consecrating his poetry to the praise of religion and duty. Placed, as it happened, between two ages, he participates in their two characters, as a stream which, flowing between two different soils, is tinged by both their hues. A poet and a Protestant, he receives from the closing age the free poetic afflatus, and from the opening age the severe political religion. He employed the one in the service of the other, and displayed the old inspiration in new subjects. In his works we recognize two Englands: one, impassioned for the beautiful, devoted to the emotions of an unshackled sensibility and the fancies of pure imagination, with no law but the natural feelings, and no religion but natural belief; willingly pagan, often immoral; such as it is exhibited by Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the superb harvest of poets which covered the ground for a space of fifty years; the other fortified by a practical religion, void of metaphysical invention, altogether political, worshipping rule, attached to measured, sensible, useful, narrow opinions, praising the virtues of the family, armed and stiffened by a rigid morality, driven into prose, raised to the highest degree of power, wealth, and liberty. In this sense, this style and these ideas are monuments of history; they concentrate, recall, or anticipate the past and the future; and in the limits of a single work are found the events and the feelings of several centuries and of a whole nation. [Footnote 105: Matre probatissimâ et eleemosynis per viciniam potissimum nota.--"Defensio Secunda, Life of Milton," by Keightley.] [Footnote 106: "My father destined me while yet a little child for the study of humane letters."--Life by Masson, 1859, I. 51.] [Footnote 107: Queen Elizabeth.] [Footnote 108: The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Mitford, "Paradise Regained," Book I. pp. 201-206.] [Footnote 109: Milton's Prose Works, ed. Mitford, 8 vols., "The Reason of Church Government," I. 150.] [Footnote 110: Milton's Prose Works (Bohn's edition, 1848), "Second Defence of the People of England," p. 257. See also his Italian Sonnets, with their religious sentiment.] [Footnote 111: Milton's Prose Works, Mitford, "Apology for Smectymnuus," I. 270.] [Footnote 112: Ibid. 273. See also his "Treatise on Divorce," which shows clearly Milton's meaning.] [Footnote 113: "Though Christianity had been but slightly taught me, yet a certain reservedness of natural disposition and moral discipline, learnt out of the noblest philosophy, was enough to keep me in disdain of far less incontinences than this of the bordello."--"Apology for Smectymnuus," Mitford, I. 272.] [Footnote 114: An expression of Jean Paul Richter. See an excellent article on Milton in the "National Review," July, 1859.] [Footnote 115: 1643, at the age of 35.]