing. His early and frugal dinner succeeded, and when it was finished, he resigned himself to the recreation of music. His voice, Richardson remarks, was delicately sweet and harmonious, and he would frequently accompany the instruments on which he played—the bass viol or the organ. From this he returned with fresh vigour to the exercise of These and the following particulars are taken from Dr. Symmons' Life of Milton.

his intellect; to his books, or his composition. At six, he admitted the visits of his friends. He ordinarily took his supper at eight, and, having smoked a pipe, retired to rest at nine o'clock. The privacy of Milton's style of life in Bunhill Fields did not seclude him from the attentions of the learned and the noble. It is even said that curiosity led the two princes, Charles and James, to pay a visit to the aged bard. The story goes, that "the Duke of York expressed one day to the king, his brother, a great desire to see old Milton, of whom he had heard so much. The king replied that he felt no objection to the duke's satisfying his curiosity: and, accordingly, soon afterwards, James went privately to Milton's house, where, after an introduction which explained to the old republican the rank of his guest, a free conversation ensued between these very dissimilar and discordant characters. In the course, however, of the conversation, the duke asked Milton whether he did not regard the loss of his eyesight as a judgment inflicted on him for what he had written against the late king. Milton's reply was to this effect :-' - If your highness thinks that the calamities which befal us here are indications of the wrath of Heaven, in what manner are we to account for the fate of the king your father? The displeasure of Heaven must, upon this supposition, have been much greater against him than against me-for I have lost only my eyes, but he lost his head.'

Richardson also informs us that he might be seen sitting before his door, in a grey coat of coarse cloth, in warm, sultry weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well as in his own room, receiving the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality: and his funeral, as Toland informs us, was attended "by all the author's great and learned friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar."

Such was Milton-a man than whom England never

Symmons' Life of Milton, pp. 377, 378.