implied in his avowal of preference for the second child of his old age, he said no more than seems to my poor judgment absolutely just and right-as right as might reasonably be expected by men reasonable enough to perceive, and modest enough to acknowledge, the flagrant fals.ty and the impudent absurdity of the favorite opinion that a great man is probably not the best judge-if, indeed, he be not naturally the worst judge as to the respective worth of his several great works.

Of all the leading poems which glorify our language none has ever been subjected to such perverse persistency of misjudgment as that which to some students may, from its proper point of view, not unworthily present itself as the master-work of Milton. From Dr. Johnson or from Lord Macaulay we are not surprised to hear the note of condemnation uttered in the key peculiar to either critic; but it is something more than singular to find this most majestic and pathetic of all Milton's works passed over without a word of comment attached to the naked mention of its name. And we cannot turn without keen disappointment from the admirable definition given by Mr. Mark Pattison of "Samson Agonistes" as "the intensest utterance of the most intense of English poets," to the stupefying incongruity of his subsequent admission that as a composition the drama is languid, nerveless, occasionally halt, ing, never brilliant;" nay, that the intense action of the presentative faculty is no longer at the disposal of the writer of Samson (a hardly happy expression of a most unhappy judgment).The simplicity of Samson Agonistes' is" anything but a flagging of the forces, a drying up of the rich sources," and so forth. Of all other illustrious Englishmen the worthiest to applaud and the fittest to judge of Milton has borne heavily enough on some few sufficiently apparent shortcomings in the executive details of this heroic tragedy; but no other of all the most glorious among our countrymen could have paid to the crowning work of Milton such a tribute as this of Landor's.

'Reminiscences of many sad afflictions have already burst upon the poet, but instead of overwhelming him they

have endued him with redoubled might and majesty. Verses worthier of a sovran poet, sentiments worthier of a pure, indomitable, inflexible republican, never issued from the human heart than these" (v. 265-277), "referring to the army, in the last effort made to rescue the English nation from disgrace and servitude."

It is the fashion of our day to look for the typical man or representative figure of the English Commonwealth not so much in the poet who glorified as in the dictator who destroyed it. This is but natural and consistent in such historians as see nothing in the record of our short-lived republic worth admiration or regret but the triumph of a more harsh and earnest form of superstition over one somewhat less hellish in its cast of creed and greatly more graceful in its tone of life, accompanied by the substitution of a stern and steady system of dictatorial rule for the lax and trustless impulse of a treacherous and shifting tyranny; but those whose faith or feeling in the matter of historic patriotism lies deeper than a mere preference for competent over incompetent autocracy must perceive, or at least will believe, that the restoration which they admire as little as any military-minded Neo-Calvinist or Muscovitic imperialist of their time was not so much the doing of James Monk as the work of Oliver Cromwell: a consummation of catastrophe directly rather than indirectly due. to the weakness and selfishness of the nominal and temporary protector, the actual and final destroyer, of the commonwealth of England. For surely the dying hand which put into Richard Cromwell's the sceptre of its sway put oy that act the crown of England into Monk's for delivery into Charles the Second's. And this, if we never have learned it from the evidence of Milton himself, we may learn with equal confidence from Landor's that Milton surely saw. "He had grown calmer at the close of life, and saw in Cromwell as a fault what he had seen before as a necessity or a virtue." And therefore is it rather in the loftier, purer, more loyal and more liberal virtue of its poet, than in the dubious and double-faced majesty of its august and imperious dictator, that we should salute the highest and most

perfect type of the English republic; dragged down into his own grave by the fatal dead hand of Cromwell, yet surviving after a sort in the figure of the blind man "left upright'*-in the phrase of a poet as glorious and a republican as faithful as himself-on the verge and in the shadow of her sepulchre.

In private matters, or such as belong to the range of ethics rather than of politics, the instinct of Milton seems to me as much truer and finer than the instinct of Dante as his judgment and his conscience were juster, sounder, purer than the conscience or the judgment of Cromwell. Only those disciples in whom congenital idolatry has passed into the stage of acute monomania can maintain that the quality of Dante's great work is never in any considerable degree impaired by the incessant invasion of merely personal polemics; that the reader is never, or but rarely, fatigued and nauseated by the obtrusion and obsession of "verminous fellows," whom the higher muses at least should be content to leave in the native and natural shelter of that obscene obscurity which alone is proper to such autocoprophagous animalcules as make the filth they feed on. There are others beside the" brothel lackeys" of a bastard empire who, as Victor Hugo said once, would desire us to shut our eyes, but compel us to stop our noses.

No matter what manner of offence may naturally be given by creatures whose very nature is offensive, a man who is duly and soberly conscious of any reason for self-respect will ultimately, as Milton did and Dante did not, determine that personal insolence, whether masked as Caliban or manifest as Thersites, shall draw down no further notice from his hand or foot. There are things unmentionable save by a too faithful pupil or too literal imitator of Swift, which, only for our own sake, we are careful not to spurn as we step over them. Upon such Milton did not hesitate to set his heel, when duly guarded * La République anglaise expire, se dissout, Tombe, et laisse Milton derrière elle debout:

La foule a disparu, mais le penseur deme

ure;

C'est assez pour que tout germe, et que rien

ne meure.

Victor Hugo," L'Année Terrible," Prologue

by the thick-soled boot of prose; but, unlike Dante, he never permitted the too fetid contact of their stercorous feculence to befoul the sandal of his muse. The reddening knots of his controversial scourge fell only in cadences of prose, or at least but very rarely in brief reverberation of rhythmic numbers, on the noisome nudity exposed as in provocation of its lash by Saumaise or du Moulin, the literary lackey of a princeling or the cryptonymous railer for his bread.

This high-souled and haughty respect for the dignity of his natural art should be duly borne in mind whenever we are tempted to dwell somewhat disapprovingly on Milton's indefatigable and fierce delight in "double-thonging" such equivocal sons of a dubious kennel; though it will not be denied that he spent more strength of arm than he need have wasted on the resonant reiteration of stripes from a deserved but superfluous dog-whip, too constantly sent curling about their currish flanks.

It is certainly no very dignified amusement, no very profitable expenditure of energy or time, to indulge in the easy diversion of making such curs yelp, and watching them writhe under the chastisement which an insulted superior may condescend to inflict, till their foul mouths foam over in futile and furious response, reeking and rabid with virulent froth and exhalations of raging ribaldry. Yet when, like those that swarmed at the heels of Milton, the vermin venture on all possible extremes of personal insult and imputation to which dulness may give ear or malice may give tongue, a man cannot reasonably be held to derogate from the duty and the dignity of self-respect if he spurns or scourges them out of his way. To give these rascals rope is a needless waste of hemp; a spider's thread, spun from the inner impurity of his own venomous vitals, will suffice for such a creature to hang himself.

A ground more plausible may seem to exist for a graver charge against Milton than that of a ferocious condescension to take unmerciful notice of such leprous little malignants as these; for the charge of relentless and unmitigable savagery toward the dead, whose misdoings might seem or to us may seem at this distance-to have been amply expiated

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by discomfiture and death. Cheap and not over-nice chivalry-the false Florimel who assumes and degrades the appearance of true knightliness of mind and sound nobility of spirit-is ever ready, when tyrants are fallen or when traitors are degraded, to remind us in the shrill est note of reproachful impertinence that it is ill boasting over dead men." Ill indeed, and worse than ill, it is when those who could see nothing to blame in Nero, nothing to loathe in Judas, till the moment of ruin which reduced them to suicide, begin to cast stones at the carrion which had been found worthy of their adoration when a pontiff, of their adulation when an emperor. But ill it would also be, abomninable and absurd, if the "piteous and unpitied end" of either were to be held as expiation sufficient to reverse the branding judgment or silence the damn ing voice of history or of poetry; to bid those now be silent out of pitiable pity and hypocritical high-mindedness who did not hesitate, while some among the posthumous revilers as well as the posthumous champions of these wretches were prone before the vilest of all idols on their knees like the courtier or on their bellies like the serpent, to call Judas by his name of Iscariot and Nero by his name of Bonaparte.

The self-confident and self-conscious majesty of Milton's devotion and dedication to their natural work of all the faculties assigned to him by nature has foolishly enough been objected against him as evidence of his poetic inferiority_to Shakespeare. With that unapproachable name no rational man will assert the equality of Milton's; but if Shakespeare's claim to superiority rested only

on the evidence of his intellectual selfeffacement, his modest unconsciousness and humble-minded abnegation or ignorance of his right to put forward any claim whatever, it would be but too easy a task to convict him out of his

own mouth, and prove by the avowal of his own pretensions that he can pretend to the credit of no such imbecility. sandier foundation was ever discovered for a fallacy more futile than this. No

No

man ever lived who had less title than Shakespeare to whatever blessing may be reserved for the poor in spirit. Not even Milton, not even Dante, had less right to say in appeal to God or man, "I am not high-minded." No man's writings bear witness more unquestionable that he worked and waited with the haughty patience of self-assured expectation for the inevitable homage of mankind in centuries to come.

Had we no evidence to this effectas happily we have much-beyond the affirmation and proclamation in sonnet after sonnet of his own intellectual rank and spiritual prospect, it would be vain to advance against their evidence alone the doubtless irrefragable proposition "that somewhat similar expressions were used by other sonnetteers, and [that] they formed almost a commonplace of sonnet-literature." Not less on this than on every other point the peculiar note of personal earnestness which pervades the leading sonnets of Shakespeare is unmistakable by the eye and ear of all "save bats and owls. That the eye and the car of Mr. Rossetti belong to neither of these far too extensive literary classes, the following excerpt from his own text bears eloquent and triumphant witness.

*

drously ispiriting; they express a perfect and "The trumpet-tone of all these lines is wonsplendid confidence. That Shakespeare, who led an inconspicuous life, and took no heed for the preservation of any of his writings later than the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece, tha should yet have known with such entire certainty that they would outlive the perishing body of men and things till the Resurrection of the Dead-this is the most moving fact in his extant history: the one which informs with grandeur of being, and reconciles into a potent unity, the residual elements of his career, sparse and disparate at best, sometimes insignificant or incongruous-looking."

These words themselves deserve to put on immortality; there are truer or nobler, wiser or more inemora

none

ble, in the whole historic range of highest criticism.-Fortnightly Review.

*This, I must object, is a much more than dubitable assumption.

THE means whereby we are enabled to form conceptions and judgments of the outer world, and of our own relations thereto, form the subject-matter of the most elementary study in the physiology of nerves. But as the understanding of the deepest problems often depends on the correctness of our primitive studies and on the soundness of the beginnings of knowledge, it may be well that, in studying the work of the brain, we should very briefly glance at the manner and method in which body or outer world usually acts upon mind, and mind in turn upon the frame it controls. Such a simple study in sensation will suffice to introduce us to some interesting phenomena of mind; and these last may prove of some service, even if they may but aid us in some degree to comprehend the nature and ways of our own being.

When, under ordinary circumstances, an impression from the external world reaches the outward parts of our nervous system, or passes through one of those "gateways of knowledge" which we term an organ of sense, it is transmitted in due course to a special part of the nervous system named a nerve-centre. There the impression gives rise to actions or processes which result in the production of a "sensation," and comsensation," and commonly also of "consciousness"-that is, the knowledge of the why and wherefore of our acts and feelings. Apart from metaphysical vagaries and subtleties, this much seems clear-that any simple sensation, starting like an electric current from the outer world, and passing along the wires we term nerves, to the head office or brain, gives rise therein to responsive feelings, and, it may be, to corresponding and related actions in the body as well. Example is more potent than precept; let us therefore turn to the study of a common sensation such as that of touch, by way of illustrating the ways and methods of the ordinary government of life. A person aims a blow at our head, and that important region is quickly, and we may add automatically, withdrawn from

the threatened contact with the malcontent. The explanation of our action is perfectly clear. The impression of the moving fist was caught by the eye, was modified by its passage in the form of light-rays through that organ, was converted into a "sensation, was transmitted through a special (optic) nerve to the brain, was therein firstly transferred to some special region of the seat of mind, and finally gave rise to the “consciousness" or thought of the danger which threatened our person. Now all of these actions took place so quickly that their accurate analysis might well seem to be impossible. Still the sequence of events proves the accuracy of the statement that the seat of knowledge, and in this case the power of acting or walking by sight, is resident in some part of the brain, to which it is the function of the eye and optic nerve together to convey the impressions and sensations on which our knowledge depends. But the effects of the threatened blow end not thus with the declaration of "information received" emanating from the brain. Like an active and efficient official, the brain is prone to act upon such intelligence. The head is. withdrawn from the blow, the body itself is removed, it may be some paces backward; and unless discretion be deemed the better moiety of valor, there may be responsive and co-ordinated muscular actions of hands, arms, and possibly of legs or feet as well, wherewith swift and sure retaliation may be made upon the sensiferous organs and most tangent regions of our antagonist. In other words, if an impression has been received by the brain, it is no less plain that another-or it may be several-impressions have issued from the seat of mind. These have radiated, as directed by the brain, to the muscles of our head and neck, and to those of our limbs; and our subsequent movements are the result of this secondary brainact which follows upon the reception of the previous impression. Thus we begin to understand that in their nature ordinary nervous acts are really double,

and that all our ordinary acts and our extraordinary actions as well are regulated by a kind of duplex telegraphy on the part of the nervous system; while it becomes apparent that even the confused heat and bustle of a severe scrimmage or the whirling maze of heads, hats, and coat-tails which are popularly believed to constitute an enlivening feature of festivals of which Donnybrook remains the type-may, through a patient scientific inquiry, be resolved into so many sensations received and acted upon through the system of mind-telegraphy just described.

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It remains, therefore, a plain doctrine of modern physiology that our knowledge of the outer world is received and acted upon through a very definite system of actions and reactions. True, we do not know what constitutes an impression. We have measured the rate at which nerve-force travels, but the exact nature of this force is unknown. Consciousness and the reception of impressions by the brain-has not advanced materially in explanation since Hartley, in his Observations on Man," spoke of the "vibrations of the small, and, as we may say, infinitesimal medullary particles," which he conceived further to be "motions backward and forward of the small particles" of the brain, and to present a similarity to "the oscillations of pendulums, and the tremblings of the particles of sounding bodies." And of what takes place in the brain when the impression from the outer world is converted into that proceeding from brain to body and to the outer world again, we are likewise in the depths of ignorance. But despite our inability to read between the lines of the brain-work, the general nature of nerveaction remains as a clear and patent basis for further research. Nervous acts are now spoken of in physiology as being founded on the grand principle of "reflex action," with the name of which every schoolboy is familiarized by his physiology-primer. The ordinary acts of living and being are regulated on this duplex system. An impression (which we call afferent or sensory) travels inward to the brain or other centre, and is there converted into another impulse (named efferent or motor), which passes outward to muscles, to glands, to other organs,

or it may be to some other part of the brain itself. The original impression or sensation is thus "reflected," as it were, from a nerve-centre to some other organ or part. The sensation of withdrawal from danger, to which the threatened blow gives rise in the brain, was duly "reflected," and thus passed onward to the head and neck-muscles, and, in the case of practical retaliation, to the muscles of the limbs. So that, in this view of matters, the brain may be regarded as largely performing the functions of a complex clearing-house, where the varied business concerns of the frame are assorted, parcelled out, rearranged, and finally transmitted to their proper destinations.

Other examples of this duplex system, and of the power of the head-centre of the nervous system to receive and retransfer impressions and sensations, may throw a further light upon some special features and noteworthy characteristics of its action. Select, for instance, the sensation of touch, and we shall have forcibly impressed upon our understanding the fact that the brain or sensorium is the true and actual seat of knowledge. This latter truism, plain as it may appear, is not usually appreciated until the attention has been directly called thereto. It is needful, in truth, for the correct understanding of the evolution of mind-phantasies and illusions, that such a truth should be continually present in all its plainness to the mind. We touch a table, and the rationale of the nervous acts therein implied is readily explained. Thoughtlaying aside the question of antecedent conditions and influences-begins the act, and determines the desire to touch the object. This thought next becomes transformed into nerve-force-how, why, when, where, are details all-important in their profundity, but immaterial to the plain issue before us. This nerveforce passes, under the direction of the brain, along definite nerve-tracts, leading, say, to the forefinger of the right hand. On the way it stimulates the appropriate muscles. Thus the finger is brought in contact with that part of the outer world represented by the table, and a "sensation" (of touch) is the result of the contact in question. Here ends the act, we may be disposed to