look nearly upon the matter, though marriage be most agreeable to holiness, to purity, and justice, yet is not a natural, but a civil and ordained relation. For if it were in nature, no law or crime could disannul it, to make a wife or husband otherwise than still a wife or husband, but only death; as nothing but that can make a father no father, or a son no son.-Adam spake like Adam the words of flesh and bones, the shell and rind of matrimony; but God spake like God, of love, and solace, and meet help, the soul both of Adam's words and of matrimony."

We find nothing worthy of Milton in the remainder of this tedious and heavy Treatise, which may deservedly be consigned to oblivion; as also may the next, entitled Colasterion, which means a scourge or instrument of chastisement; a favourite title at this period; thus we have Burton's Flagellum Pontificis et Episcoporum Latialium, and the celebrated Histriomastix of William Prynne, who was sentenced to a fine of £5,000, and imprisonment for life, by the Starchamber, in 1634, for an alleged libel on the Queen in the said book. It was he, who again in 1637, condemned to have his ears cut off in the pillory (for they had been sewn on in prison), and to be branded on both cheeks, with the letters S. L.-Seditious Libeller, cried out to the executioner, 'Cut me, tear I fear thee not; I fear the fire of hell.'

me;

ON EDUCATION.

UR author is a wholesale root-and-branch Reformer; he would reform everything, church, government, marriage, and now education; but all his systems and schemes happily proved abortive, visionary, vague, and vain. Instead of our public schools and universities, against which he seems to have been deeply prejudiced, he would have in every city "a spacious house and ground about it fit for an academy, which should be at once both school and university, and big enough to lodge a hundred and fifty persons." He objects to "forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment, and not matters to be wrung from poor striplings like the plucking of untimely fruit." Vacations are to be abolished, but he lays down rules for exercise and diet as well as study. We cannot sum up this absurd and impracticable scheme of "the reforming of education" better than in the sarcastic words of a Quarterly Reviewer. 'Here will every stripling, by the time he is one and twenty, have read more Latin and Greek authors than, perhaps, the most veteran scholar in these de

L

generate days: he will besides have mastered the Italian, the Hebrew, the Chaldee, and Syrian at "odd hours." He will have made himself, in his schoolroom and playground, a complete farmer, architect, engineer, sportsman, apothecary, anatomist, law-giver, philosopher, general officer of cavalry, skilled in "embattling, marching, encamping, fortifying, besieging, and battering," equal to the command of an army, the moment he has escaped from the rod; and thus will he prove himself, "in a dangerous fit of the commonwealth, no poor, shaken, uncertain reed, of such a tottering conscience as many great counsellors show themselves, but a stedfast pillar of the state." This is hardly an exaggeration, and Milton himself seems not to have had much faith in the very scheme he propounds, for in conclusion he says, "Only I believe that this is not a bow for every man to shoot in, that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave Ulysses." One or two sentences are all that are worth selecting.

"The end of learning is to repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but

on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.

And

though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman competently wise in his mother dialect only."

He would allow an hour and a half, ere they ate, at noon for exercise, and due rest afterwards. The exercise he commends is the exact use of their weapon, and practice in wrestling, "wherein Englishmen were wont to excel."

"The interim of unsweating themselves regularly, and convenient rest before meat, may, both with profit and delight, be taken up in recreating and composing their travailed spirits with the solemn and divine harmonies of music, heard or learned; either whilst the skilful organist plies his grave and fancied descant in lofty fugues, or the whole symphony with artful and unimaginable touches, adorn and grace the wellstudied chords of some choice composer; sometimes the lute or soft organ-stop waiting on elegant voices, either to religious, martial, or civil ditties; which, if

wise men and prophets be not extremely out, have a great power over dispositions and manners, to smooth and make them gentle from rustic harshness and distempered passions. The like also would not be inexpedient after meat, to assist and cherish nature in her first concoction, and send their minds back to study in good time and satisfaction. Where having followed it close under vigilant eyes, till about two hours before supper, they are, by a sudden alarum or watchword, to be called out to their military motions, under sky or covert, according to the season, as was the Roman wont; first on foot, then, as their age permits, on horseback, to all the arts of cavalry. Besides these constant exercises at home, there is another opportunity of gaining experience to be won from pleasure itself abroad; in those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature, not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth. I should not, therefore, be a persuader to them of studying much then, after two or three years that they have well laid their grounds, but to ride out in companies, with prudent and staid guides, to all the quarters of the land: learning and observing all places of strength, all commodities of building and of soil, for towns and tillage, harbours and ports for trade. Sometimes taking sea as far as to our navy, to learn there also what they can in the practical knowledge of sailing and of sea-fight."