attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments; and could no more represent, by their siender conceits and labored particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he who dissects the sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon. What they wanted, however, of the sublime, they endeavored to supply by hyperbole; their amplification had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused magnificence that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined."

Yet a happy trifle was now and then hit upon. At rare intervals nature seems to have broken through the casing of artificiality. Francis Quarles gives forcible poetic expansion to Job's prayer, "Oh that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past."

"Ah, whither shall I fly? What path untrod

Shall I seek out to escape the flaming rod

Of my offended, of my angry God?"

There is a light, careless spontaneity about the little song of Herrick's beginning,

"Gather the rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a flying;

And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying."

JOHN MILTON.

IN the period under consideration, Milton stands out in solitary grandeur. Intimately associated with the political and religious movements of his time, and identified in principle and in life with the Puritan party, he still rises grandly above the narrowness of his age. In one work at least he rivals the great achievements of the age of Elizabeth. He deserves to be recognized as the sublimest poet of all times. The far-fetched conceit of Dryden, whose genuine appreciation of Milton at a time when the Puritan poet was not in fashion is much to his credit, hardly surpasses the truth:

"Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go:

To make a third, she joined the other two."

John Milton was born in London, Dec. 9, 1608. His father, a man of the highest integrity, had been disinherited for espousing the Protestant cause; but, taking up the profession of a scrivener, he acquired the means of giving his son a liberal education. His mother, a woman of most virtuous character, was especially distinguished for her neighborhood charities. The private tutor of Milton was Thomas Young, a Puritan minister, who was afterwards forced to leave the kingdom on account of his religious opinions. Milton showed extraordinary aptness in learning; and when in 1624 he was sent to Cambridge, he was master of several languages, and had read

extensively in philosophy and literature. He remained at the university seven years, and took the usual degrees.

The education of his time did not, however, meet with his approval, and in several of his works he has criticised the subjects and methods of study with astonishing independence and wisdom. His educational writings deservedly rank him as one of the notable educational reformers of modern times. "And for the usual method of teaching arts," he says, “I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that, instead of beginning with arts most easy (and those be such as are most obvious to the senses), they present their young, unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics; so that they, having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows, where they stuck unreasonably long to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate, to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet depths of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected delightful and worthy knowledge."

Milton was designed by his parents for the church. But as he approached maturity, he perceived that his religious convictions and ecclesiastical independence would not allow him to enter the Established Church. We here see, perhaps, the effects of his Puritan training. Speaking of this matter he says: "Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience that he would relish, he must either perjure or split his faith, I thought better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing."

In 1632 he left the university amidst the regrets of the fellows of his college, and retired to his father's house at Horton