AUTHORIS PRO SE DEFENSIO.

HIS Third Defence is omitted in Bohn's edition

THIS

of the Prose Works of Milton, and the reason I presume to be, because no translation into English of this work exists. Its full title is, "The Author's Defence of himself, against Alexander More, Ecclesiastic, that he is rightly said to be the author of an infamous libel, entitled, 'The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven for vengeance on the English Parricides."" In this he vindicates himself, as in the First and Second Defence he had vindicated the people and the Republic. "Quando hoc necessario tollendum mihi onus est, dabit quisque veniam, uti spero, si populo qui non defui pridem et Reipublicæ, mihimet nunc non defuero." It consists of two parts, in the first he proves that he had correctly assumed in his Second Defence that More was the author of the pamphlet in question; and in the second he replies to a rejoinder which his miserable adversary' had put forth. This Milton entitles, "Authoris ad Alexandri Mori Supplementum Responsio." No doubt it is to this "Authoris pro se Defensio" that the elder Disraeli especially alludes when he descants on the acrimony

of Milton. How ridiculous the attitudes in which great men appear, when they sink 'the dignity of the author in the malignity of the man,' and 'employ the style of the fish-market.' We have too much reverence for Milton to follow him in his, in some respects, still magnificent, torrent of abuse in which he well-nigh annihilates his opponent; nor shall we retail that mutual recrimination of infamous and scurrilous charges of which perhaps both were innocent; certainly the one, who had obtained his information by hearsay, and by, I regret to write it, a mean and dishonourable correspondence with friends abroad where More resided. Besides our design is to reproduce whatever is of intrinsic worth and interest in the prose of Milton, and in this performance we meet with no sentence of a venturous edge; on the contrary, all is uttered in the height of malice and irritation. Consequently there is nothing to transcribe-nothing to rescue from that oblivion in which it has so long lain buried in a learned language. We must except the incidental allusions to some personal details of his history, as, for instance, the state of his health and of his eyesight, and the domestic affliction under which he was suffering when he wrote the Second Defence; and now, two years after, he writes this Treatise, his great adversary, Salmasius, dead, his eyesight irrecoverably gone, and his health partially despaired of, and partially restored. The

"domestic grief of two funerals," mentioned in the passage we shall quote, we conceive-for the chronological arrangement of the events of Milton's life is by no means very clear-refers to the death of his second wife in childbed, Catharine Woodcock, whom he lost the year after their marriage; that his grief was most poignant appears from his exquisite sonnet on his deceased wife, beginning

"Methought I saw my late espoused saint

Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave.”

It is remarkable that he lost his first wife, Mary Powell, the mother of his three daughters, on a similar melancholy occasion. "Verum me, tum maxime, et infirma simul valetudo, et duorum funerum luctus domesticus, et defectum jam penitus oculorum lumen diversâ longe sollicitudine urgebat: foris quoque adversarius ille prior (Salmasius), isti (More) longe præferendus, impendebat; jamjamque se totis viribus incursurum indies minatabitur; quo derepente mortuo, levatum me parte aliquâ laboris ratus, et valetudine partim desperatâ partim restitutâ, utcunque confirmatus, ne omnino vel summorum hominum expectationi deesse, vel omnem inter tot mala abjecisse curam existimationis viderer, ut primum de isto Clamatore anonymo certum aliquid comperiendi facultas data est, hominem aggredior. De te, More, dictum hoc volo; quem ego nefandi illius clamoris vel esse authorem, vel esse pro authore haud injuria habendum statuo."

We are now approaching the conclusion of our task, or the one book of Familiar Letters is all that remains for examination and selection. We find nothing further which will serve our purpose either in this "Authoris pro se Defensio," or in those smaller works of which we have given the dates, or in the History of England, which, though written by a schoolmaster, has never become a school-book, or in the Latin Grammar, which no one has ever used, or in the Treatise on Logic, which has never displaced Aldrich or Huyshe, or, lastly, in his posthumous Treatise on Christian Doctrine. We confess to a little disappointment, notwithstanding the considerable amount of genuine gold we have succeeded in extracting even from some of the most unpromising and drossiest of his works. We thought, unreasonably perhaps, that "the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life," would prove the vitality, and be found somewhere latent in every single work he had published. We thought that it might be said of him, 'nihil tetigit quod non ornavit'-that such a mind could not write long on any subject without some scintillation of transcendant genius sparkling on the page sooner or later; with this conviction we set out, but we now close our labours with this sanguine feeling considerably modified. We do not just see that he who enchants and enchains us in his poetry must

necessarily do the same in his prose; that he who could write the Paradise Lost, and Comus, and Lycidas, must be the same thing to worship and to wonder at,' when, with passions roused and self-love wounded, he takes up his pen and parable against some wretched and contemptible libeller like Salmasius or Alexander More. Passion and prejudice can throw a dark and impenetrable cloud over the brightest intellect— even over such a mind as Milton's; and the Divine Spirit which dictated to him the whole of Paradise Lost, and most certainly some parts of the Areopagitica, forsook him when he took the field against such miserable antagonists, and in so bad and unrighteous a quarrel.

The fact is, our mind has so long dwelt upon Milton, that we fear it has contracted an almost morbid over-activity—what the Greeks express by the one word Tepívoca, but which has no equivalent in our own language. This expressive word, translated by Liddell and Scott, 'over-wiseness,' occurs in Thucydides (iii. 43,) in the speech of Diodotus, and denotes that over-suspiciousness of the motives of their public men, into which fault the Athenians were so apt to fall. Thus the word is used in a good and bad sense, but in both signifies the excess of an active mind, which not only sees all that is really to be seen in a subject, but fancies something more. We were amused to read Arnold's note, explanatory of this word, as it exactly