both, would content me:' whereby I perceive him to be more ignorant in his art of divining than any gipsy. For this I cannot omit without ingratitude to that Providence above, who hath ever bred me up in plenty, although my life hath not been unexpensive in learning, and voyaging about; so long as it shall please Him to lend me what He hath hitherto thought good, which is enough to serve me in all honest and liberal occasions, and something over besides, I were unthankful to that highest bounty, if I should make myself so poor as to solicit needily any such kind of rich hopes as this fortune-teller dreams of. And that he may further learn how his astrology is wide all the houses of heaven in spelling marriages, I care not if I tell him thus much professedly, though it be the losing of my rich hopes, as he calls them, that I think with them who, both in prudence and elegance of spirit, would choose a virgin of mean fortunes, honestly bred, before the wealthiest widow."

Here we may remark that Milton selected his three wives out of the virgin state.

"His next venom he utters against a prayer which he found in the Animadversions; he dislikes it, and I therefore like it the better. Neither was it a prayer, so much as a hymn in prose, frequent both in the prophets, and in human authors; therefore, the style was greater than for an ordinary prayer." "The muse of prose-literature,' observes David Masson

'has been very hardly dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be much of that mighty licence in the fantastic, that measured riot, that unabashed dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by prescription to verse. All speed, then, to the prose invasion of the peculiar realm of verse; and the farther the conquest can proceed, perhaps the better in the end for both parties. The time is perhaps coming when the best prose shall be more like verse than it now is, and the best verse shall not disdain a certain resemblance to prose.'

"If we have indeed given a bill of divorce to popery and superstition, why do we not say as to a divorced wife, "Those things which are yours take them all with you, and they shall sweep after you"? Why were we not thus wise at our parting from Rome? Ah! like a crafty adulteress, she forgot not all her smooth looks and enticing words at her parting: "Yet keep these letters, these tokens, and these few ornaments; I am not all so greedy of what is mine, let them preserve with you the memory"—of what I am? No, but-" of what I was; once fair and lovely in your eyes." Thus did those tenderhearted reformers dotingly suffer themselves to be overcome. And she, like a witch, but with a contrary policy, did not take something of theirs, that she still might have power to bewitch them, but for the same

intent left something of her own behind her."

"But

now, readers, we have the port within sight; his last section, which is no deep one, remains only to be forded, and then the wished shore."

"I that was erewhile the ignorant, on the sudden by his permission am now granted "to know something." And that "such a volley of expressions" he hath met withal, "as he would never desire to have them better clothed." For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue; yet true eloquence I find to be none, but the serious and hearty love of truth and that whose mind soever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words, like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well-ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places."

THE DOCTRINE AND DISCIPLINE OF DIVORCE;

IN

RESTORED TO THE GOOD OF BOTH SEXES.

IN TWO BOOKS.

To the Parliament of England with the Assembly.

N the year 1644 Milton produced this extraordinary work, his brief Treatise on Education, and his incomparable Areopagitica. He had a short time previously been married to his first wife, who, after one month of wedded life, suddenly returned to her father, and stayed with him three years. On hearing that he meditated a divorce, she as suddenly threw herself at his feet and obtained his forgiveness. It was to justify his resolution of being divorced that he wrote the present work, which will not detain us long, but we shall hope to rescue from out this mass of trash a few sentences of transcendant beauty. He professes "with much labour to have first found out, or at least first published, to the manifest good of Christendom, that which, calling to witness everything mortal and immortal, he believes unfeignedly to be true; and then he doubts not but with one gentle stroking to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the

life of man."

Such was his sincerity even when most erring. This elaborate discussion,' writes Warton on his eleventh sonnet which is entitled "On the detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises," 'unworthy in many respects of Milton, and in which much acuteness of argument, and comprehension of reading, were idly thrown away, was received with contempt, or rather ridicule. He held that disagreement of mind was a better cause of separation than adultery. Here was a fair opening for the laughers. For this doctrine our author was summoned before the Lords. But they not approving his accusers, the presbyterian clergy, or thinking the business too speculative, he was quickly dismissed. On this occasion Milton commenced hostilities against the presbyterians,' and joined the independents. His conjugal life is anything but pleasant to contemplate. Perhaps so laborious a student, so sensitive, and stern, and unbending a character had better have remained single. That he was not averse to marriage is evident from his essaying it three times. It was not every woman who could be a help-meet for such a mind as his, or make him happy. But Mary Powell was the last person we should have expected him to choose. No wonder such a marriage proved an unhappy one. He entertained the most exalted views of love, marriage, and domestic felicity, regarding a true woman with the utmost reverence as the companion of man's