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which we call reason, we disdain to allow them that perfection, and attribute it only to a natural instinct and are not we fools too by the same kind of instinct? If we could but learn to number our days (as we are taught to pray that we might), we should adjust much better our other accounts; but, whilst we never consider an end of them, it is no wonder if our cares for them be without end, too. Horace advises very wisely, and in excellent good words:

"Spatio brevi

Spem longam reseces,"

from a short life cut off all hopes that grow too long. They must be pruned away, like suckers, that choke the mother plant, and hinder it from bearing fruit. And in another place, to the same

sense:

"Vitæ summa tievis spem nos vetat inchoare longam;" which Seneca does not mend when he says, "Oh! quanta dementia est spes longas inchoantium!" but he gives an example there of an acquaintance of his, named Senecio, who, from a very mean beginning, by great industry in turning about of money through all ways of gain, had attained to extraordinary riches, but died on a sudden after having supped merrily, "In ipso actu bene cedentium rerum, in ipso procurrentis fortunæ impetu," in the full course of his good fortune, when she had a high tide, and a stiff gale, and all her sails on; upon which occasion he cries out of Virgil:

"Infere nunc, Melibee, pyros; pone ordine vites!" Go, Melibæus, now,

Go graff thy orchards, and thy vineyards plant;
Behold the fruit !

For this Senecio I have no compassion, because he was taken, as we say, in ipso facto, still labouring in the work of avarice; but the poor rich man in St Luke (whose case was not like this) I could pity, methinks, if the Scripture would permit me; for he seems to have been satisfied at last, he confesses he had enough for many years, he bids his soul take its ease; and yet, for all that, God says to him, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; and the things thou hast laid up, who shall they belong to " Where shall we find the causes of this bitter reproach and terrible judgment? We may find, I think, two; and God, perhaps, saw more. First, that he did not intend true rest to his soul, but only to change the employments of it from avarice to luxury; his design is, to eat and to drink, and to be merry. Secondly, that he went on too long before he thought of resting; the fulness of his old barns had not sufficed him, he would stay till he was forced to build new ones; and God meted out to him in the same measure; since he would have

* Luke xii. 20.

more riches than his life could contain, God destroyed his life, and gave the fruits of it to another.

Thus God takes away sometimes the man from his riches, and no less frequently riches from the man: what hope can there be of such a marriage, where both parties are so fickle and uncertain? by what bonds can such a couple be kept long together?

OF MYSELF.

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to write thing of disparagement, and the reader's ears to of himself; it grates his own heart to say anyhear anything of praise from him. There is no danger from me in offending him in this kind; neither my mind, nor my body, nor my fortune allow me any materials for that vanity. It is sufficient for my own contentment, that they have preserved me from being scandalous, or remarkable on the defective side. But, besides that, I shall here speak of myself, only in relation to the subject of these precedent discourses, and shall be likelier thereby to fall into the contempt, than rise up to the estimation, of most people.

As far as my memory can return back into my past life, before I knew, or was capable of guess. ing, what the world, or the glories or business of it, were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves, and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running about on holidays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them, and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or with some one companion, if I could find any of the same temper. I was then, too, so much an enemy to all constraint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any persuasions or encouragements, to learn without book the common rules of grammar; in which they dispensed with me alone, because they found I made a shift to do the usual exercise out of my own reading and observation. That I was then of the same mind as I am now (which, I confess, I wonder at myself) may appear by the latter end of an ode, which I made when I was but thirteen years old, and which was then printed with many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish; but of this part, which I here set down (if a very little were corrected), I should hardly now be much ashamed.

"This is commonly said, but against all experience. A man of worth and name is never so sure to please, as when he writes of himself with good faith, and without affectation. Fience our delight in those parts of Horace's, Boileau's, and Pope's works, in which those eminent writers paint themselves; and hence the supreme charm of Cowley's Essays, more especially of this essay."-Bishop Hurd.

9.

This only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honour I would have,

Not from great deeds, but good alone;
The unknown are better, than ill known:

Rumour can ope the grave.

Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends Not on the number, but the choice of friends.

10.

Books should, not business, entertain the light,
And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night.
My house a cottage more

Than palace; and should fitting be
For all my use, no luxury.

My garden painted o'er

With nature's hand, not art's; and pleasures yield, Horace might envy in his Sabine field.

11.

Thus would I double my life's fading space;
For he, that runs it well, twice runs his race.
And in this true delight,

These unbought sports, this happy state,
I would not fear, nor wish, my fate;

But boldly say each night,

To-morrow let my sun his beams display, Or, in clouds hide them; I have lived, to-day. You may see by it, I was even then acquainted with the poets (for the conclusion is taken out of Horace); and perhaps it was the immature and immoderate love of them, which stamped first, or rather engraved, these characters in me: they were like letters cut into the bark of a young tree, which with the tree still grow proportionably. But, how this love came to be produced in me so early, is a hard question: I believe, I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse, as have never since left ringing there: for I remember, when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works: this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); and, by degrees, with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers: so that, I think, I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made a eunuch.

With these affections of mind, and my heart wholly set upon letters, I went to the university; but was soon torn from thence by that violent public storm, which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedars to me the hyssop. Yet, I had as good fortune as could have befallen me in such a tempest; for I was cast by it into the family of one of the best persons, and into the court of one of the best princesses, of the world. Now, though I was here engaged in

ways most contrary to the original design of my life, that is, into much company, and no small business, and into a daily sight of greatness, both militant and triumphant (for that was the state then of the English and French courts); yet all this was so far from altering my opinion, that it only added the confirmation of reason to that which was before but natural inclination. I saw plainly all the paint of that kind of life, the nearer I came to it; and that beauty, which I did not fall in love with, when, for aught I knew, it was real, was not like to bewitch or entice me, when I saw that it was adulterate. I met with several great persons, whom I liked very well; but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired, no more than I would be glad or content to be in a storm, though I saw many ships which rode safely and bravely in it: a storm would not agree with my stomach, if it did with my courage. Though I was in a crowd of as good company as could be found anywhere, though I was in business of great and honourable trust, though I ate at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and public distresses; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old school boy's wish, in a copy of verses to the same effect:

Well then; I now do plainly see

This busy world and I shall ne'er agree, etc. And I never then proposed to myself any other advantage from his Majesty's happy Restoration, but the getting into some moderately convenient retreat in the country; which I thought, in that case, I might easily have compassed, as well as some others, who with no greater probabilities or pretences, have arrived to extraordinary foragainst myself; and I think Apollo inspired me tune: but I had before written a shrewd prophecy in the truth, though not in the elegance, of it:

"Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar.
Content thyself with the small barren praise,

Which neglected verse does raise."
She spake; and all my years to come
Took their unlucky doom.

Their several ways of life let others choose,
Their several pleasures let them use;
But I was born for Love, and for a Muse.

4.

With Fate what boots it to contend?
Such I began, such am, and so must end.
The star that did my being frame,
Was but a lambent flame,
And some small light it did dispense.
But neither heat nor influence.

No matter, Cowley; let proud Fortune see,
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee
Let all her gifts the portion be

Of folly, lust, and flattery,

Fraud, extortion, calumny, Murder, infidelity, Rebellion and hypocrisy.

Do thou nor grieve nor blush to be,
As all th' inspired tuneful men,

And all thy great forefathers were, from Homer down to Ben.*

However, by the failing of the forces which I had expected, I did not quit the design which I had resolved on; I cast myself into it a corps perdu, without making capitulations, or taking counsel of fortune. But God laughs at a man who says to his soul, "Take thy ease:" I met presently not only with many little encumbrances and impediments, but with so much sickness (a new misfortune to me) as would have spoiled the happiness of an emperor as well as mine: yet I do neither repent, nor alter my course. "Non ego perfidum dixi sacramentum;" nothing shall separate me from a mistress, which I have loved so long, and have now at last married; though she neither has brought me a rich portion, nor lived yet so quietly with me as I hoped from

her:

"Nec vos, dulcissima mundi

Nomina, vos Musa, Libertas, Otia, Libri,
Hortique Sylvæque, anima remanente, relinquam."
Nor by me e'er shall you,

You, of all names the sweetest, and the best,
You, Muses, books, and liberty, and rest;
You, gardens, fields, and woods, forsaken be,
As long as life itself forsakes not me.

A CRISIS.+

I have often observed (with all submission and resignation of spirit to the inscrutable mysteries of Eternal Providence) that, when the fulness and maturity of time is come, that produces the great confusions and changes in the world, it usually pleases God to make it appear, by the manner of them, that they are not the effects of human force or policy, but of the Divine justice and predestination; and, though we see a man, like that which we call Jack of the clock-house, striking, as it were, the hour of that fulness of time, yet our reason must needs be convinced, that his hand is moved by some secret, and, to us who stand without, invisible direction. And the stream of the current is then so violent that the strongest men in the world cannot draw up against it; and none are so weak but they may sail down with it. These are the spring-tides of public affairs which we see often happen, but seek in vain to discover any certain causes: "Omnia fluminis

Ritu feruntur, nunc medio alveo

• Pindaric Odes: Destiny.

From "A Discourse, by way of Vision, concernIng the Government of Oliver Cromwell," generally thought to be Cowley's most successful effort in prose. ✰ Cowley inserts "omnia" for the "cætera" of Horace.

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And one man then, by maliciously opening all the sluices that he can come at, can never be the sole author of all this (though he may be as guilty as if really he were, by intending and imagining to be so); but it is God that breaks up the flood-gates of so general a deluge, and all the art then, and industry of mankind, is not sufficient to raise up dykes and ramparts against it. In such a time, it was, as this, that not all the wisdom and power of the Roman senate, nor the wit and eloquence of Cicero, nor the courage and virtue of Brutus, was able to defend their country, or themselves, against the inexperienced rashness of a beardless boy, and the loose rage of a voluptuous madman.* The valour and prudent counsels, on the one side, are made fruitless, and the errors and cowardice, on the other, harmless by unexpected accidents. The one general saves his life, and gains the whole world, by a very dream; and the other loses both at once by a little mistake of the shortness of his sight. And though this be not always so, for we see that, in the translation of the great monarchies from one to another, it pleased God to make choice of the most eminent men in nature, as Cyrus, Alexander, Scipio, and his contemporaries, for His chief instruments and actors, in so admirable a work (the end of this being not only to destroy or punish one nation, which may be done by the worst of mankind, but to exalt and bless another, which is only to be effected by great and virtuous persons); yet, when God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people, He does not raise up His servant Cyrus (as He himself is pleased to call him), or an Alexander (who had as many virtues to do good as vices to do harm); but He makes the Masaniellos, and the Johns of Leyden, the instruments of His vengeance, that the power of the Almighty might be more evident by the weakness of the means which He chooses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents, and the monsters of Afric, to correct the pride of the Egyptians; but called for His armies of locusts out of Æthiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust; and, because you see a whole country destroyed by these, will you argue from thence they must needs have had both the craft of foxes, and the courage of lions?

* Octavius and Antony.

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JOHN MILTON.*

BORN 1608: DIED 1674.

(From "Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.")

LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.

I DENY not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless waryness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the

* Professor Masson has well said, that "Milton's 'Areopagitica' is certainly that one of his writings which answers best continuously to our modern idea of an Essay." Though given to the world in the form of a speech, it may well yield material which, in richness

and rounded completeness, may take a lofty place

beside the efforts of our greatest writers in this direction.

Macaulay's characterisation of Milton's prose writings is well known. "They abound with passages, compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the 'Paradise Lost' has he ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by con

flict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, 'a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."" In spite of this high commendation, William Minto, in his "Manual of English Prose Literature," with his usual caution and judgment, says: "Much that he wrote is for the student of composition unprofitable reading; the finer passages are useful mainly to the student of elaborate poetical prose, and he should not resort to them till he is master of the best that has been done in that depart ment within the present century."

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living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself slays an immortality rather than a life. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve, in many respects, to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As, therefore, the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in

with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read. . . . If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress, foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did He create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may, for a time, be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so; such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means, look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike. This justifies the high providence of God, who though He command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigour contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth?

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I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt it causes, in being first the

greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning and to learned men. It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every least breath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more equally Church revenues, that then all learning would be for ever dashed and discouraged. But as for that opinion, I never found cause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell with the clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy speech of any churchman who had a competency left him. If therefore ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end, but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind, then know, that so far to distrust the judgment and the honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and examiner, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption, is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him. What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only scaped the ferule, to come under the fescue of an imprimatur? if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporising and extemporising licenser. He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself reputed in the commonwealth wherein he was born, for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that wrote before him; if in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings, and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing, and if he be not repulsed, or slighted, must appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety, that he is no idiot, or seducer, it cannot be bu

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