MILTON. Ir may seem questionable to assume Milton as a representative of Puritanism; and in the narrower sense of that word, the question would be a fair one; for Milton was certainly a great deal more than a Puritan. His mind and culture show elements even anti-Puritan. His youth and early manhood were academic and literary. Classical and poetical studies moulded his taste, and disciplined and refined his intellect. The Cambridge student of the years 1625-1632the youthful poet at Horton-and the leisurely dilletante traveller at Florence, Rome, Naples, and Geneva, during the seven following years-seems far enough from participation in the religious spirit which was then spreading throughout England, and beginning to move it to its centre; then, again, the later spiritualist of the years of the Restoration, Arian in doctrine, and latitudinarian in practice, who owned no church, and nowhere joined in public worship-the blind old poet-the divine dreamer of a Paradise Lost and a Paradise Regained-" who used to sit in a grey, coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air," may seem equally removed from the nonconformity that was still active and zealous under all its renewed oppressions-that lived in jails or flourished in corners beyond the scrutiny of the Five-mile Act. It is nevertheless true that, in all the higher and more comprehensive meaning of the word, Milton was a Puritan. Even in his early years, his sympathy with its spirit of ecclesiastical reform, the polemical hatred against Episcopacy which it nourished, prevented him from entering the Church. On his return to England from his travels abroad, he plunged into the very heart of the religious contention that was then brewing on all sides. His first prose writings are as distinctively Puritan in their dogmatic spirit as any writings in all the century. During the years of his controversial manhood, he was identified closely with every great phase of the movement. He was the advocate of its triumphs-of its excesses. He stood forth before the world as its literary genius and apologist. And, finally, his two great poems, while classical in their structure and in the severe and felicitous majesty of their style, are intensely Puritan in their spirit -in the intellectual ideas, and even the imaginative scenery through which their great purpose is worked out and impressed upon the mind of the reader. There is no picture of Puritanism, therefore, that would be at all complete which did not embrace John Milton as one of its prominent figures. The very fact that his relations to it are in some respects exceptional -that he stands so much alone, and above the movement, while intimately connected with it—makes it all the more necessary to introduce him; for there is no other character can be a substitute for him; there is no one else that did the same work as he did, and in the same spirit. He remains the single great poet that Puritanism has produced; and while we shall see abundantly how much more went to his formation than Puritanism-how broader sympathies and affinities were necessary to nurse and educate his genius-we shall see at the same time what a peculiar consecration its religious spirit gave to that genius-to what unearthly heights it carried it "above the Olympian hill," "above the flight of Pegasean wing;" and what richness, and strength, and mystery of grandeur all his high powers derived from communion with those biblical thoughts and biblical forms of expression on which the Puritan spirit exclusively fed and delighted to clothe itself. The life of Milton is in itself a sort of Puritan Drama, severe, earnest, sad, yet with the bright lights of an irrepressible poesy irradiating it. The spiritual discontent and unrest of his youth hiding itself beneath a widely sympathetic and varied culture of his intellect, taste, and feelings, of which his early poems continue the ever beautiful expression; his stormy and contentious manhood, mingling pride and sternness, and even cruel harshness, with the assertion of the most noble principles, both political and religious; and then the mournful close of all, "the evil days and evil tongues" "In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude," in which his high hopes for human freedom and the triumph of divine truth expire-the picture is a grandly impressive one, the heroic lesson of which is only the more conspicuous from the apparent failure, the sacrifice of the hero. His life divides itself conveniently for our purpose into three main epochs-the first extending to his |