was that in setting forth this pamphlet the Remonstrant was not unconsulted with. (7) Thus his first address "An humble Remonstrance by a dutiful Son of the Church," almost as if he had said, her Whiteboy. His next was, a Defence" (a wonder how it escaped some praising adjunct)" against the frivolous and false Exceptions of Smectymnuus," sitting in the chair of his title-page upon his poor cast adversaries both as a judge and party, and that before the jury of readers can be impannelled. His last was "A short Answer to a tedious Vindication;" so little can he suffer a man to measure either with his eye or judgment, what is short or what tedious, without his preoccupying direction and from hence is begotten this " Modest Confutation against a slanderous and scurrilous Libel." 13. I conceive, readers, much may be guessed at the man and his book, what depth there is, by the framing of his title; which being in this Remonstrant so rash and unadvised as ye see, I con (7) Here his suspicions glance at Bishop Hall himself, whom he evidently supposes to have aided his son in concocting the "Modest Confutation." Dr. Symmons imagines that, "had this work been published with the author's name, its motives would probably have atoned with Milton for its virulence; and his own filial piety, affected by the spectacle of a generous youth rushing to present his bosom to the wound intended for his father's, would have spared the enemy;" &c.-Life of Milton, p. 239. On the contrary, his contemptuous severity would more probably have been augmented by beholding the father encou raging his son to defend him by heaping, what Dr. Symmons acknowledges to have been "enormous falsehoods," on the head of his adversary. ceit him to be near akin to him who set forth a passion sermon with a formal dedicatory in great letters to our Saviour. (8) Although I know that all we do ought to begin and end in his praise and glory, yet to inscribe him in a void place with flourishes, as a man in compliment uses to trick up the name of some esquire, gentleman, or lord paramount at common law, to be his book-patron, with the appendant form of a ceremonious presentment, will ever appear among the judicious to be but an insulse and frigid affectation. As no less was that before his book against the Brownists, to write a letter to a Prosopopoeia, a certain rhetorized woman whom he calls mother, and complains of some that laid whoredom to her charge; and certainly had he folded his epistle with a superscription to be delivered to that female figure by any post or carrier, who were not an ubiquitary, it had been a most miraculous greeting. We find the primitive doctors, as oft as they wrote to churches, speaking to them as to a number of faithful brethren and sons; and not to make a cloudy transmigration of sexes in such a familar way of writing as an epistle ought to be, leaving the tract of com : (8) The man who did this was no other than Bishop Hall; and the discourse, with this extraordinary dedication, still occupies a place in his works. Though not printed till the year 1642, it was 66 preached at Paul's Cross on Good Friday, April 14, 1609." The dedication is conceived in the following words :—" To the only honour and glory of God, my dear and blessed Saviour, (which hath done and suffered all these things for my soul,) his weak and unworthy servant humbly desires to consecrate himself and his poor labours: beseeching him to accept and bless them to the public good, and to the praise of his own glorious name." mon address, to run up, and tread the air in metaphorical compellations, and many fond utterances better let alone. 14. But I step again to this emblazoner of his title-page, (whether it be the same man or no, I leave it in the midst,) and here I find him pronouncing without reprieve, those animadversions to be a slanderous and scurrilous libel. To which I, readers, that they are neither slanderous, nor scurrilous, will answer in what place of his book he shall be found with reason, and not ink only, in his mouth. Nor can it be a libel more than his own, which is both nameless and full of slanders; and if in this that it freely speaks of things amiss in religion, but established by act of state, I see not how Wickliffe (9) and Luther, with all the first martyrs and reformers, could avoid the imputation of libelling. I never thought the human frailty of erring in cases of religion, infamy to a state, no more than to a council. It had therefore been nei (9) Wickliffe was regarded by Milton with particular veneration. He speaks of him in his various writings again and again, and always as the Prince of Reformers. In his first controversial work,-"Reformation in England," he describes Wickliffe's preaching as the flame "at which all the succeeding reformers more effectually lighted their tapers." Again, in his "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence," having dwelt on what seems to have been a favourite idea with him, viz. that the English were, in modern times, God's chosen people ;"he knocked once and twice, and came again, opening our drowsy eyelids leisurely by that glimmering light, which Wickliffe and his followers dispersed ;" and further on, in the same treatise, he adds :--"It may be denied that bishops were our first reformers, for Wickliffe was before them, and his egregious labours are not to be neglected." ther civil nor Christianly, to derogate the honour of the state for that cause, especially when I saw the parliament itself piously and magnanimously bent to supply and reform the defects and oversights of their forefathers; which to the godly and repentant ages of the Jews were often matter of humble confessing and bewailing, not of confident asserting and maintaining. Of the state therefore I found good reason to speak all honourable things, and to join in petition with good men that petitioned but against the prelates, who were the only seducers and misleaders of the state to constitute the government of the church not rightly, methought I had not vehemence enough. And thus, readers, by the example which he hath set me, I have given ye two or three notes of him out of his title-page; by which his firstlings fear not to guess boldly at his whole lump, for that guess will not fail ye; and although I tell him keen truth, yet he may bear with me, since I am like to chase him into some good knowledge, and others, I trust, shall not mispend their leisure. For this my aim is, if I am forced to be unpleasing to him whose fault it is, I shall not forget at the same time to be useful in something to the stander-by. 15. As therefore he began in the title, so in the next leaf he makes it his first business to tamper with his reader by sycophanting, and misnaming the work of his adversary. He calls it “ a mime thrust forth upon the stage, to make up the breaches of those solemn scenes between the prelates and the Smectymnuans." Wherein while he is so over greedy to fix a name of ill sound upon another, note how stupid he is to expose himself or his own friends to the same ignominy; likening those grave controversies to a piece of stagery, or scenework, where his own Remonstrant, whether in buskin or sock, must of all right be counted the chief player, be it boasting Thraso, or Davus that troubles all things, or one who can shift into any shape, I meddle not; let him explicate who hath resembled the whole argument to a comedy, for "tragical," he says, 66 were too ominous." Nor yet doth he tell us what a mime is, whereof we have no pattern from ancient writers, except some fragments, which contain many acute and wise sentences. And this we know in Laertius, that the mimes of Sophron were of such reckoning with Plato, as to take them nightly to read on, and after make them his pillow. Scaliger describes a mime to be a poem imitating any action to stir up laughter. (10) (°) On the nature of these Mimes the learned entertain very contradictory notions, some insisting they were written in verse, others in prose; and others, again, willing to reconcile the contending parties, suggesting that they may have been a mixture of both. Valkenaer, in his edition of Ten Idylls of Theocritus, p. 200; and Casaubon, de Sat. Poët. c. iii. have entered minutely into the question. More recently, Müller, in his "History and Antiquities of the Doric Race," has collected and examined critically all the testimonies of ancient authors bearing directly on the subject. "About half a century after Epicharmus, Sophron, the mimographer, made his appearance, who was the author of a new species of comedy, though in many respects resembling that of his predecessor. Still this variety of the drama differed so much, not only from that of Sicily, but from any other which existed in Greece, that its origin must, after all our attempts at |