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His col broadest grounds of personal liberty of both thought and action; and the time is THE completion of Professor Masson's fast approaching when an unlimited uni"Life of John Milton: Narrated in Con- versality will be acknowledged as the nection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, only possible area for the exhibition of and Literary History of his Time," is an Milton's genius. As soon as he emerged event worthy of grateful recognition by from the strife of parties and the odium all liberal Englishmen. The first volume of the Restoration, his poetical genius was of the work was in our hands in Decem- acknowledged on all sides, and his name ber 1858. The preface to the sixth vol-placed second in the roll of English ume is dated December, 1879. To those poets. who welcomed the first volume the appearances of the others from time to time during a period of twenty-one years have afforded a series of literary pleasures of no common kind. Professor Masson has placed the whole of the events and circumstances of Milton's life before us in one work. The twenty-one years of publication must have been preceded by many years of labor in preparation and collection, in order to account for the large result. But it is such a result as could only be attained by the well-directed labors of a single mind. No "Milton Society" could have wrought a work like this; but the work itself for the operations of such a society. Although the professor has reaped the whole field and carried the harvest, yet he may have left many dropped and scattered ears for the gleaners. Before long a Milton Society may perhaps be formed on some basis like that of the various Shakespeare and other societies. At present Milton has scarcely passed out of the sphere of party; and while in such a sphere, sections of party will set up their peculiar claims to him. Some of our readers may have a recollection of the unsuccessful attempt some years ago to establish a Milton Club, which failed in consequence of a design to subject the membership to a kind of orthodox test. This experiment is not likely to be repeated. The influence of Milton's name can never be enlisted in favor of any scheme which does not rest upon the may leave room The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David Masson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 6 vols., 1859-1880. London: Macmillan and Co. A century later, when men looked back to the English Commonwealth for the rise of the principles of civil and religious liberty, Milton's political writings attracted the attention they deserved. lected prose works were first published in 1698, with Toland's biography prefixed. These volumes are folios, and though bearing the name of Amsterdam on their title-pages, were really printed in London. Birch's editions followed in 1738 and 1753; and Dr. Symmons's edition, with a translation of the "Defensio Secunda " by Robert Fellowes, M.A., was published in 1806, in seven handsome 8vo volumes, with a life by Dr. Symmons, in many respects, and from a Whig-Revolution point of view, very admirable. A popular edition appeared in 1838 with a fine "Introductory Review," by Robert Fletcher; and now the whole of the prose works, including Bishop Sumner's translation of the "Treatise on Christian Doctrine," forms part of Bohn's Standard Library. It may, therefore, be fairly said that the -a literature in body of Milton's works themselves is in every library, and is an element in the intellectual life-blood of England. Still, there is one characteristic feature of Milton's mind which removes him from the admiration and sympathy of a considerable section of the religious world. This is his rigid, anti-sacerdotal spirit. Milton is essentially Protestant, and, therefore, repugnant to all ritualists, whether Roman or Anglican. Even our great statesman, whose Homeric studies have won for him a high place in literature, cannot give ungrudging welcome to Milton. Homer and Shakespeare claim universal homage without limitation or Milton is both a Puritan and a reserve. heretic, and draws from his countrymen | did not begin until after his return, in the a less complete, though perhaps an in- July of 1639, from his visit to the Contitenser, worship. Shakespeare was happy in filling the imagination of mankind with a flood of light unobscured by a cloud or even a transient vapor from the political and ecclesiastical turmoils of his age. So might it have been with the great poet of the seventeenth century, had he not fallen "on evil days." nent. He would gladly have remained abroad much longer than he did; and, indeed, he intended to pursue his travels into Greece, and he would doubtless have spent more time in the cities and among the societies most congenial to his tastes and his lofty literary aims. When he was enjoying all the delights of foreign In preparing for the work of his life as travel and society, he had already brought that of a poet in the highest sense, the his education to a perfect maturity; and purposes of Milton were so pure and so by his writings up to that time he had lofty that there can be no doubt he would, satisfied the best judges as well as himbut for adverse circumstances, have shone self of his powers and capacities for as a luminary in literature without admix- poetry. Nothing had been omitted or ture of mundane things. Until his thir- left incomplete in his work of self-culture ty-first year, Milton was only a son of the and preparation. He had submitted himMuses. His stores of learning and ob- self to the judgment of the most learned servation, his aspiring genius, his chaste and most noble of his contemporaries in life, and his devout spirit were being England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, trained and directed into the sphere of and had won from every quarter approval the imagination for the production of and encouragement. Grotius, Galileo, works which should win an immortality and Manso, and many other poets, scholof fame. It is difficult to conjecture what ars, and divines, received the young Enthe results of his genius might have beenglishman, and recognized his talent. His without the interruptions of political con- English poetry sounded with strains unflict and the modifications of religious heard since Shakespeare sang. "L'Allecontroversy. But surely no soaring spirit gro" and "Il Penseroso," "Comus" and was ever so clogged and hindered by cir-"Lycidas," fell on the ears of his councumstances as that wandering student, who was drawn by events from the fields of Italy and the mountains of Greece to yoke Pegasus to the task of dragging his country out of the sloughs of despotism and anarchy before he could be allowed to rise from the earth and traverse the "realms of gold." Thus it happens that there are two Miltons with whom we have to deal, and until both of them shall be completely presented to us we have a difficulty in estimating the whole man. Professor Masson has made this presentation, and in his volumes we have all the materials before us. The difficulty of the work seems to have pressed itself on the mind of the biographer with especial force as soon as he had completed his first volume. This volume covers the period of Milton's life from his birth in 1608 until his thirty-first year, and is almost purely a narrative biography; and for this reason: that the disturbing influences of the poet's career trymen with a delight which none but the strains of the age of Spenser could awaken. In Latin verse, and in the com. plimentary sonnets which he wrote in the Italian tongue, he had approved himself a master in the opinion of foreigners. It might seem that nothing remained but to wait for time to mature his mind for some supreme expression of his imagination which the world would not willingly let die. But the career he longed for and expected was suddenly checked, and it might have been forever. It is this change from an even tenor to an interrupted life which has led his biog rapher to adopt the method of placing the history of the times and the biography of his subject before the reader in such a way as to do full justice to both. The first volume, as we said, was out in December, 1858. The second volume came out in March, 1871; and in his preface of that date, Professor Masson felt himself called upon to explain the plan of 2 his work—a plan partly adopted in the | into "books," and every book devoted to first volume, but not so necessary to it as distinct portions of "history" and "biogto the volumes which were to follow. He raphy;" while the chapters into which says: Now, while it is the right of the public to say what they want in the shape of a book, it is equally the right of an author to say what he means to offer; and accordingly I repeat that this work is not a Biography only, but a Biography together with a History. . . No one can study the life of Milton as it ought to be studied without being obliged to study, extensively and intimately, the contemporary history of England and even, incidentally, of Scotland and Ireland too. Experience has confirmed my previous conviction that it must be so. Again and again in order to understand Milton, his position, his motives, his thoughts by himself, his public words to his countrymen and the probable effects of those words, I have had to stop in the mere Biography and range round largely and windingly in the History of his Time, not only as it is presented in well-known books, but as it had to be rediscovered by express and laborious investigation in original and forgotten records. Thus on the very compulsion, or at least by the suasion, of the Biography, a History grew on my hands. "The the books are subdivided take the por. With the plan of the author thus clearly indicated, we have no right to complain that Professor Masson's six volumes are both a history and a biography; and when once we have discovered his method, we find it a very useful one. Milton's life and writings were so mixed up with public affairs that any adequate account of him implies what Masson describes as the "incessant connection of the history and the biography - the history always sending me back more fully informed for the biography, and the biography again suggesting new tracks for the history." Nor are the intercalary portions of the work confined to the ordinary history of the period. In the first volume we have a comprehensive survey of British litera-promised, and is very much needed; and ture, giving a view of it generally at the the more complete the apparatus, the bettime when Milton resolved to connect ter for future readers. Though we read himself with it. And in the sixth vol- the volumes as they came out, when we ume a chapter of one hundred and thirty- look into them again with the intention of two pages is devoted to a survey of the giving some account of them, we cannot first seven years of the literature of the but feel dismayed at the extent of the field Restoration. From the second volume which lies open before us. It is impossionwards we find every volume divided | ble for us to do more than to invite others |