coveted the same things-rank, distinction, wealth; as the Presbyterians soon made evident when they had succeeded in ousting the prelates.

25. Of all Milton's prose works, none, perhaps, contains passages of greater beauty than his treatises on Divorce. While ostensibly engaged in discussing the question generally, and upon public grounds, he was, it is well known, pleading his own cause. He had married a woman, not wanting, perhaps, in the virtue on which all a woman's peculiar virtues are built, but otherwise worthless; one to whom company, the false and hollow attentions of gay chamberers, show, glitter, and banqueting, were more pleasing than the society and love of her husband. Too late, indeed, he made the discovery; when, in one short month after their marriage, the lady became tired of the unriotous tranquillity of his house, and obtained his permission to return to her father's; where, instead of the modest cheerfulness, the plain repasts, the religious and happy homeliness of a philosophic dwelling, she was surrounded by the brawling soldiers of the king's army, the most dissolute, depraved, and godless crew that ever disturbed the peace of civil society.

26. With the patience and calmness of a good man, hoping to reclaim the partner chance had brought him, he long bore with her perverseness, beseeching her, again and again, to return to her home.

His prayers were disregarded, his messengers dismissed with contempt. Upon this he naturally grew angry, and resolved, if reason and ar

gument would effect it, to obtain legal deliverance from a woman unworthy, as all his biographers agree, ever to have been his wife. At this circumstance of his own history he evidently glances in the " Paradise Lost," where Adam, incensed, and half despairing, reproaches his guilty and now submissive consort with the fatal sin they had shared together:

"But for thee

I had persisted happy, had not thy pride
And wandering vanity, when least was safe,
Rejected my forewarning, and disdained
Not to be trusted, longing to be seen
Even by the Devil himself; him overweening
To overreach, but with the serpent meeting
Fooled and beguiled, by him thou, I by thee,
To trust thee from my side, imagined wise,
Constant, mature, proof against all assaults,
And understood not all was but a show
Rather than solid virtue, all but a rib
Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears,
More to the part sinister, from me drawn,
Well if thrown out, as supernumerary
To my just number found. O, why did God,
Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect

Of Nature, and not fill the world at once
With men as angels without feminine,

Or find some other way to generate

Mankind? This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befal, innumerable

Disturbances on earth through female snares,

And strait conjunction with this sex.

For either

He never shall find out fit mate, but such

As some misfortune brings him, or mistake,
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained

By a far worse; or if she love, withheld
By parents; or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame:
Which infinite calamity shall cause

To human life, and household peace confound."

Book x. 873-908.

27. In handling this subject, it is easy to see he was personally concerned, so frequently and with such torturing eloquence does he pourtray domestic infelicity. He speaks of the husband, overtoiled with long-continued laborious thought, sitting down lonely by his fire-side, a prey to that melancholy which intellectual exertion commonly leaves behind it, not finding in his wife a fit companion, but rather a cold image of clay, devoid of sympathy, devoid of love. And we see throughout that he had no children upon whom his heart might otherwise have showered its affections. This, the sweetest of human enjoyments, he had not yet known; for he was childless. And as far as it could be done,-much farther than at first view would be deemed possible, he has bared, in these works, the secrets of his bosom, and admitted the reader into communion close as that of friend with friend. He has exhibited to all those who know how to regard it, a picture of his soul, for the truth of which every man who attentively reads will be answerable. And he who can rise from the contemplation of this portrait, without intense love and admiration for the great and godlike

spirit it represents, must be cased pletely in stoicism than Zeno himself.

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28. Many of the finest passages in his troversial writings, are sometimes spoken of, even by favourable judges, as declamation. But here, at least, he does not declaim. He reasons, and supports his reasoning by so many authorities and examples, fetched from the Scriptures, or from the most unobjectionable authors of ancient and modern times, that he overwhelms and bears down before him all his antagonists, triumphantly establishing the doctrine, that divorce, properly regulated, can be no other than an important blessing to society. Timid and illjudging persons, however, though convinced of this verity, often hesitate to support it, from the supposition that some truths may prove prejudicial to society; which, though they intend it not, is a most impious and unphilosophical notion, for it supposes God to be in contradiction with himself, to have established laws and relations which it would be destructive to human kind to make known.

29. Milton was wholly incapable of cherishing fancies of this kind. He saw every part of the economy of the universe in harmony with every other part; and even thus early undertook

"To vindicate eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to man."

He, therefore, feared not to encounter the obloquy he foresaw would be heaped upon him, for thus

endeavouring, by one bold effort, "to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of man," insisting on the necessity of recovering domestic liberty, and of preceding the reforms of the state by a more important reform in the household laws, which, ill understood, had banished peace and love from the Christian hearth.

30. His ideas of woman must be sought for in this treatise, not in Johnson. Here we find him representing her as man's best companion, and in the sense most flattering to the sex, as the companion of his intellect, with whom he might well be content, though no other rational creature existed, to spend a life devoted to each other. For St. Augustin, in his commentary on the words,— "And the Lord said, It is not good that man should be alone," having contended that, excepting for the continuation of the human race," manly friendship, in all other regard, had been a more becoming solace for Adam, than to spend so many secret years in an empty world with one woman;" Milton replies: "But our writers deservedly reject this crabbed opinion; and defend that there is a peculiar comfort in the married state which no other society affords. No mortal nature can endure either in the actions of religion, or study of wisdom, without sometime slackening the cords of intense thought and labour; which, lest we should think faulty, God himself conceals us not his own recreations before the world was built: 'I was, saith the Eternal Wisdom, daily his delight, playing always before him.' And to him indeed wis