“It is acknowledged by all that it is written with a calm and conscientious desire for truth, like that of a man who had forgotten or dismissed the favourite animosities of his youth, and who had retired within himself, in the dignity of age, to employ the unimpaired energies of his intellect on the most important and awful subject of inquiry. The haughtiness of his temper, the defiance of his manner, his severe and stoical pride, are no longer seen. He approaches the book of God with an humble and reverential feeling, and with such a disposition of piety, united to so powerful an intellect, and such immense stores of learning, who would not have expected to have seen the ‘star-bright form’ of truth appear from out the cloud; but wherever we look, the pride of man’s heart is lowered, and the weakness of humanity displayed. With all his great qualifications for the removal of error and the discovery of truth, _he failed_”.(14) He not only failed, but he seems to have been a perfect type of that unsteadiness in error which St. Paul describes in his Epistle to the Ephesians: he was as a little child “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine”. He wandered, we are told, “from Puritanism to Calvinism, from Calvinism to an esteem for Arminius, and finally, from an accordance with the Independents and Anabaptists to a dereliction of every denomination of Protestants”.(15) When this was the fate of his gigantic intellect, how can humbler minds hope to attain success if they employ the same means? It seems to us, therefore, that we can find some excuse for the errors of Milton in the false principles which he had imbibed in his youth. And, with all his faults, we cannot but revere the magnanimity of his spirit, the splendour of his genius. But we have no sympathy with those who, having the rich inheritance of an infallible authority for their guide in matters of religion, would yet claim for themselves the right to launch forth into the boundless sea of thought without restriction or restraint; who blindly embrace the conclusions of Milton, while they reject his premises; and who imitate him in his wanderings, while they cannot imitate that nobility of sentiment and that loftiness of eloquence which shed a lustre even around his errors. THE SEE OF KILLALOE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.