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beautiful and romantic estate of Hawthornden, in the vicinity of Edinburgh, which is still visited with interest as the favourite haunt of one of Scotland's sweetest poets, and where he entertained Ben Jonson, and others of his most distinguished contemporaries. The death of a lady, remarkable no less for her beauty than for rare mental accomplishments, just when the day for her wedding the poet had been fixed, proved a bitter trial to him, and has given a pathetic and mournful cast to much of his verse. He sought relief from this despondency in change of scene, and spent eight years travelling on the continent. During his travels he made a valuable collection of books and manuscripts in various languages, which he afterwards presented to the University of Edinburgh. He was a man of great and varied learning, and his poetry abounds with vigorous thought, as well as graceful and pleasing fancy. His sonnets are peculiarly beautiful, and may stand comparison with those of any other poet who has woven his thoughts into the same artificial, yet most graceful constraints.

The poets of this period are singularly mixed up with its political changes. Drummond was a keen, and, indeed, a bigoted royalist. HERRICK and KING, as clergymen, were deprived of their livings during the Commonwealth, and restored to them by Charles II. FRANCIS QUARLES, the author of the "Divine Emblems," had his property sequestrated, and his books burned, by order of the Parliament, in consequence of publishing a book entitled the "Loyal Convert." RICHARD CRASHAW lost his fellowship at Peter House, Cambridge, and was driven into exile in 1644, for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant. SHIRLEY, the dramatist, found "his occupation gone," when in 1642 the Long Parliament prohibited all

performance of plays, and he was compelled to betake himself to the occupation of a schoolmaster. EDMUND WALLER figures still more, though with less credit to himself, as a sharer in the political changes of the day. So well did he trim his sails to suit the changes of the times, that Charles II., while accepting graciously his congratulatory address on his happy restoration, could not miss the opportunity of reminding him that his panegyric on Cromwell had been a finer poem. The courtly poet, however, was a match for the witty monarch, and replied with ingenious effrontery, "Poets, sire, succeed better in fiction than in truth!" But the poet of the seventeenth century, great as a politician, and as a distinguished statesman of the Commonwealth of England, and as a poet equalled by few indeed of the noblest of all ages, is the author of the "Paradise Lost."

JOHN MILTON.

BORN, 1608; DIED, 1674.

THE name of Milton is one of which England may well be proud, as that of one of her worthiest sons. Even had he written no single line of poetry, his noble and disinterested labours in the cause of liberty would suffice to establish his claims to the gratitude of all times. The stern gravity of his great poem was in perfect consistency with his own character. His father was of an ancient Roman Catholic family, and had been disinherited for adopting the Protestant faith. His upright independence was proved by holding fast to the true faith, which he had adopted at such sacrifice, and finding for himself an

honest maintenance as a copier of legal documents, or a scrivener, as it was then called. He was not only fond of music, but a composer of undoubted excellence. We perceive, therefore, how much the tastes as well as principles of his greatly gifted son were formed under the influence of this worthy father. This was still further strengthened by the selection, for his tutor, of Thomas Young, a Puritan clergyman, under whose efficient care he remained till he was sent to St. Paul's School, at the age of fifteen. From thence he passed to Christ's College, Cambridge, two years after, and he has left sufficient evidence that he fully availed himself of all the advantages thus placed in his power for the ample gratification of a thirst for knowledge. Before leaving college, he composed his beautiful "Hymn to the Nativity," and during the succeeding five years which he passed under his father's roof at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, he wrote his "Comus," "Lycidas," "L'Allegro," and "Il Penseroso"-poems abounding in beauties of the very highest order, and amply sufficient of themselves to have secured for him an enduring place among the great poets of his country. On the death of his mother, in 1637, he left England and travelled for fifteen months in France, Switzerland, and Italy, receiving everywhere the honours already accorded to his growing fame. At Paris he was introduced to Grotius, who was residing in the French capital as ambassador from the Queen of Sweden; and at Rome he obtained access to the great Galileo, in the prison of the Inquisition—a sight well calculated to give new force to all his detestation of spiritual thraldom and priestly intolerance. Nor did he conceal his opinions, although he thereby gave such offence to the Jesuits of Rome as exposed him to some danger from their malice.

The important political events transpiring in England, when Charles I. formed the rash purpose of forcing the religious system and ritual of Laud on the Scottish nation, induced Milton to return home. He had been designed by his father for the church, and it was afterwards desired that he should devote himself to the study of the law; but to both of these he had insurmountable objections, and he now established himself as a classical teacher in London. While pursuing the duties of this new vocation, he was not inattentive to the great political events which were transpiring, and in 1641 he commenced his remarkable series of political writings, by the publication of his celebrated work, entitled, "Of Reformation touching Church Government in England, and the Causes that have hitherto hindered it." His object has been well stated by a modern critic to have been "the attainment of civil liberty, tempered and cemented by the principles of religion. He had no party but his country, and his creed was Christianity." Many good men have differed from some of the opinions which he advanced with earnest fearlessness in the powerful writings with which he followed up this first blow in the cause of freedom; but the grand and essential points which he aimed to secure, are those which have since been recognised by his countrymen as the very elements of liberty's vitality—the full exercise of private judgment, freedom of thought, and an unfettered press. The effect which his writings produced was prodigious. He stirred up the heart of the nation like the sound of the trumpet to men in battle array, and largely aided in promoting that great cause of liberty of which we now reap the best fruits.

In the crisis of the revolution which followed, Milton

did not shrink from the largest responsibility. On the execution of Charles I. he published a remarkable tract on the nature of the "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," in which he maintained the lawfulness of calling a wicked king to account, and punishing him for his evil deeds. He had engaged in the preparation of a history of England, and had made some progress with it when he was appointed by Oliver Cromwell as his Latin secretary. While filling this important office, Milton wrote his famous "Defence of the People of England," as well as other of his most celebrated political writings. He also composed the noble letters by which the majesty of England's Commonwealth arrested the persecution of the Waldensian Christians.

On the restoration of Charles II., Milton's "Defence of the People of England" was burnt by the common hangman, and he narrowly escaped the mean vengeance of the triumphant royalists. But though blind, old, and now straitened in circumstances, Milton was the same lionhearted man that he had been when his own party was triumphant, and fortune filled his sails. He refused to accept of any employment under the new government. Undaunted by poverty and blindness, he commenced that great work which he trusted "posterity would not willingly let die," and finished in five years the "Paradise Lost," justly pronounced by Dryden to be one of the

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greatest, most noble, and sublime poems which any nation has produced." Notwithstanding the temper of the times, the nation was not insensible to the value of this great work, and when we consider that, in addition to the unpopularity of its author with all the most wealthy and influential men of the era of the Restoration, and the unattractive aspect of a long and elaborate poem

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