rival of his genius, and receive its due share of admiration and esteem. Men, indeed, of narrow minds, and of servile principles, will for ever attempt to depreciate a character so absolutely the reverse of their own; but liberal spirits, who allow to others that freedom of sentiment, which they vindicate for themselves, however they disapprove or oppose the opinions of the sectary and the republican, will render honorable and affectionate justice to the patriotic benevolence, the industry, and the courage, with which Milton endeavoured to promote what he sincerely and fervently regarded as the true interest of his country.

We have now attended him to the middle stage of his life, at which it may not be improper to pause, and make a few remarks on the years, that are passed, and those that are yet in prospect. We behold him, at the age of thirty-two, recalled to England, from a foreign excursion of improvement and delight, by a manly sense of what he owed to his country in a season of difficulty and danger. His thoughts and conduct on this

occasion, are the more noble and becoming, as all his preceding years had been employed in forming, for the most important purposes, a firm and lofty mind, and in furnishing it abundantly with whatever might be useful and honorable to himself and others, in the various exigences and vicissitudes both of public and private life..

We have traced him through a long course of infantine, academical, domestic, and foreign study; we have seen him distinguished by application, docility and genius; uncommonly attached to his instructors, and most amiably grateful to his parents; in friendship, ardent and steady; in love, though tender not intemperate; as a poet, sensible of his rare mental endowments, yet peculiarly modest in regard to his own productions; enamoured of glory, yet as ready to bestow as anxious to merit praise in his person and manners so fashioned to prepossess all men in his favor, that even foreigners gave him credit for those high literary atchievements, which were to shed peculiar lustre on his latter days, and

considered him already as a man, of whom his country might be proud.

With such accomplishments, and such expectations in his behalf, Milton returned to England. The subsequent portion of his life, however gloomy and tempestuous, will be found to correspond, at least in the close of it, with the radiant promise of his youth. We shall see him deserting his favorite haunts of Parnassus to enter the thorny paths of ecclesiastical and poetical dissention: his principles as a disputant will be condemned and approved, according to the prevalence of opposite and irreconcilable opinions, that fluctuate in the world; but his upright consistency of conduct deserves applause from all honest and candid men of every persuasion. The Muse indeed, who had blessed him with singular endowments, and given him so lively a sense of his being constituted a poet by nature, that when he wrote not verse, he had the use (to borrow his own forcible expression) “but of his left hand;" the Muse alone might have a right to reproach him with

having acted against inward conviction; but could his Muse have visibly appeared to reprove his desertion of her service in a parental remonstrance, he might have answered her, as the young Harry of Shakespear answers the tender and keen reproof of his royal father,

"I will redeem all this,

And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you, that I am your son."

END OF THE FIRST PART.