they least look for. In all negotiations of difficulty a man may not look to sow and reap at once, but must prepare business and so ripen it by degrees.

OF STUDIES.

(From the same.)

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. 5 Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business: for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars one by one; but the general counsels and the plots and marshalling of affairs come best from 10 those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning 15 by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use, but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. 20 Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not 25 curiously, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments and the meaner sort of books; else, distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy 30 things. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and therefore if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had

need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. "Abeunt studia in mores." Nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit but may be wrought out 5 by fit studies, like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins, shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the head, and the like. So, if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics, for in dem- 10 onstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again; if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cymini sectores; if he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the 15 lawyers' cases: so every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.

John Milton.

1608-1674.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.

(From Areopagitica, 1644.)

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 5 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 10 fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness 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, 15 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. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions 20 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 living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books, since we see a kind of homi25 cide 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.

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 5 in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds, which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor 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 10 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 knowl- 15 edge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never 20 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 25 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 Spenser, whom I dare 30 be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, 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 35 vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human

virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth,

1

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.

5 Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain: if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. 10 A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than the 15 charge and care of their religion. There be-who knows not that there be?-of Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrant an implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man addicted to his pleasure and to his profits finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many 20 piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious, fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he, therefore, but resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some 25 factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation, that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that 30 man his religion, esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the house. He enter35 tains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him: his Religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey or