greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men.

"There is enough to cool the flame of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial and imaginary beauty.

"There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust and lay down their symbol of mortality and tell all the world that, when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings', and our accounts easier, and our pains for our crowns shall be less."

Like all men who through the trials and provocations of life preserve loving-kindness in their hearts, Jeremy Taylor could not fail to look upon little children with benignity.

"No man can tell," he writes, "but he that loves children how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society."

Two of his most delightful parables from the world about him are the following, which I now quote :

"But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly, so is a man's reason and his life."

So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to

heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest, than it could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries here below; so is the prayer of a good man."

The sweet serenity of the man's mind is enforced upon us as we read his works; no controversies disturbed it, and no strokes of fortune could impair it.

The peace of God had found entrance into his heart and seemed to rest as a benediction upon his writings. I quote as a last citation a little passage which shows the blessedness of his sweet contentment :

"I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and they have taken all from me; what now? Let me look about me. They have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they still have left me the Providence of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbour's pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God Himself."

It seems to me impossible not to feel a real affection for a man who could write such beautiful passages as these. With all his erudition and wisdom he carried to a ripe old age the heart of a child.

CHAPTER XVI

JOHN MILTON

JOHN MILTON, if he had never written Paradise Lost, Comus, and Lycidas, would nevertheless have come down to us as a famous writer of English prose. Most of his prose writings deal trenchantly with the fierce controversies of his times.

He first favoured the Presbyterians, and then became their enemy.

But at this distance of time the interest in the polemical pamphlets of that day has long disappeared, and they seem to us, in the fine phrase of Sir William Watson, nothing more than the dust of vanished collisions."

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But in 1644 he published his great defence of "the liberty of unlicensed printing," which he called his Areopagitica.

This is a subject that can never grow old or become unimportant in a civilised state, and indeed the final solution of the matter has not yet been achieved.

Johnson, in his inimitable way, has commented on the Areopagitica thus:

"The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve.

"If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects, there can be no settlement;

if every murmurer at government may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; if every sceptick in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion.

"The remedy against these evils is to punish the authors; for it is yet allowed that every society may punish, though not prevent, the publication of opinions, which that society shall think pernicious; but this punishment, though it may crush the author, promotes the book; and it seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted because by our laws we hang a thief."

The most celebrated passage in this famous pamphlet I will now quote, and, after all, it seems to leave the matter in a somewhat indeterminate condition. But of the fine quality of its style there can be no uncertainty:

“I deny not but that it is a 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 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 fabulous dragons' teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

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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; 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 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 persecutions we raise against the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide 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."

Anyway, this defends the inviolability of a fine and good book, with which in these days none will disagree. And it is by men of letters that such books are kept alive from generation to generation. Bad books generally die of themselves. The personal character of Milton was much affected by the affliction of his blindness. As a man of powerful mind, wide scholarship, and noble expression, both in poetry and prose, he commands our respect and admiration, but there remains something wanting to win our affection. Whether his daughters were unkind and undutiful, or whether he was exacting and cold as a father, is difficult now to decide. There certainly is left with us a sense that the household was sour and unlovely.