series of events, culminating to some worthy purpose, and sufficiently continuous to remain ever after part of the mind's furniture, to which the memory shall instinctively revert in its search of figures to exemplify the lessons it would illustrate? If Mr. Reade writes for fame, he will yet do something like this; but if writing is with him merely a profession, a means of living, he will of course continue to consult the market, and turn off his wares as rapidly as possible, before he and they become unfashionable.

ART. V.-1. An Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of JOHN MILTON. With an Introduction to Paradise Lost. By THOMAS KEIGHTLEY. London: Chapman and Hall. 1855. 8vo. pp. 484.

2. MILTON. A Sheaf of Gleanings after his Biographers and Annotators. By JOSEPH HUNTER. London: John Russell Smith. 1850. 12mo. pp. 72.

3. The Poetical Works of JOHN MILTON, with a Life by REV. JOHN MITFORD. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1854. 3 vols.

It is for no lack of prejudice and caprice in commentators, controversialists, and unfledged philologians, that the works of many of our older writers have not been frittered away as to their original strength and purity, and nothing left but a few fragments, which, rescued from the accumulating slime by curious hands, might afford some idea of the primitive formation. Yet, thanks to the enduring offspring of the press, we can in most cases, in English literature, turn from the deposit left by the retreating tide of each generation, to the original rock, which, thrown up on its own shore, no succeeding waves have reached. To those who with venerating care and love seek to protect this rock from sacrilegious hands, to point out the rich veins or the concealed gems, we cannot be too grateful; and when amongst the increasing drift they seek to preserve whatever of value may have been washed up by the sea of letters, and the results are clearly placed before us for

our instruction and profit, we can hardly over-estimate the cost at which we receive the benefit.

Those of the great dramatist alone excepted, Milton's writings have been the object of more conjecture, praise, and detraction, of more worthless and more elegant criticism, than those of any other English poet. He lived and moved in an age when in England no expressed thought passed unquestioned, — when there was a grand upheaving of old modes of faith and of action. He mingled fiercely, and as a literary champion, in the controversies of the times, and it is to this fact, aside from the beauty of his lighter verse or the bold flight of his epic Muse, that we must look, when we seek to account for the swarms of writers, who, with good or evil intent, have followed in the train of his original mind.

For his contemporary commentators, it was difficult to look impartially at any of the productions of Milton, no matter how free from political taint. He was one in whose vigorous pen they had exulted, or whose well-sustained assaults had filled them with rage. Even so late as when Johnson wrote his "Lives of the Poets," the old fire was still burning, and his Toryism was impregnated with the true bitterness of the Cavalier, with so little change, in a country like England, is political feeling transmitted with estates and customs. The views which prompted the great moralist to clutch at straws and poorly executed forgeries to slur Milton's fame, and which produced that life and critique which even Johnson's latest editor acknowledges to be predjudiced and unfair, — although he mildly thinks the fault lies more in the manner than the matter, we can but think, were very much the same that a century before produced Winstanley's sketch. That dizzard of a critic devotes three or four pages of his small octavo, "The Lives of the Poets," to the royalist John Cleveland, who might now almost rank with Mr. Lowell's very dead bards, while he kindly informs us that "John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English Poets, having written two Heroick Poems and a Tragedy; namely, Paradice Lost,

Paradice Regain'd, and Sampson Agonistes. But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honorable repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr King Charles the First."

But Johnson's attack was not unattended with good; for during the next twenty years the press teemed with editions of Milton, some of a most beautiful execution. New defenders and commentators sprang up, Hayley and Warton, Lofft, Dunster, Pearce, Symmons, and a host of others; some as violent on the one side as Johnson had been on the other. Greatest of all in bulk arose Todd, who with a shark's maw devoured all that came in his way, and, notwithstanding the many hard things said of him as an editor, his labors have been the staff upon which all later commentators have been more or less glad to lean. For the last fifty years, Todd for the poetical, and Symmons for the prose works, have been the Miltonic Encyclopædia, and as to the former, especially, it will probably be long ere any one will seek to displace his from its rank as the variorum edition. But this has been the age of reviewers and essayists, and articles on Milton in the English and American periodicals, many of them rich in merit, have been very numerous. Brydges, Mitford, Macaulay, Hallam, and other names of note, have appeared in the field, to say nothing of German, French, and American writers, and to the list we now have to add, with no little pleasure, that of Thomas Keightley, the work bearing whose name stands at the head of this article.

To pick the way amongst the débris of more than two hundred years, to know when to accept and when to reject, to weigh nicely so many clashing opinions and judgments, is no trifling task; but Mr. Keightley has performed the labor with equal skill and penetration. To set forth some of the authorities that have been consulted, and to furnish an idea of the estimation in which they are held, we give the following ex. tract from one of the "Notes."

"Milton's own Latin poems supply a few incidents of his life; and in his Apology for Smectymnuus and his Defensio Secunda he has

furnished us with several interesting circumstances of his early life and his travels on the Continent. From his Latin letters, also, a few particulars may be gleaned.

"John Aubrey, the celebrated antiquary, who was personally acquainted with Milton, left in manuscript several circumstances relating to the biography of the poet. These furnished materials to Wood for his account of Milton in the Athenæ Oxonienses, and they have been published in the present century.

"Edward Phillips, the poet's youngest nephew, when publishing a translation of his uncle's Latin Epistles in 1694, prefixed to it an account of his life. This, though more brief than were to be desired, is extremely interesting, and is valuable as being the work of one so intimately connected with its subject. But we must recollect that it was probably written from memory only, more than twenty years after the death of the poet, and nearly half a century from the time that Phillips had been residing in his house. It may, therefore, not be free from error. "In 1698, four years after Phillips, John Toland, the well-known deistic writer, prefixed a Life to the folio edition of Milton's prose works. It is written in a grave and manly tone, and furnishes some additional particulars. . . . .

"In 1725 Elijah Fenton prefixed an elegant sketch of Milton's Life to an edition of his poems; but it contained nothing that was not previously known.

"Jonathan Richardson, the painter, published in 1734,- in conjunction with his son, who possessed the learning in which he was himself deficient, Notes on Milton, to which he prefixed a Life, containing a few particulars not to be found in those of Toland or Phillips, and which he had obtained from Pope, or from the poet's granddaughter.

"The learned and laborious Dr. Thomas Birch edited in 1738 a new edition of the prose works; and in the Life which he prefixed to it, his researches enabled him to add several interesting particulars. He was the first to direct attention to what is called the Cambridge Manuscript of Comus and some of the other poems.

"Newton's edition of Milton's Paradise Lost appeared first in 1749. The Life is tamely but impartially written, and contains hardly any additional matter.

"The Life of Milton has since been written by the vigorous but strongly prejudiced Johnson, the tame and super-elegant Hayley, the dry and ponderous Todd,* the impetuous and violent Symmons, the

"We trust we shall be excused, when we say that, in our opinion, Todd's Life of Milton is the very beau idéal of bad biography."

just, moderate, and elegant Mitford, and others; but of necessity they could add little to the previous stock. Thomas Warton had, however, in the second edition of the Minor Poems, in 1791, brought to light, from the archives of Doctors' Commons, Milton's Nuncupative Will, and the Depositions connected with it, which furnish some very interesting particulars respecting the domestic life of the poet in his latter years. Early in the present century Mr. Lemon discovered in the State Paper Office various documents relating to the Powell family, and also made extracts from the Orders of Council during the time of Milton's secretaryship, all of which appeared for the first time in 1809, in Todd's second edition of the Poetical Works. Finally, in 1823, the researches of Mr. Lemon brought to light the long-lost De Doctrina Christiana, and some documents connected with it, which will be found in the Bishop of Winchester's Preliminary Observations, and in the later editions of Todd's Milton. Additional particulars relating to Milton and his family have been discovered by Mr. Hunter, and published by him in his tract entitled 'Milton.'

"For our account of Milton's family and friends we have been chiefly indebted to Warton in his edition of the Minor Poems, and to Godwin's Lives of Edward and John Phillips."—pp. 114-116.

The Life by Mitford above referred to is prefixed to the beautiful edition of Milton's Complete Works published by Pickering in eight octavo volumes, books which it is a luxury even to look into, and which every lover of Milton, or even of a beautiful book, should endeavor to possess. It is, besides, the only complete uniform edition of the Prose and Poetical Works that has been published. A briefer sketch by Mitford, copied from Pickering's so-called Aldine edition, is to be found in the excellent Boston edition of the poets now in the course of publication by Messrs. Little, Brown, & Co., whose liberality and enterprise deserve the thanks of the whole community.

We must admit that, after reading the Preface to Mr. Keightley's volume, we expected to lay it aside with but little more than a glance of curiosity; for with much that it was well to mention, he has mingled passages that it would have been far better to omit. It is to be expected of writers of "forty thousand copies sold in a week," that they should chant their own praises, and we believe it is common in this country for persons ambitious of fame to insert their memoirs, with a