that the passionate desire of beauty in its most ideal form was not inexperienced by the poet :

"What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads,

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest."

If another passage in "Tamburlaine":

"Still climbing after knowledge infinite,"

announced the poet's Paracelsus, does not this more distinctly announce his never-created Aprile?

THE IDEALISM OF MILTON.

THE critic who would find some single expression which resumes the tendency of each of an artist's works, or an expression which resumes the tendency of all his works taken together, is commonly engaged in falsifying the truth of criticism, and in all cases runs a risk of losing the faithfulness of sympathy, the disengagedness of intelligence, the capacity for assuming various spiritual attitudes which should belong to him. A man will not be comprehended in a formula, nor will the work of a man. But in the case of Milton, and those who resemble him in his method as an artist, this doctrinaire style of criticism is at least not illegitimate. No poem, of course, is reducible to an abstract statement or idea; yet the statement, the idea, may be the germ from which the poem has sprung. A tree glorious with all its leaves and blossoming is much more than the seed in which it lay concealed; yet from the seed, with favourable earth and skies, it grew. Milton never sang as the bird sings, with spontaneous pleasure, through an impulse unobserved and unmodified by the intellect. The intention of each poem is clearly conceived by himself; the form is elaborated with a conscious study of effects. There is in him none of the delicious imprévu of Shakspere. Milton's nature never reacted simply and directly, finding utterance in a lyrical cry,

when impressions from the world of nature or of society aroused the faculty of song. The reaction was checked, and did not find expression until he had considered his own feelings, and modified or altered them upon the suggestions of his intellect. Milton's passion is great, but deliberate, approved by his judgment, and he never repents, feeling that repentance would be a confession, not only of sin, but of extreme weakness and fatuity. He is not imaginative in the highest-in Shakspere'smanner. Each character of his masque, his drama, his epics, is an ideal character-a Miltonic abstraction incarnated. He himself is, as much as may be, an ideal personage: his life does not grow in large, vital unconsciousness, but is modelled, sometimes laboriously, after an idea. And consequently his life, like his writings, lacks the imprévu. He resolves in early youth that it shall be a great life, and he carries out his resolution unfalteringly from first to last. He tends his own genius, and observes it. He waits for its maturity, and watches. He accepts his powers as trusts from God, and will neither go beyond nor fall short of them. He is noble, but we are sometimes painfully aware that it is a nobleness prepense. He loves to imagine himself in heroic attitudes-as defender of England and of liberty, as the afflicted champion of his people, fallen on evil days. His very recreation is pre-arranged― Mild heaven ordains a time for pleasure.

*

In all this Milton was unlike Shakspere; and as the men differed, so did the times. During the brighter years of the Elizabethan period, when life-life of the Sonnet to Cyriac Skinner.

intellect, life of the imagination, religious life, life of the nation, and life of the individual-with one great bound had broken through and over the medieval dykes and dams, and was rushing onwards, somewhat turbid, somewhat violent, yet gaining a law and a majestic order from the mere weight of the advancing mass of waters— at that fortunate time to live was the chief thing, not to adopt and adhere to a theory of living.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!"

At the time when Milton reached manhood, the unity of this new life of England was broken, and there were two conspicuous theories of life, to one of which each man was compelled to attach himself; two experiments of living, of which each person must assay one; two doctrines in religion, two tendencies in politics, two systems of social conduct and of manners. The large insouciance of the earlier fashion of living was gone; everyone could tell why he was what he was.

Thus the character of the period fell in with Milton's natural tendency towards the conscious modelling of his life as a man, and of his works as an artist after certain ideals, types, abstractions. It is not a little remarkable that we have the authority and example of Milton himself for applying to his writings that criticism which looks for an intention or express purpose as the germinal centre of each, and which attempts to discover an unity in them all, resulting from the constant presence of one dominant idea. In the "Defensio Secunda" Milton looks back over his more important prose works, and he finds that they all move in a harmonious system around

From an

a central conception of liberty. An ideal of liberty was that which presided over his public life, his life in the world of action, and the books which were meant to bear upon the world of action refer to that ideal. There are three forms or species of liberty, Milton tells us, which are essential to the happiness of man as a member of society-religious liberty, domestic, civil. early period the first of these had occupied his thoughts. "What he had in view when he hesitated to become a clergyman," Professor Masson remarks, "was, in all probability, less the letter of the articles to be subscribed, and of the oaths to be taken, than the general condition of the Church at that particular time." Prelatical tyranny, and the theories by which it was justified, inspired the indignant pamphlets to write which Milton resolutely put poetry aside. Domestic liberty "involves three material questions-the conditions of the conjugal tie, the education of children, and the free publication of one's thoughts." Each of these was made a subject of distinct consideration-in "Tetrachordon" and other writings on the question of divorce, in the Letter addressed to Samuel Hartlib on education, and in the Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing. Were it one of Milton's critics, and not Milton himself, who had thus classed the "Areopagitica" amongst the treatises in defence of domestic liberty, or who had represented the letter to Hartlib as concerned with liberty in any of its forms, should we not be ready to declare that he had departed from the sincerity of criticism, and was forcing the author's works at any cost to accord with a theory

* "Defensio Secunda."