whom they would have made their executioner to punish church-delinquencies, whereof civil laws have no cognizance.

And well did their disciples manifest themselves to be no better principled than their teachers, trusted with committeeships and. other gainful offices, upon their commendations for zealous, (and as they sticked not to term them) godly men; but executing their places, like children of the devil, unfaithfully, unjustly, unmercifully, and where not corruptly, stupidly. So that between them, the teachers, and these, the disciples, there hath not been a more ignominious and mortal wound to faith, to piety, to the work of reformation, nor more cause of blaspheming given to the enemies of God and truth, since the first preaching of reformation."

The attention of Milton to his latin thesaurus was not productive of any very profitable result. The materials, which he had amassed, occupied, in manuscript, the bulk of three large folios: but they were left by him in too indigested a state to be fit for publication: it is said, however, that they were advantageously employed by the edi

Published in 4to in 1693.

tors of the Cambridge dictionary, to whom they were probably given by Philips. This work, for the execution of which his state of blindness must have peculiarly disqualified him, seems to have formed, till the hour of his death, a part of that change of literary exercise in which he delighted; and if we reflect upon the circumstance, we must certainly be astonished at the mind, which could thus instantaneously pass, with all its energy, from invention to compilation, from the luxurious sports of fancy to the dry and barren drudgeries of verbal recollection.

Of the third object, on which our author's powers were at this period exerted, his immortal epic, I shall forbear to speak till the time of its completion and publication. Some great production in the highest region of poetry had been, as we have observed, in his contemplation from the commencement nearly of his literary life. The idea accompanied him to Italy, where, with a more defined object, it acquired a more certain shape from the example of Tasso, and the conversation of Tasso's friend, the accomplished Marquis of Villa. From this moment it seems to have been immoveably fastened in his mind; and, though for a season

oppressed and overwhelmed by the incumbent duties of controversy, its root was full of life and pregnant with stately vegetation. At the time, of which we are speaking, (the end of 1653 and the beginning of 1654) the mighty work, according to Philips, was seriously undertaken; and it is curious to reflect on the steadiness of its growth under a complication of adverse circumstances; and to see it, like a pine on the rocks of Norway, ascending to its majestic elevation beneath the inclemency of a dreary sky, and assailed, in the same moment, by the fury of the ocean at its feet, and the power of the tempest above its head.

In this variety of strong and effective intellectual exertion did Milton pass his hours during the usurpation of Cromwell, discharging, of course, the duties of his secretaryship, but neither engaging in controversy nor addressing the public on any topic of political disquisition. In 1655 he published with the title of "The Cabinet Council" a manuscript of Sir Walter Raleigh's, consisting of aphorisms on the art of government; and in the same year, he composed, in a strain of peculiar elegance, the manifesto issued by the Protector to justify his war with Spain. In 1657 Andrew Marvell, a man of whom I shall

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