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"plied its deficiences by an honeft and "ufeful employment."

This is faid with more confidence than the Doctor's careleffnefs in confulting Milton's Biographers will justify. Philips is not one and another; and he is the only original from whom those who have apologised for Milton's employment in teach. ing youth have copied.

Whether Toland knew the particulars of Milton's motives, must be left to God and his own confcience; but to say that "Milton had no fordid or mercenary " purposes" will not imply that he taught for nothing.

Milton's friends are obliged to Dr. Johnfon for doing credit to his fuppofed occupation of a schoolmafter; but To

land had done it before him, whose remarks would hardly have been seconded in the new narrative, if the author had not had fome fellow-feeling of the reproach of Milton's adverfaries; a circumftance that gave us fome especial wonder that the Doctor fhould be fo much afhamed of the whipping ftory retailed from Aubrey.

Concerning this part of Milton's Life, Mr. John Philips muft, out of all comparifon, be the most authentic hiftorian: He was Milton's pupil from the beginning; and they who attend to the feries of facts in his account will perceive how much Dr. Johnfon's fpeculations on vagrant inattention, fluggish indifference, and abfurd mifapprehenfion, introduced by way

of confuting those facts, might have been

fpared.

"We are told," fays the new narrative, "that in the art of education he per"formed wonders; and a formidable lift "is given of the authors Greek and "Latin that were read in Alderfgate"street by youth between ten and fifteen "or fixteen years of age." And then follows the wife obfervation, that "no"body can be taught faster than he can "learn *."

But who were these youth? Even his fifter's two fons, (perhaps only one of them, the younger); as appears by what Philips fays after he had specified the formidable lift.

* New Narrative, p. 27.

"Now

"Now perfons," fays he, "fo far ma"nuducted into the highest paths of lite

rature, both divine and human, had

"they received his documents with the fame acutenefs of wit and apprehen

"fion, the fame induftry, alacrity, and "thirst after knowledge, as the inftruc"tor was indued with, what prodigies "of wit and learning might they have "proved! the scholars might, in fome "degree, have come near to the equal

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ling the mafter, or at leaft have in

"fome fort made good what he seems to

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predict in the clofe of an elegy he made

in the feventeenth year of his age,

upon the death of one of his fifter's

"children (a daughter) who died in her E 3 • in

infancy." The laft couplet of which elegy is,

This if thou do, he will an offspring

give

That to the world's laft end fhall make thy name to live *.

Hence it is clear that the perfons fo manuduced were only, at the moft, the two Philipfes, the offspring of Milton's fifter, whofe name would be little connected with the proficiency of a promifcuous number of boys in a boardingfchool.

In the next place, Mr. Philips is before-hand with Dr. Johnfon in affigning the caufes of the little comparative

*Philips, p. xix,

pro

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