of ease, want of spirit, (39) to use more, and the like. "And therefore content," he says, "because it neither goes before, nor comes behind his merit." Belike then if his fortune should go before his merit, he would not be content, but resign, if we believe him; which I do the less, because he implies, that if it came behind his merit, he would be content as little. Whereas if a wise man's content should depend upon such a therefore, because his fortune came not behind his merit, how many wise men could have content in this world?

45. In his next pithy symbol I dare not board him, for he passes all the seven wise masters of Greece, attributing to himself that which, on my life, Solomon durst not: "to have affections so equally tempered, that they neither too hastily adhere to the truth before it be fully examined, nor too lazily afterward." Which, unless he only were exempted out of the corrupt mass of Adam, born without sin original, and living without actual, is impossible. Had Solomon, (for it behoves me to instance in the wisest, dealing with such a transcendent sage as this,) had Solomon affections so equally tempered, as "not adhering too lazily to

(39) This is agreeable to what Aristotle, in his Ethics, observes of the difference between the magnanimous and little-minded man; the latter of whom, he says, underrates his own merits; while "the magnanimous man estimates himself at the highest rate, yet no higher than he ought; and, conscious of his inward worth, thinks himself entitled to whatever is most precious, to what the most exalted of men claim as the highest of all rewards."-1. iv. c. 3, of the elegant translation of Dr. Gillies.

the truth," when God warned him of his halting in idolatry? do we read that he repented hastily? did not his affections lead him hastily from an examined truth, how much more would they lead him slowly to it? Yet this man, beyond a stoic apathy, sees truth as in a rapture, and cleaves to it; not as through the dim glass of his affections, which, in this frail mansion of flesh, are ever unequally tempered, pushing forward to error, and keeping back from truth ofttimes the best of men. But how far this boaster is from knowing himself, let his preface speak. Something I thought it was that made him so quicksighted to gather such strange things out of the Animadversions, whereof the least conception could not be drawn from thence, of" suburb-sinks," sometimes "out of wit and clothes," sometimes "in new serge, drinking sack, and swearing;" now I know it was this equal temper of his affections, that gave him to see clearer than any fennel-rubbed serpent. (40) Lastly, he has resolved" that neither person nor cause shall improper him." I may mistake his meaning, for the word ye hear is " improper." But whether if not a person, yet a good parsonage or impropriation bought out for him, would not "improper" him, because there may be a quirk in the word, I leave it for a canonist to resolve.

(40) It is one of the artifices of Plato's style to make use, in illustration, of the traditions, poetical legends, and vulgar errors of his country; and here we find Milton acting on the same principle, with the design of recommending his works to the people, who love to find in superior men traces of their own ideas.

46. And thus ends this section or rather dissection, of himself, short ye will say both in breadth and extent, as in our own praises it ought to be, unless wherein a good name hath been wrongfully attainted. Right; but if ye look at what he ascribes to himself," that temper of his affections," which cannot anywhere be but in Paradise, all the judicious panegyrics in any language extant are not half so prolix. And that well appears in his next removal. For what with putting his fancy to the tiptoe in this description of himself, and what with adventuring presently to stand upon his own legs without the crutches of his margin, which is the sluice most commonly that feeds the drought of his text, he comes so lazily on in a simile, with his "armfull of weeds," and demeans himself in the dull expression so like a dough-kneaded thing, that he has not spirit enough left him so far to look to his syntax, as to avoid nonsense. For it must be understood there that the stranger, and not he who brings the bundle, would be deceived in censuring the field, which this hipshot grammarian cannot set into right frame of construction, neither here in the similitude, nor in the following reddition thereof; which being to this purpose, that "the faults of the best picked out, and presented in gross, seem monstrous; this," saith he, " you have done, in pinning on his sleeve the faults of others;" as if to pick out his own faults, and to pin the faults of others upon him, were to do the same thing.

47. To answer therefore how I have culled out the evil actions of the Remonstrant from his vir

tues, I am acquitted by the dexterity and conveyance of his nonsense, losing that for which he brought his parable. But what of other men's faults I have pinned upon his sleeve, let him show. For whether he were the man who termed the martyrs "Foxian confessors," it matters not; he that shall step up before others to defend a church government, which wants almost no circumstance, but only a name, to be a plain popedom, a government which changes the fatherly and ever-teaching discipline of Christ into that lordly and uninstructing jurisdiction, which properly makes the pope Antichrist, makes himself an accessory to all the evil committed by those who are armed to do mischief by that undue government; which they, by their wicked deeds, do, with a kind of passive and unwitting obedience to God, destroy; but he, by plausible words and traditions against the Scripture, obstinately seeks to maintain. They, by their own wickedness ruining their own unjust authority, make room for good to succeed; but he, by a show of good upholding the evil which in them undoes itself, hinders the good which they by accident let in. Their manifest crimes serve to bring forth an ensuing good, and hasten a remedy against themselves; and his seeming good tends to reinforce their self-punishing crimes and his own, by doing his best to delay all redress. Shall not all the mischief which other men do be laid to his charge, if they do it by that unchurch-like power which he defends? Christ saith, "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathers not with me,

scatters." In what degree of enmity to Christ shall we place that man, then, who so is with him, as that it makes more against him; and so gathers with him, that it scatters more from him? Shall it avail that man to say he honours the martyrs' memory, and treads in their steps? No; the Pharisees confessed as much of the holy prophets. Let him, and such as he, when they are in their best actions, even at their prayers, look to hear that which the Pharisees heard from John the Baptist when they least expected, when they rather looked for praise from him: "Generation of vipers, who hath warned ye to flee from the wrath to come ?"

48. Now that ye have started back from the purity of Scripture, which is the only rule of reformation, to the old vomit of your traditions; now that ye have either troubled or leavened the people of God, and the doctrine of the gospel, with scandalous ceremonies and mass-borrowed liturgies, do ye turn the use of that truth which ye profess, to countenance that falsehood which ye gain by? We also reverence the martyrs, but rely only upon the Scriptures. And why we ought not to rely upon the martyrs, I shall be content with such reasons as my confuter himself affords me; who is, I must needs say for him, in that point as officious an adversary as I would wish to any man. For, "first," saith he, "there may be a martyr in a wrong cause, and as courageous in suffering as the best; sometimes in a good cause with a forward ambition displeasing to God. Other whiles