best means may be used against the growth of Popery. This ittle tract was published in 1673, and was doubtless written at that time as a contribution to a controversy again rising into interest. It is written in a calm spirit, and with none of the vehemence of his earlier polemical writings, and is interesting as showing his matured views on the subject of religious toleration. He is for the absolute toleration, both as regards doctrine and as regards worship, of all Protestant sects. -the Church of England, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arians, Socinians, &c.; but, as regards worship, he excludes Roman Catholics, partly on the civil ground that they acknowledge a foreign allegiance, partly on the theological ground that they deny the paramount authority of Scripture, which denial, and nothing else, he holds is heresy. He is not for punishing them "by corporal punishment or fines on their estates," because he supposes this "stands not with the clemency of the gospel more than what appertains to the security of the state;" but he is for suppressing their worship and removing its furniture.

5. Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus; quibus accesserunt Prolusiones quædam Oratoria. These are the "Familiar Epistles" and the "Oratorical Exercises at College," already alluded to. They were printed in 1674, the last year of Milton's life, apparently not on Milton's own motion, but as a speculation of the publisher.

6. A Brief History of Moscovia and of other less known Countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay; gathered from the writings of several eye-witnesses. This short sketch was left in manuscript, and was published eight years after Milton's death.

7. Literæ Senatus Anglicani; necnon Cromwellii, &c., nomine ac jussu conscriptæ. These are the "Letters of State" already referred to as written by Milton in his official capacity under the Commonwealth. The bookseller who published his "Familiar Letters" intended to publish these in the same volume, but was warned not to do so, and they were not edited till after Milton's death.

8. Johannis Miltoni Angli de Doctrina Christiana ex Sacris duntaxat Libris petita, Disquisitionum Libri Duo. This is the famous "Treatise on Christian Doctrine," the manuscript of which having been accidentally discovered by Mr. Lemon in 1823 in the State Paper Office, was edited and subsequently translated by the Rev. Charles R. Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester. The history of the work is as follows:- In his mature life Milton, dissatisfied with such systems of theology as he had read, and deeming it to be every man's right and duty to draw his theology for himself from the Scriptures alone, had begun to compile a system for his own use, carefully collecting texts, and aiming at doing little more than grouping and elucidating them. He continued this work till

he had finished it. Considering it of importance enough to be published, but knowing that it contained some matter which might be thought heterodox in England, he gave the manuscript, along with a transcript of his "State Letters," to a Mr. Daniel Skinner of Trinity College, Cambridge, (a relative of his friend Cyriack Skinner,) who was going over to Holland, desiring him to arrange for their publication with some Dutch printer. Elzevir, in whose hands they were placed, having declined to have anything to do with them, they were given back to Skinner, who still remained abroad. Meanwhile the existence of the MSS., and the intention to publish them, had become known to the English government; and letters were sent to Skinner from Barrow, the master of Trinity College, warning him of the risk he was running, and ordering him to return to his college under pain of expulsion. This was in 1676, or two years after Milton's death; and Skinner seems to have returned soon after, and to have delivered the MSS. to Sir Joseph Williamson, one of the secretaries of state. By him they were stowed away, with other papers, in the place where Mr. Lemon found them a hundred and fifty years afterwards, still in the original wrapper.

Besides the above, there are some other things which are supposed, on evidence more or less slight, to have come from Milton's pen in his later life; and it is known that in 1661 he edited a manuscript of Raleigh's entitled Aphorisms of State. (He had previously, in 1658, edited another MS. of Raleigh's entitled The Cabinet Council.) In addition to all this, he had collected a considerable quantity of materials towards a dictionary of the Latin language, the papers containing which fell into the hands of Edward Philips, who is supposed to have used them in compiling the Cambridge Dictionary of 1693. How he managed in his blindness to go through so much labor of mere reading and accumulation, is explained partly by what Philips tells us of his methods. The severe use which he made of his two younger daughters, till at last they would bear it no longer, and detested the very sight of him and his books, has already been mentioned.

There were others, however, who, both while his daughters lived with him and after they went away, were but too glad to serve the scholarly and exacting old Lear. "He had daily about him," says Philips, "one or other to read, some, persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, that they might as well reap the benefit of what they read to him as oblige him by the benefit of their reading; others, of younger years, who were sent by their parents to the same end." One of his readers, recommended to him by Dr. Paget, was a young Quaker named Ellwood.

Milton's later prose writings, however, derive most of their interest from the fact that they belong to the same period as his later poems. It was not to them, nor even to the much more splendid polemical writings which had preceded them, that Milton could point as the fulfilment of his early pledge, that if God gave him strength, he would leave behind him some worthy work of Christian genius in which Britain should exult as a national possession, and which posterity would not willingly let die. Often as, amid the turmoil of his middle life, this pledge had recurred to him, how he must have sighed over the work that was then occupying him, and felt it all to be very sickening, and longed for a sabbath at the end of his life, when his soul might sail again into the haven of a majestic calm! After all, controversy was but the work of his "left hand," and he longed for the time when his right hand should again have its turn, and he could rejoice in the renewed sensations of its superior strength and more natural cunning. His sonnets and other stray pieces of verse written during the civil wars and the Com

monwealth, and perhaps also those occasional passages of lyric grandeur in his prose writings where he seems to be spurning prose underfoot, and almost rising for the moment on poetic wings, may be regarded as so many brief efforts whereby he assured himself, while his higher and finer faculty was in abeyance, that he had not lost it. It was not till towards the end of Cromwell's protectorate, however, and when already he had for several years been blind, that he was able to begin an undertaking commensurate with his lifelong aspiration. According to Aubrey, it was then (1658), when it appeared as if, under the settled rule of Cromwell, the nation was entering on a long period of peace and leisure, that the Paradise Lost was begun. Whether it was then begun in the actual shape in which we now have it, or whether Milton was at this time only turning over the subject in his mind, and ruminating it in that form of a sacred mystery or drama in which we find it first rudely sketched in the Cambridge manuscripts, can hardly be ascertained. Cromwell was not to live long enough to initiate by his great and peaceful rule that new literature, signs of the rise of which were not wanting towards the close of his protectorate. When the new literature did arise, it was in the guise of the literature of the Restoration; and whatever progress Milton may have made in his great poem before the accession of Charles II., the bulk of it was written after that monarch was on the throne.

The facts respecting Paradise Lost, and the other later poems of Milton, will be best presented in a table of his later poetical publications, supplementary to that of his later prose writings already given:

1. Paradise Lost. This poem was certainly complete by the 27th of April 1667, (Milton ætat. 58,) on which day it was sold to Samuel Simmons, bookseller, for £5 down, with a promise of £5 more when 1300 copies of the first edition should have been sold, another £5 more when 1300 copies of the second edition should have been sold, and so on for successive editions, -each edition to consist of 1500 copjes. According to Ellwood, however, the poem must have been ready more than a year before that time; for he says that on visiting Milton while he was at Chalfont in Buckinghamshire (1665-6), he gave him the complete manuscript of the poem to read. As originally published, the poem consisted of ten books, and was sold at three shillings per copy. The stipulated 1300 copies must have been sold before the 26th of April 1669, on which day Milton signs a receipt for the second £5. This was a very good sale in two years; but the remaining copies do not seem to have gone off so fast, as it was not till 1674, or the year of Milton's death, that a second edition was published. In this second edition the ten books were converted into twelve, by a division of the seventh and tenth; and there were some other alterations. A third edition was called for in 1678; and in December 1680 Milton's widow parted with all her interest in the work for one sum of £8, paid to her by Simmons.

2. Paradise Regained. When Ellwood returned the manuscript of Paradise Lost to Milton, they had some talk, he says, as to the merits of the poem, in the course of which Ellwood ventured pleasantly to say to him, "Thou hast said much here of paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of paradise found? To this, he says, Milton made no answer, but fell into a muse, and broke off the discourse. When, however, some time after the sickness was over, Ellwood revisited Milton in London, he showed him Paradise Regained, saying, "This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of." Assuming this to be literally accurate, we should have to suppose Paradise Regained finished in 1667, if not earlier; but it was not published till 1671 (Milton ætat. 62), on which occasion it was issued, not by Simmons, but by another bookseller, in the same volume with Samson Agonistes.

3. Samson Agonistes, a Dramatic Poem, published as above, 1671.

4. A second edition of his minor poems was published in 1673, the year before his death, containing the pieces which had appeared in the edition of 1645, with some additions.

At this point it is that the fact of the interposition of a middle period of prose polemics be