Parliament who convoked the meeting, selected the members of Assembly, nominated its president, prescribed its bye-laws, and kept a firm hold and a vigilant eye on all their proceedings. Still, with all these drawbacks, it must be admitted that Parliament could hardly have made a selection of more pious, learned, and conscientious men. The Assembly consisted of men nominated by the members for each county sending in suitable names. The two divines appointed for Suffolk were Mr. Thomas Young, of Stowmarket, and Mr. John Phillips, of Rentall. The Vicar, it is said, sometimes acted as chairman, but this, as Mr. Hollingsworth remarks, is doubtful. Mr. Young’s claim to fame rests on something greater than his sermon, or his position in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, or his mastership of Jesus College. He was, as we have said, Milton’s schoolmaster. The poet tells us: ‘’Tis education forms the common mind; Just as a twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’ If so, much of Milton’s piety and lofty principle and massive learning must have come to him from the Stowmarket Vicar. In our day there is little chance of a young scholar becoming imbued with Miltonian ideas on the subject of civil and religious liberty. That sublime genius which was to sing in immortal verse of ‘Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe,’ must have owed much to Dr. Young—a debt which the poet acknowledged, as we have already seen, in no niggardly way. Amongst Milton’s Latin letters is the following, which has been translated by Professor Masson thus: ‘Although I had resolved with myself, most excellent preceptor, to send you a certain small epistle composed in metrical numbers, yet I did not consider that I had done enough unless I also wrote something in prose: for, truly, the singular and boundless gratitude of my mind which your deserts justly claim from me was not to be expressed in that cramped mode of speech, straitened by fixed feet and syllables, but in a free oration—nay, rather, if it were possible, in an Asiatic exuberance of words. To express sufficiently how much I owe you, were a work far greater than my strength, even if I should call into play all those commonplaces of argument which Aristotle or that dialectician of Paris (Ramus) has collected, or even if I should exhaust all the fountains of oratory. You complain as justly that my letters have been to you very few and very short; but I, on the other hand, do not so much grieve that I have been remiss in a duty so pleasant and so enviable, as I rejoice, and all but exult, at having such a place in your friendship, as that you should care to ask for frequent letters from me. That I should never have written to you for over more than three years, I pray you will not misconceive, but, in accordance with your wonderful indulgence and