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By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
Æolian charms, and Dorian lyric odes."

"Remove their swelling epithets, thick laid
As varnish on a harlot's cheek, the rest,
Thin sown with aught of profit or delight,
Will far be found unworthy to compare
With Sion's songs, to all true taste excelling,
Where God is praised aright, and godlike men,
The holiest of holies, and his saints;

Such are from God inspired, not such from thee,
Unless where moral virtue is express'd
By the light of Nature, not in all quite lost.
Their orators thou then extoll'st, as those
The top of eloquence, statists indeed,
And lovers of their country, as may seem;
But herein to our prophets far beneath
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of civil government,

In their majestic, unaffected style,

Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so,—
What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat;
These only with our law best form a king."

The Saviour's night in the wilderness, after the departure of Satan, is a powerful piece of life painting. The winds rushing from their stony caves from the four hinges of the world; the rain mingled with fire, falling on the vexed wilderness; while infernal ghosts, let

loose from their dens, yelling and howling around, hurl their fiery darts.

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"Ill wast thou shrouded then,

O patient Son of God, yet only stoodst

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Came forth with pilgrim steps, in amice grey,

Who with her radiant finger still'd the rear

Of thunder, chased the clouds, and laid the winds
And grisly spectres."

The "Paradise Regained" is like some wonderful allegory, which man must read by his life experience. The temptations of the Saviour, it is easy to see, were regarded as the temptations common to us all those of depraving sensualism, of glory, and of literary and intellectual vanity.

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CHAPTER XVII.

MILTON'S ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.

MILTON did not love bishops; he did not regard episcopacy, as an institution, with love and approbation; he had no friendly feelings toward established religions. Our English Reformation stopped far too short for him; he could not tolerate a sensual religion; and all that he beheld in the episcopacy of his times, tended only to bury the spiritual beneath the superincumbent weight of observances and forms, "attributing purity or impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the spirit to the outward and customary eyeservice of the body, as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual. They began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul; yea, the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form,

urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence, and worship circumscribed. They hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, -not in robes of pure innocence, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws, fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe, or the Flamen's vestry. Then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul, by this means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wings apace downwards; and, finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcass to plod on in the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity."*

We shall not attempt to give to our readers anything like a connected analysis of the views of Milton, as developed in his ecclesiastical works. Simply we may say, to him Reformation was not sufficient reform; he desired

Of the Reformation in England. Book First, p. 1.

to see all rites, and ceremonies, and mummeries, abandoned by the Church, and the Church altogether unfettered from state interference. His religion was a "high philosophy, impregnated with the spirit of the gospel Christianity, unalloyed, and undefiled by human teaching;" we shall allow our author to speak for himself, for the most part.-He does not undervalue the Reformation.

"When I recall to mind, at last, after so many dark ages, wherein the huge overshadowing train of error, had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of the church; how the bright and blissful Reformation (by divine power) struck through the black and settled night of ignorance and antichristian tyranny, methinks a sovereign and reviving joy, must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears; and the sweet odour of the returning Gospel, imbathe his soul with the fragrancy of Heaven. Then was the sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners, where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it; then schools opened, divine and human learning raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues, the princes and cities trooping apace to the newly erected banner of salvation; the martyrs, with the irresistible might of weakness, shaking the powers

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