awed into a forgetfulness of its interests, by the political or judicial influence of tyrannous times. Had he not been foremost in this generous path-had he lavished his powers in humiliating obsequiousness to a government that would have heaped honours on his recreancy, we should not have stepped aside to attempt his eulogy-he might have spoken the eloquence of Greece unnoticed by us. Whatever might be his honours, there would still be one thing beyond the reach of his talents--the honest praise we have bestowed on the friend of his country. His name and character are for other times, and the impartial historian will fail in his duty who does not do honour to the virtues of PETER BURROUGHS.

SNATCHES OF SONG.

No. III.

BY MRS. C. BARON WILSON.

Lay of the exiled Troubadour.

THE Sunny fields of glowing France,
Where first I sang of love and thee,
When my young spirit's wild romance
Burst forth in strains of minstrelsy;
In Fancy's dream I see them rise,
Still, still they live in Mem'ry's eyes!

The sunny fields of glowing France
Shall greet, alas! my sight no more!
The glitt'ring spear, the polished lance,
The tourney and the chase are o'er ;-
Yet still beneath these colder skies,

France! glorious France! fills Mem'ry's eyes!

HABITS AND OPINIONS OF THE POETS.

MILTON AND THOMSON.

A MASS of interesting scraps of biography float over the wide surface of our literature, which it would be desirable should be garnered up by some careful and affectionate hand. Shakspeare has been honoured by the labours of some of his late annotators, who have pursued him into the field of nature, developed his studies among birds, flowers, and insects, and interpreted his genius and his life aright. The latest memoir of the Bard of Avon, by Campbell, may be imperfect and hurriedly thrown together, but it is written in a delightful spirit of love and reverence. The Aldine edition of the Poets has also done good service in the cause of the muses, and how beautiful is the field thus opened up! On every page we may hang some illustration of character or of history-some cento of criticism-some gleaming from the side volume of nature! Then it is felt to be a pleasure, not a task, to trace out the humblest circumstances relating to our benefactors, the poets-to follow them into private life-to see their tastes, their habits, their opinions expanding before us in the full light of knowledge and truth.

"O deem not, 'midst this worldly strife,

An idle art the poet brings;

Let high philosophy control,
And sages calm the stream of life,
"Tis he refines its fountain-springs,

The nobler passions of the soul.'

In the mean time we shall here string together some notices of two great poets, who sang of the woods and vales of England, reflecting in their golden pages the softened grace and beauty of landscapes that rise before the eye like summer dreams, and sink as calmly and beautifully into the soul. The first, indeed, touched a higher key-the loftiest of human strains; but his love of nature was a clear and steady light, shining brightly through the storms and tempests of political commotion, and kindling up, when all was dark around him, with a lustre worthy of paradise.

The austere

MILTON! We approach the name with reverence. dignity of his personal character, no less than the sublimity of his genius, overpowers the imagination, and we feel that we are treading on holy ground. He was the purest of all the poets; set apart and dedicated, as it were, to the highest and noblest services. His morning studies, "often ere the sound of any bell awaken men to labour or devotion," remind us of his own exquisite description:

"His sleep

Was airy, light, from pure digestion bred,

And temperate vapours bland, which th' only sound
Of leaves and fuming rills (Aurora's fan)

Lightly dispersed, and the shrill matin song
Of birds on every bough."

His first occupation was reading in the Hebrew Bible, and with his studies, music, and exercise, varied and interposed, the day passed over in sober intellectual gratification and delight. His "celestial patroness" sometimes

"Brought nightly to his ear"

the strains of paradise, and he knew and felt that these were inspirations which after times would not willingly let die. His life was a true poem, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things." Educated with great care and tenderness from the "laureate fraternity of poets," riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading led him, as he beautifully describes it, to the shady spaces of philosophy, and chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato and his equal Xenophon, where he learned of chastity and love. He imbibed a portion of that delicate, romantic gallantry predominant in the Italian poets; but what with Dante and Petrarch was an ardent, inextinguishable passion, with Milton was but a dream of fancy—a beautiful but cold and barren admiration of female loveliness and perfection. Hence his youth glided away amid his academic bowers without any strong or permanent attachment; and in after years the robust, intellectual character of his mind, his love of fame and of his country, must have led him to look with pity and contempt upon those who could consign

"The noon of manhood to a myrtle shade."

He was unhappy in his first marriage-unhappy in his children, from whom he probably exacted too much, and his life had fallen on evil days and evil tongues. He was alone, blind, and aged, with none to meet his enemies in the gate.

Milton's republicanism is well known, yet he was averse to all popular clamour. When vacancies occurred in his favourite ideal grand council, others were to be elected, but the electors were not to be "committed to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude; permitting only," he adds, "those of them who are rightly qualified, to nominate as many as they will; and out of that number others of a better breeding to choose a less number more judiciously, till after a third or fourth sifting and refining, of exactest choice, they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices the worthiest."

In points of religious faith and doctrine, the opinions of Milton, at different periods of his life, underwent a material change. In his youth he had sung the Trinal Unity, apostrophised the tripersonal Godhead, and denounced the Arian heresy; but in advanced years he rejected this belief, and indirectly stigmatised the terms of trinity, triunity, &c., as "scholastic notions." The following lines in " Paradise Regained" had long proved a stumbling-block to his commentators:

"His weakness shall o'ercome Satanic strength,
And all the world, and mass of sinful flesh :
That all the angels and ethereal powers,
They now, and men hereafter, may discern
From what consummate virtue I have chose
This perfect man, by merit called my Son,
To earn salvation for the sons of men."

At length the discovery and publication of his long-lost treatise on Christian Doctrine solved the mystery, and proved that, on the doctrine of the Trinity, Milton's opinions ultimately approximated to Arianism; ascribing to the Son as high a share of divinity as was compatible with the denial of his self-existence and eternal generation, but not admitting his co-equality or co-essentiality with the Father. The Spirit he held to be far inferior to the Son. It is chiefly on the doctrine of the eternal filiation that Milton is at variance with the generality of Christians. The atonement he esteemed to be full and satisfactory: not only was man redeemed, but a real price, life for life, was paid for his redemption. On the dubious interminable question of predestination, Milton's opinions were in accordance with the popular feeling. "Mention," he says, "is frequently made of those who are written among the living, and of the book of life, but never of the book of death." Who shall decide?

"Truth," says he, in one of the most eloquent passages of his most eloquent prose treatise, the Areopagitica-" truth came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape, most glorious to look on; but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the god Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down, gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, lords and commons! nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection."

Among these dim and awful mysteries the mind of the poet delighted to wander, shunning no labour of research or severity of thought; proudly contemning the wisdom of the past, and fearless, in conscious rectitude, of the future-seeking sedulously to find the "mangled body of Truth," and to pierce the gloom that mantles between the eternal, irreversible decrees and perfection of the Deity, and the frail, bounded, perishable conceptions of mortality.

One of the minor defects of Milton's character was his opinion of the inferiority of women to men. Eve was of "outward form elaborate," but of "inward less exact." In his " In his "History of England," Boadicea and his daughters "riding about in a chariot" are barely tolerable in his eyes, and he does not fail to censure the vanity of the historian in embellishing the exploits of the British heroine; "not caring," he says, "to brand us with the rankest note of barbarism, as if in Britain women were men, and men women." The poet's do-mestic circumstances gave rise to his "Turkish contempt for females,” and it is distinguishable in none of his productions written prior to the "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." The sheet-anchor of his argument in favour of divorce is the law of Moses, which allowed of divorcement when the wife had ceased to find favour in the eyes of her husband in consequence of some uncleanness. This uncleanness,

he contends, was not adultery only, but referred to the mind as well as the body. In his posthumous work, he also defends the lawfulness of polygamy, and endeavours to graft the living fruits of Christianity upon the exploded formalisms of Judaism.

The puritanism of Milton deadened his feelings towards some of the early objects of his genius and his admiration. He had walked the "studious cloisters pale," and loved the "storied windows" and high embowed roof" of our noble ecclesiastical edifices; but afterwards he wished to place the religion of the state on a very humble footing. The gospel was to be preached by itinerant divines brought up, at once, "to a competence of learning and to an honest trade,' and who were to be supported by the voluntary contributions of their hearers and their own manual labour.

"Thus taught, once for all," he adds, "and thus now and then visited and confirmed in the most destitute and poorest parts of the land, under the government of their own elders, performing all ministerial offices among them, they may be trusted to meet and edify one another, whether in church or chapel, or to save them the trudging of many miles thither, nearer home, though in a house or barn; for, notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of some, devoted still ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured that he who disdained not to be laid in a manger, disdains not to be preached in a barn.”

The nuncupative will of Milton affords a familiar glimpse of his domestic life shortly before the time of his death. He had two female servants-dined at noon, and in the kitchen of his house, (a practice then common enough,) and he appears to have been not inattentive to the viands set before him. In the evidence of Elizabeth Fisher, one of his domestics, there occurs the following sketch of Milton en deshabille :

"This deponent was servant unto Mr. John Milton for about a year before his death, who died upon a Sunday, the 15th [it should be the 8th] of November last [1674] at night; and saith that on a day happening in the month of July last, this deponent being then in the deceased's lodging chamber, he the said deceased and his wife being then also in the said chamber at dinner together, and the said Elizabeth Milton having provided something for the deceased's dinner which he very well liked, he the said deceased then spoke to his said wife these or the like words, as near as this deponent can remember, viz. God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit whilst I live, and when I die thou knowest that I have left thee all."

The fellow witness of this domestic gave similar evidence.

"On a day happening about two months since, as near as this deponent can remember, this deponent being then in the kitchen of the house of the foresaid John Milton, situate against the Artillery Ground near Bunhill Fields, and about noon of the same day, the said deceased and Elizabeth his wife being then at dinner in the said kitchen, he the said deceased, amongst other discourse then had between him and his said wife, did then speak to her and utter these words, viz. 'Make much of me as long as I live, for thou knowest I have given thee all when I die at thy disposal.”