ing him as "a man of low stature, fair complexion, a yellowish beard, a high forehead; between forty and fifty years of age." Being taken in Bedfordshire, he was brought back to London, and part of his sentence was executed on him in this manner, in the palace of Westminster: he was severely whipped before being placed in the pillory, after which he had one of his ears cut off; then one side of his nose was slit; then he was branded on the cheek with a redhot iron, with the letters S. S., signifying a Stirrer up of Sedition. After this torture he was carried back to the Fleet prison, where he was kept in close custody. Precisely one week afterwards, his wounds upon the back, nose, and ears being yet unclosed, he was whipped again at the pillory in Cheapside, and there had the remainder of his sentence executed upon him by cutting off the remaining ear, slitting the other side of the nose, and branding the other cheek. 'Thus horribly disfigured, he was remanded to prison, where he lay for ten years. And all this accumulation of refined torture, which reminds one of the palmy days of the Inquisi

tion in Spain or Italy, on account of the publication of an obnoxious Puritan pamphlet.

The generous soul of Milton, sickened by the atrocity of this and similar acts, was moved to its profoundest depths, and as we have seen, he turned with loathing from the service of a church which had so far forgotten its Protestantism as to dig up from its grave of two hundred years the horrors of the Inquisition, and which with one hand shackled the press, while with the other it gagged the lips of free inquiry. He was not willing "to subscribe himself slave," by stifling his honest Puritan convictions in order to enter upon an ecclesiastical career.

Cut off thus from his chosen avenue of usefulness, he finally, though not without anxious and prayerful meditation, determined to devote himself to a life of continued study, with the secret purpose of doing his utmost to elevate and enrich the literature of his time. From some random remarks of his, it has been conjectured that he had thoughts of studying the law. However this may be, it is certain that he took no steps towards the mastery of

that science, leaving it for his brother Christopher to become the lawyer of the family, which posterity has never regretted.

Milton's idea of his mission and duty as a literary man was high and noble. He ventured to hope that, by "hard labor," which he took to be the portion of his life, he might be the instrument of some good, and "perhaps leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die." His chief aim was, as he has himself said, to be "an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among my own citizens throughout this island, in the mother dialect; that what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this advantage of being a Christian, might do for mine.”

The literature of that age stood greatly in need of pious and elevated intellects. English letters were never more brilliant and witty than then; neither were they ever more lax and licentious. It was the era of loose dramatists and drunken wits, of infidel satirists and

epigrammatic sneerers. The scholarship of

the French Revolution was not more atheistic. Ben Jonson, the poet laureate of England in 1632, was a haunter of taverns and a wine bloat-stains which his rare genius cannot eradicate. Literature was taken possession of by Beaumont and. Fletcher, by Webster and Massenger; and though Shakspeare had already written himself into immortality, and Spenser's sweet muse had sung, their efforts, however admirable, were certainly far from being tinctured with a religious spirit. Indeed the graceless letters of the time sadly needed the Christian leaven; and that was precisely what John Milton intended to supply-what he, better than almost any other man who has lived before or since, was fitted and mentally equipped to do.

Though he says he "spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers" while at Horton, Milton's intellectual labor seems to have been really exhaustive, embracing a "ceaseless round of study and reading." His pen was seldom idle. It was

during the first two and a half years of his

tarry in the hamlet, that he composed five of his finest English poems-the "Sonnet to a Nightingale," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Arcades," and "Comus." The first was a composition in the "Petrarchian stanza," species of verse made familiar to him by his readings in the Italian poets. The poem is light, airy, and very graceful.

Next came "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." These are two of the most splendid short poems in the language. The diction is exceedingly rich and melodious, while many of the ideas are quaintly expressed. They display exquisite feeling; and the imaginative subtilty and musical art with which he manages the two styles of verse-"L'Allegro" invoking Mirth, attended by Jest and Jollity; "Il Penseroso," in contrast, bidding Mirth begone, and invoking the divine maid Melancholy, robed in pensive black, with rapt, heaven-directed eyes-proves Milton to have been at twenty-five one of the most skilful and wonderful of poets.

"Arcades" and "Comus" were conceived in a different vein, being masques, a species of