connection and sequence to all his movements. But the miscellaneous manner in which he handled his theme hardly presents that uniformity of design which is to be found, for instance, in the characteristics of Shaftesbury. He hurries from subject to subject, with as little regard for classification as the author of the "Tales of the Princess Schezerade." Hence, in the course of his aberrations, he himself appears in a thousand different guises, at one time a Stoic, then an Epicurean, then a Stoic again. He had taken Plutarch and Seneca as his model, and the tone and style of his thought had become so completely identified with theirs that he could not sustain himself long in any position, or promise himself constancy in any discussion requiring even ordinary application and perseverance.

This assimilation of himself with the authors of antiquity is one of the most marked of Montaigne's characteristics. It filled his pages with ostentatious citations from the libraries of Greece and Rome, thereby setting the fashion of that pedantic abuse of quotation which long after Balzac attempted to ridicule in his "Barbon," and which, in our own country, Ben Jonson laughed at in his "Silent Woman," and Butler caricatured in his "Hudibras." But it affected him in points of far more serious importance than mere dialectical or rhetorical propriety. It affected him very visibly, for instance, in his sentiments on death and suicide. It would be difficult to name any author, not pretending to inspiration, who has handled more grandly or more solemnly that grandest and most solemn of all themes, the Mortality of Man. The necessity of the inevitable hour, the advantages of contemplating its approach, the philosophy of despising its arrival, are all urged over and over again with a pathos and an eloquence that might have been envied in the Porch or the Academy. But of

those loftier motives which, for the Christian, disarms the King of Terrors, robs the grave of its sting, and makes death itself the portal to life, he makes as little account as though he knew no more about the secrets of immortality than Epictetus, or any of those poetic heathens who filled their stanzas with stories about Charon and the Capacious Urn. Early training, again, may be permitted to explain the preference which he gives to Epaminondas, Alexander, and Cæsar, over the generals of his own day; or to account for the zeal he displays about the factions of Consular Rome, contrasted with his apathetic demeanour towards the civil broils of his own country; but no partiality can excuse his advocacy of voluntary death, the finest, as he calls it, of all deaths. It is true that in the height of his career he pretends to recollect the canon of the Creator against self-murder; but though he pauses between the fortitude of Regulus and the weakness of Cato, it is clear that the balance of his decision is in favour of the εύλογον ἐξαγωγην of the Stoics. In his journey through Italy, he had seen Tasso pining in the dungeons of Ferrara. Addison, when he passed over the same ground, heard the gondoliers of Venice beguiling the toil of the oar with stanzas from the "Jerusalem Delivered." Montaigne could not mention the miserable plight of the poor poet without the cruel declaration that he had less of compassion than of anger for the man who could thus be content to survive himself and his works.

Such equivocal philosophy as this must, as a matter of course, considerably narrow Montaigne's reputation in the estimate of posterity. Whether his eccentricities, to call them by the mildest term, were the fruit of design or of accident, whether they formed part of his schemes, or whether they were not rather owing to the absence of all scheme, it is difficult to decide. The discursive, loose,

and unmethodical style in which he set down his thoughts must be held responsible for some of the apparent contradictions and mutations that chequered his judgment. At any rate, though he affords ample grounds for the charge of pyrrhonism, those who accuse him so positively of absolute irreligion do so at the risk of their own penetration. It will be more charitable to regard him rather as one of those

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Spirits of a middle sort,

Too black for heaven, yet too white for hell,

Who just dropped half way down, nor lower fell."

What Montaigne's real merit as a thinker is, I conceive to be this. He was the first, who had the boldness in an age of pedants to strip pedantry of much of its domineering pretensions. In his position, as the recognized antagonist of conventionalism, he stood face to face with the accumulated dogmatism of centuries, and this too when the faggots were yet drying that were to burn Bruno. It is true that the extent of the reaction, the force of the rebound operated injuriously on his own character, that in the first enjoyment of freedom he was in danger of falling, and actually did fall into licentiousness. But it is certain that his very exaggerations were not without fruit. By pointing out to men with a boldness and a distinctness that could not but arrest attention the road to emancipation, he rendered them less tolerant of tyranny. By illustrating to them, with a positiveness of colouring almost revolting, the utter fallibility of human reason, he assisted them in their efforts to release themselves from the control of any other reason but their own. By teaching them, in a word, to doubt, he taught them, involuntarily indeed, and, like Balaam, against his intention, to examine. In this view, and in this view only, can Montaigne be regarded as an ally of the Reformation.

In many other respects he was far in advance of his generation. Indeed, whatever are his failings, however little Christianity owes to a sceptic who insinuated that the creed of the Christian is sustained by the same innate principle of credulity as that which actuates the Mahommedan or the Bhuddist, however Protestants may feel towards the bigot who thought Protestantism a mere "moral frenzy," it cannot be denied that society is indebted to the liberality of the thinker who, in an age when Baroco and Baralipton were supreme, published in language as modern as anything to be found in the Tirocinium of Cowper,' views of education enlightened enough to win the future approbation of Locke; who, while De Thou was filling his book with the grossest fictions of witchcraft, laughed to scorn the absurdities of demonology; and who, though a contemporary of the Estrapade, protested against the use of torture almost half a century before the use of torture had been authorized by the conduct of our own Bacon.

'It is no accident or inadvertence that has thus associated the poet and the philosopher. Those who will be at the pains to compare the "Review of Schools" and Montaigne's twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth Essays, will find ample compensation in tracing out not only an analogy of sentiment, but even a verbal identity, in the pages of the two authors.

CHAPTER II.

MILTON :-HIS POLITICS, PROSE WRITINGS, AND

BIOGRAPHERS.

Popular ignorance of Milton's early Idiosyncracies.--The Literary Tastes of his Youth.-A Positivist, and a Satirist.-His exoteric Education.The tendency of Politics, from the Reformation, to be associated with Religious Considerations.-Origin of this Amalgamation.-Its Effect in producing Traitors on both sides; Campions and Parsonses; Vanes and Hugh Peterses. Its Influence on the Prerogative. — Striking Reactionary Spirit in the Present Century, illustrated by the Divorce between Legislation and Religion.-Attempt at Protests.—Mr. Gladstone's "Church and State."-Mr. Sewell's "Christian Politics."-This tendency to develop the Personality of the Social Unit neutralized, however, by the Press, and other Literary Corporations.-Return to Milton.- His Political Connection with Cromwell examined.-As a Politician contrasted with Southey.-Cromwell's Puritanism investigated by the light of his Letters.-Mr. Buckle's Assertion that the Great Rebellion was a War of Classes, examined and refuted.-Origin of the Scriptural and Pagan Complexions severally assumed by the English and French Revolutions.-Milton's Revolutionary Speculations futile.-Natural Aversion in the English Mind to Political Experiments.-Return of Charles,-Singular Contrasts in his Character and Habits.- Position of Milton.-His Prose Writings compared with Burke's.-Examination of his Biographies.-The Present Age the Age of Biography.-Cause of this.-Growth of Milton's Political Reputation. -Warburton.-Warton.-Merits of Johnson as Critic and Biographer. -The prevailing Views of History in his Day.-Present Taste for Heroizing.-Mr. Carlyle.-Damaging Influence on the Integrity of History. Mr. Masson's "Life of Milton."-The Theory of the Association of History with Biography: How far Practicable.

MILTON Somewhere compares the career of a great and a good man to a poem. Estimating a poem with reference to its dramatic divisions of a beginning, a middle, and an end, the comparison is singularly applicable to Milton's own career. His life comprehending, as it does, that great Epic in our history which relates the