small reason to believe the fact. Milton was designed for the church, but he preferred a "blameless silence" to what he considered "servitude and forswearing." At this time, in his twentyfirst year, he had written his grand Hymn on the Nativity, any one verse of which was sufficient to show that a new and great light was about to rise on English poetry. In 1632 he retired from the university, having taken his degree of M.A., and went to his father's house at Horton, Bucks: here, during a residence of five years, he read over all the Greek and Latin classics, and here he wrote his Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas. In 1637, on the death of his mother, Milton traveled into Italy, during which journey he was introduced to Grotius, to Galileo, and to Tasso's patron, Manso. On Milton's return to England, he devoted himself to the education of his nephews, John and Edward Phillips, at his house in Aldersgate-street, which was then "freer from noise than any other in London." Of Milton's system of teaching, we gather, from his letter to Mr. Hartlib, that the knowledge of words is best obtained in union with the knowledge of things; that "language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." He looked upon the reading of good books as the best and only means of obtaining a knowledge of language, wherefore he protests against "the preposterous exaction of forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations," as a way to obtain a knowledge of the language; for he regards them as "the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims, and copious invention." He preferred physical studies to humane or moral studies; but like Bacon, he protests against that method which starts from abstractions and conclusions of the intellect; and he maintains that all true method must begin from the objects of sense. Possibly his protests against making logic and metaphysics the introduction to knowledge in the universities, when they ought to be the climax of knowledge, were more appropriate to his own day, when boys went to Cambridge or Oxford at 15 or 12, than to the present time.

Milton wished his college to be both school and university: the studies, therefore, proceed in an ascending scale, from the elements of grammar to the highest science, as well as to the most practical pursuits. The younger boys are to be especially trained to a clear and distinct pronunciation, "as like as may be to the Italian." Books are to be given them like Cebes or Plutarch, which will "win them early to the love of virtue and true labor." In some hour of the day they are to be taught the rules of arithmetic and the elements of geometry. The evenings are

to be taken up "with the easy grounds of religion, and the study of Scripture.' In the next stage they begin to study books on agriculture, Cato, Varro, and Columella. These books will make them gradually masters of ordinary Latin prose, and will be at the same time “occasions of inciting and enabling them hereafter to improve the tillage of their country." The use of maps and globes is to be learnt from modern authors; but Greek is to be studied as soon as the grammar is learnt, in the "historical physiology of Aristotle and Theophrastus." Latin and Greek authors together are to teach the principles of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and geography. Instruction in architecture, fortification, and engineering follows. In natural philosophy, we ascend through the history of meteors, minerals, plants and living creatures, to anatomy. Anatomy leads on to the study of medicine. Milton would have us always conversant with facts rather than with names. He aims at the useful as directly as the most professed utilitarian. The pupils are to have "the helpful experiences of hunters, fowlers, fishermen, shepherds, gardeners, and apothecaries" to assist them in their natural studies. These studies are to increase their interest in Hesiod, in Lucretius, and in the Georgics of Virgil.

In other words, the tendency of Milton's scheme was not so much to supply the then existing deficiency of instruction in the knowledge of nature, or to substitute some other treatise on such matters for the works of Aristotle, but to exchange, as quietly as possible, and at the same time as decidedly, the merely formal routine of classical teaching for one in which the books that were read might arouse thought as well as exercise memory. His list comprises almost all the technical treatises extant in Latin and Greek, but excludes history and almost all the better known books of poetry, probably because he only intended it for children, and postponed such subjects for the instruction or amusement of riper years. His aims were not those of a mathematician or the philosopher of nature; the state, not science, was in his view, and his object was to make, not good members of a university, but well-informed citizens. To this tend his eulogy of manly exercises and his plans for a common table, which could have had little importance in the eyes of a student. But the ends of Milton's system were as noble and as practicable as those of any that was ever conceived.

LOCKE'S SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.

Equally illustrative of the important business of Education are the writings of John Locke, one of the wisest and sincerest of Englishmen. He was born at Wrington, near Bristol, in 1632.

He was the eldest of two sons, and was educated with great care by his father, of whom he always spoke with the highest respect. and affection. In the early part of his life, his father exacted the utmost deference from his son, but gradually treated him with less and less reserve, and when grown up, lived with him on terms of the most entire friendship; so much so, that Locke mentioned the fact of his father having expressed his regret for giving way to his anger, and striking him once in his childhood when he did not deserve it. In a letter to a friend, written in the latter part of his life, Locke thus expresses himself on the conduct of a father toward his son:

"That which I have often blamed as an indiscreet and dangerous practice in many fathers, viz, to be very indulgent to their children whilst, they are little, and as they come to ripe years to lay great restraint upon them and live with greater reserve toward them, which usually produces an ill understanding between father and son, which cannot but be of bad consequences; and I think fathers would generally do better, as their sons grow up, to take them into a nearer familiarity, and live with them with as much freedom and friendship as their age and temper will allow."

Locke was next placed at Westminster School, from which he was elected, in 1651, to Christchurch, Oxford. Here he applied himself diligently to the study of classical literature; and by the private reading of the works of Bacon and Descartes, he sought to nourish that philosophical spirit which he did not find in the philosophy of Aristotle, as taught in the school at Oxford. Though the writings of Descartes may have contributed, by their precision and scientific method, to the formation of Locke's philosophical style, it was the principle of the Baconian method of observation which gave to the mind of Locke that taste for experimental studies which forms the basis of his own system, and probably determined his choice of a profession. He adopted that of medicine, which, however, the weakness of his constitution prevented him from practicing.

Of the writings of Locke, it must suffice for us to mention his great work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in which, setting aside the whole doctrine of innate notions and principles, the author traces all ideas to two sources, sensation and reflection; treats at large of the nature of ideas, simple and complex; of the operation of the human understanding in forming, distinguishing, compounding, and associating them; of the manner in which words are applied as the representatives of ideas; of the difficulties and obstructions in the search after truth, which arise from the imperfection of these signs; and of the nature, reality, kinds, degrees, casual hindrances, and necessary limits of human knowledge. The influence of this work, written in a plain, clear, expressive style,

upon

the aims and habits of philosophical inquirers, as well as upon the minds of educated men in general, has been extremely beneficial. Locke also wrote Thoughts upon Education, to which Rousseau is largely indebted for his Emile. The following passage on the importance of Moral Education is very striking:

"Under whose care soever a child is put to be taught during the tender and flexible years of his life, this is certain, it should be one who thinks Latin and languages the least part of education; one who, knowing how much virtue and a well-tempered soul is to be preferred to any sort of learning or language, makes it his chief business to formi the mind of his scholars, and give that a right disposition; which, if once got, though all the rest should be neglected, would in due time produce all the rest; and which, if it be not got, and settled so as to keep out ill and vicious habits-languages and sciences, and all the other accomplishments of education, will be to no purpose but to make the worse and more dangerous man."

GRAMMAR-SCHOOLS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary, has left this picture-inlittle of the public schools of his time:

"Before the Reformation, youth were generally taught Latin in the monasteries, and young women had their education not at Hackney, as now, 1678, but at nunneries, where they learnt needle-work, confectionary, surgery, physic (apothecaries and surgeons being at that time very rare), writing, drawing, etc. Old Jacquar, now living, has often seen from his house the nuns of St. Mary Kington, in Wilts, coming forth into the Nymph Hay with their rocks and wheels to spin, sometimes to the number of threescore and ten, all whom were not nuns, but young girls sent there for education." “The gentry and

citizens had little learning of any kind, and their way of breeding up children was suitable to the rest. They were as severe to their children as their schoolmasters, and their schoolmasters as the masters of the House of Correction: the child perfectly loathed the sight of his parents as the slave his torture. Gentlemen of thirty and forty years old were made to stand like mutes and fools bareheaded before their parents; and the daughters (grown women) were to stand at the cupboard-side during the whole time of their proud mother's visits, unless (as the fashion was) leave was desired forsooth that a cushion should be given them to kneel upon, brought them by the serving-man, after they had done penance by standing. The boys had their foreheads turned up and stiffened by spittle."

INFLUENCE OF THE WRITINGS OF LORD BACON.

"Everything relating to the state of the natural sciences at this period," says Dr. Vaughan, "may be found in the writings of Bacon. It was reserved to the genius of that extraordinary man to direct the scientific minds not only of his country but of

Christendom, into the true path of knowledge; to call the attention of men from metaphysical abstraction to the facts of nature; and in this manner to perform the two most important services that could be rendered to the future world of philosophy,-first, by indicating how much it had to unlearn, and how much to acquire; and secondly, by pointing out the method in which the one process and the other might be successfully conducted; and, as this system depended on the most rigid and comprehensive process of experiment, it obtained for its illustrious author the title of the Father of Experimental Philosophy.''

This subject is too vast for a running comment upon the progress of Learning like that which is here attempted. It is by his Essays that Bacon is best known to the multitude. The Novum Organum and De Augmentis are much talked of, but little read. They have, indeed, produced a vast effect upon the opinions of mankind; but they have produced it through the operation of intermediate agents. They have moved the intellects which have moved the world. It is in the Essays alone that the mind of Bacon is brought into immediate contact with the minds of ordinary readers. There he opens an exoteric school, and talks to plain men, in language which everybody understands, about things in which everybody is interested. He has thus enabled those who must otherwise have taken his merits on trust, to judge for themselves; and the great body of readers have, during several generations, acknowledged that the man who has treated with such consummate ability questions with which they are familiar, may well be supposed to deserve all the praise bestowed on him by those who have sat in his inner school. The following passage from the Essays is in Bacon's early style:

"Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use: that is a wisdom without them, and won by observation. Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, have a present wit; and if he read little, have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets witty, the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, morals grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend."

Lord Macaulay has well observed: "It will hardly be disputed that this is a passage to be 'chewed and digested.' We do not believe that Thucydides himself has anywhere compressed so much thought into so small a space."

No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of think

* For educational purposes we recommend attention to the ably edited reprints of the Essays, and The Advancement of Learning, by Thomas Markey, M.A. Archbishop Whately's annotated edition of the Essays is intended for a different class of students.