sence of God, elect men, and angels in eternity." But this was little: he declared all quakers, and Behmenists, and numbers of other people damned and cursed for ever.
This repulsive apostle of perdition was tried at the Old Bailey, and convicted of blasphemy, in 1676, and died in 1697, at the age of eighty-eight.
But amid the muddy and gross fermentation of the public mind in those times on the subject of religion, the pure spirit was thus clearing itself; and from these impromising elements the great principles of religions truth and freedom elevated themselves, and have grown in our time into that splendid development of Christian knowledge and Christian tolerance which now distinguish the religious public in all its varieties in this country beyond almost any other.
SCIENCE, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS.
"We have seen with what a desolating sweep the bloody conflicts of the parliament against the encroachments of kingship prostrated the pursuits of literature and art. We might have expected that the return to established tranquillity under restored monarchy would have caused a now spring of genius. But monarchy came back drenched and dripping with the foetid stews of the continent; and the vile spirit and loathsome sensuality of the court rapidly infected the regions of literature. In no reign in this country, and in no country except France, have debauchery and the most hideous grossness so defiled the productions of poetry and the drama. Scarcely now could the rudest costermonger or the basest haunter of the most unclean retreats of infamy use the filthy language which then passed current in the palace, and was nightly uttered on the stage by the lips of the most beautiful young women. It was at this period that women were first introduced to enact feminine characters in the theatres; and it was a prurient attraction to those places to hear young and reputedly virtuous women uttering the grossest indecencies.
Amid the satyr crew of degraded men and women who then represented the literary world of England, some few, however, maintained a pure and dignified career. At the head of these, equally exalted above the rest by genius and purity of life and morals stood John Milton, our great epic poet, and one of the greatest, if not the greatest that the world has produced. Neither Virgil nor Dante can be compared with him; and Homer himself, surrounded as he is by all the solemn grandeur of an ancient fame, and nobly as he stands amid the magnificent shadows of his heroic world, fails when his subject is measured with that of Milton—the contest of heaven and hell for the possession of the world and the destinies of the whole human race. Compared with this—
Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us—
what is
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered?
How poor is the invocation of the ancient Greek—
Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour
Sprung the Fierce strife; from what offended power?
when placed side by side with that of the blind Tyresas of modern times—
Sing, heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heav'ns and earth
Rose out of chaos! Or, if Sion lull
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook, that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things attempted yet in prose or rhyme.And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th' upright height and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like, sat'st brooding on the vast abyss.
And mad'st it pregnant. What in me is dark,
Iliumine; what is low, raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men
That is a stupendous topic to dare, a prayer of infinite import to address to the infinite Creator; and to say that the poet rose, in the execution of his theme, to the full "height of that great argument," is, in fact, to place him far beyond any other genius which has yet visited this earth. In the words of a modern poet, his task led him to
tread on shadowy ground, to sink
Deep; and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength, all terror, single or in bands.
That ever was put forth in personal form—
Jehovah, with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones—
To pass them unalarmed.
Heaven, chaos, and the lowest pit of Erebus, the awful presence of the Supreme, of the Messiah, and the august princedoms of eternity; the mighty antagonist power of evil, and all the hosts of the damned—these were the regions and the personages that in this most daring scheme he proposed to exhibit in all their sublime or terrible aspect to the gaze of men. And this he has nobly accomplished. The splendour of imagination, the dignified strength and beauty of diction with which he had clothed "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," astonished even those who had seen the stately eloquence with which during the commonwealth he had defended the deeds and principles of its most daring leaders. He had found no mind capable of contending with his in the great warfare of politics, and now there stood no name equal with his in the realms of poetry except Shakespeare, who in every department of the art displayed wondrous and felicitous power. It may be safely asserted, however, that if Shakspeare surpassed him in fervour of dramatic passion, in the infinite variety of character which he seemed to create at will, in rhythmical harmony of lyric measures, and wondrous ease and grace of wit and repartee, or in touches of sententious wisdom and flashes of humour which irradiated all around him, even Shakspeare could not approach those sacred and sublime heights of every real vision and massive eloquence amid which Milton moved with all the majesty of an archangel.
It is only when we compare the strains of "Paradise Lost" with those of any other great poet, that we become
