The lines referred to in page 194 are as follows:

MILTON'S LAMENT ON HIS BLINDNESS.

I am old and blind!

Men point at me as smitten by God's frown,
Afflicted and deserted of my kind;

Yet I am not cast down.

I am weak, yet strong;

I murmur not that I no longer see:
Poor, old, and helpless, I the more belong,
Father Supreme! to Thee.

O, Merciful One!

When men are farthest, then Thou art most near;
When friends pass by my weaknesses to shun,
Thy chariots I hear.

Trembling where foot of mortal ne'er hath been,
Wrapped in the radiance of Thy sinless land,

Which eye hath never seen.

Visions come and go;

Shapes of resplendent beauty round me throng;

From angel lips I seem to hear the flow

Of soft and holy song.

It is nothing now,

When heaven is opening on my sightless eyes,
When airs from Paradise refresh my brow,
That earth in darkness lies.

MILTON ON HIS BLINDNESS.

In a purer clime,

My being thrills with rapture; waves of thought
Roll in upon my spirit-strains sublime

Break over me unsought.

Give me now my lyre:

I feel the stirrings of a gift divine;
Within my bosom glows unearthly fire,

Lit by no skill of mine.

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The reader should likewise compare Milton's sonnets and his letter on the loss of his sight, addressed to Leonard Philara, with the passage quoted from the Secunda Defensio. The concluding sentences of the letter are as follows::"Though your physician may kindle a small ray of hope, yet I make up my mind to the malady as quite incurable; and I often reflect, that, as the wise man admonishes, days of darkness are destined to each of us, the darkness which I experience, less oppressive than that of the tomb, is owing to the singular goodness of the Deity, passed amid the pursuits of literature and the cheering salutations of friendship. But if, as it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, why may not any one acquiesce in the privation of his sight, when God has so amply furnished his mind and his conscience with eyes? While He so tenderly provides for me, while He so graciously leads me by the hand and conducts me on the way, I will, since it is His pleasure, rather rejoice than repine at being blind. And, my dear Philara, whatever may be the event, I wish you adieu with no less courage and composure than if I had the eyes of a lynx."

[IT has been already mentioned that Milton had at an early period turned his attention to our legendary and semi-mythical history. He at first intended to make King Arthur the hero of his epic. Spenser's Faerie Queene had shown how well adapted the theme was for poetical treatment, and still left it open to succeeding poets. Dryden, like Milton, projected an Arthurian epic, which he left unaccomplished. Blackmore attempted it, and failed from sheer dullness and stupidity. Southey, in his Prince Madoc, can hardly be said to have succeeded, even by his warmest admirers. Tennyson, either from want of the constructive skill and sustained power requisite for the production of a complete epic, or because this is an age which will neither buy nor read one, seems to have abandoned the design, and is giving us in his Morte d' Arthur, and the Idylls of the King, the beautiful fragments of a noble poem, architectural in plan, of which Arthur is the hero. It is probable that Milton, having abandoned the design of doing for our early history, "what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy did for their country," resolved to utilize his studies into our early legends, by writing them in an historical, instead of a poetical form. He commenced its composition immediately on the completion of his controversies on Divorce, and before the year 1649 had finished four books of the history. The execution of the king compelled him to leave the work at this point, and again, though reluctantly, to engage in angry polemics. In the year 1670 he corrected the whole, added several paragraphs in different parts, and wrote two more books, so as to bring the narrative down to the Norman Conquest. The licenser struck out the passages which

* Commenced prior to 1649, completed and published in 1670.

THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN.

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applied the lessons of ancient history to contemporary events, and in this garbled form it was published. The parts thus cancelled were subsequently restored in the edition of 1738. We quote the most important of them.

In the introduction to the first Book he admits, that "from the first peopling of the island to the coming of Julius Cæsar, nothing certain, either by tradition, history, or ancient fame, hath hitherto been left us. That which we have of oldest seeming hath, by the greater part of judicious antiquaries, been long rejected for a modern fable." He resolves, however, to write these old-world legends, for the following reasons:

"Nevertheless, there being others, men not unread, nor unlearned in antiquity, who admit that for approved story, which the former explode for fiction; and seeing that ofttimes relations heretofore accounted fabulous have been after found to contain in them many footsteps and relics of something true, as what we read in poets of the flood, and giants little believed, till undoubted witnesses taught us that all was not feigned; I have therefore determined to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales; be it for nothing else but in favour of our English poets and rhetoricians, who by their art will know how to use them judiciously."

In carrying out this purpose, he ransacks Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other chroniclers, for the contents of the first Book, at the conclusion of which he says: "By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes."

The second Book, beginning with the arrival of Julius Cæsar, carries the history forward to the departure of the Romans, thus covering the whole period of the Roman occupation of Britain. It closes with these characteristic sentences, marking the transition from the Greek and Latin writers, who had hitherto been his authorities, to the dull and unveracious Monkish chroniclers :

"Henceforth we are to steer by another sort of authors, near enough to the things they write, as in their own country (if that would serve them) in time not much belated, but to say how judicious I suspend a while. This we must expect, in civil matters to find them dubious relaters, and still to the advantage of what they term Holy Church, meaning themselves indeed; in most other matters of religion blind, astonished, and struck with superstition,-in one word, MONKS."

The exordium to the third Book consists of the remarkable digression in which he considers the causes of failure in the Commonwealth,

and deduces from historical examples the truth he so constantly insists upon in all his writings, that only a virtuous people can be free. In the subsequent Books, in which he traces the history and downfall of the Saxon kingdom, he is never weary of enforcing the same great truth, and concludes by a solemn, almost prophetic, appeal to his country to learn the lesson ere it be too late.]

THE HERO NEEDS THE HISTORIAN OR THE POET.

FOR worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters as by a certain fate, great acts and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honouring each other in the same ages. It is true, that in obscurest times, by shallow and unskilful writers, the indistinct noise of many battles, and devastations of many kingdoms overrun and lost, hath come to our ears. For what wonder, if in all ages ambition and the love of rapine hath stirred up greedy and violent men to bold attempts in wasting and ruinous wars, which to posterity have left the work of wild beasts and destroyers, rather than the deeds and monuments of men and conquerors? But he whose just and true valour uses the necessity of war and dominion not to destroy, but to prevent destruction, to bring in liberty against tyrants, law and civility among barbarous nations, knowing that when he conquers all things else, he cannot conquer Time or Detraction, wisely conscious of this his want, as well as of his worth not to be forgotten or concealed, honours and hath recourse to the aid of eloquence, his friendliest and best supply; by whose immortal record his noble deeds, which else were transitory, become fixed and durable against the force of years and generations, he fails not to continue through all posterity, over Envy, Death, and Time also victorious. Therefore when the esteem of science and liberal study waxes low in the common wealth, we may presume that also there all civil virtue and worthy action is grown as low to a decline: and then eloquence as it were consorted in the same destiny, with the decrease and fall of virtue, corrupts also and fades; at least resigns her office of