bridge; and was committed to the tuition of Mr. William Chappell, the reputed author of the "Whole Duty of Man;" and afterwards, in succession, provost of Trinity college, Dublin, dean of Cashel, and bishop of Cork and Ross. The conduct of the young Milton had For this and for other information on my subject I am indebted to my friend, the Reverend G. Borlase, B. D. the liberal and most respectable registrer of the University of Cambridge. г This celebrated devotional work has been attributed to various hands: but of the numerous claimants to the honour of its production, it seems with the greatest probability to be assigned to Dorothy, daughter of Thomas, Lord Coventry, and wife of Sir John Pakington, Bart. in the reigns of James the first and of the two Charles's. As a respectable writer, (with the signature of S. C. in the Gentleman's Magazine* for July, 1806,) expresses surprise at my having omitted to mention the name of a subsequent tutor of Milton's, a Mr. Tovey, who is noticed by Aubrey, I will now transcribe from Aubrey's MS. the passage in which this second tutor is mentioned, and, with a few remarks on it, will show the little credit to which it is entitled, and consequently the propriety with which it was formerly disregarded by A. Wood and lately by myself. Aubrey professes to have gained his information from that old dotard, Sir Christopher Milton, the brother of the poet. "His" (our author's) first tutor there," (at Cambridge) Mr. Chappell, from whom receiving some unkindness, (whipt him,) he was afterwards, though it seemed against the rules of the college, transferred to the tuition of one Mr. Tovell," (not Tovey), who died parson of Lutterworth." Now the records of Milton's college notice the name of a Mr. Nathaniel Tovey as one of its fellows: but give no intimation of his having succeeded to the rectory of Lutterworth, or of Milton's having been transferred to * Vol. LXXVI. 595. "was hitherto been exempted from censure. Distinguished indeed, as it was, by zeal for his tuition from that of Mr. Chappell's. With respect to the whipping, which is assigned as the cause of Milton's change of tutors, the alleged fact may be rejected on the most satisfactory evidence. Not to observe that this punishment is asserted by some of Milton's enemies to have been inflicted on him by the hand of Dr. Bainbridge himself, the master of the college, who is said to have been a stern disciplinarian; this species of correction was always inflicted by the deans of the college and neither by the tutors nor the master, and, what is more immediately and directly to our purpose, was restricted by the University statutes altogether to boys, as they are distinguished from young men; or, in other words, to those who had not attained the age of puberty. The words of the penal statute in question are, “ Mulctetur, &c. si adultus: alioquin virgâ corrigatur;" and whether Milton, who was in his seventeenth year when he entered at the University, could be regarded on any construction of this statute as liable to the punishment of the rod, shall be submitted to my readers to determine. I must believe that they who drew up the University statutes, and they who were to enforce them were too accurate in their learning not to employ their language with precision when they wrote, or not to understand it with correctness when they read: adultus, according to Stephens, whose explanation of the word is supported by the most unquestionable authorities, is, qui adolevit, i. e. crevit ad ætatem quæ adolescentia dicitur; and adolescentia is afterwards defined to be prima ætas hominis post pueritiam.-Adolescens in jure dicitur, Qui inter annum decimum quartum et vicesimum quintum ætatem agit. Adultus, therefore, is a young man between the ages of fourteen and five and twenty. In Milton's time, and before it, it was usual to send boys under the age of puberty to the University; and that these boys should be still subjected to the common mode of discipline in the subordinate schools cannot be a cause of wonder or of reasonable censure. Dr. Johnson's concern and shame therefore, on the occasion of Milton's supposed punishment, might on every account very properly have been spared. to study and contempt of pleasure, by obedience to his masters and-by piety to his pa rents, it might be regarded as not open attack and in no way to be made the subject of malevolence: it was indebted however for its immunity to other circumstances perhaps than to those of its innocence and excellence. It continued, as we have the strongest reasons to believe, equally pure and exemplary throughout the subsequent stages of his life: but no sooner did he tread the threshold of manhood, and begin to offend by the exhibition of novel opinions and strong censures, than he became the object of that enmity which, pursuing him with detraction to his grave, has in later times disturbed his ashes and endeavoured to deform his memory. Of his conduct and the treatment which he experienced in his college much has been asserted and much been made the subject of dispute. His enemies in his own days, (a son of bishop Hall is supposed to have been the immediate advancer of the charge,) accused him of having been vomited, after an inordinate and riotous youth, out of the University; and his adversaries in the present age, inflamed with all the hate of their predecessors, have pretended to prove, from some vague expressions in one of his own poems, that the slander, though completely overthrown at the time of its first production, was not altogether unsupported by truth. The lines, supposed to contain the proof in question, are the following which have been so frequently cited from the first of his elegies to his friend, C. Deodati: Jam nec arundiferum mihi cura revisere Camum ; Our author seems in this place to be guilty of a false quan tity, and to begin his hexameter very unwarrantably with a cre tic. Terentianus Maurus accuses Virgil of the same inaccuracy in the line "Solus hic inflexit sensus," &c. affirming, with the old grammarians, that hic and hoc were formerly written with two c's, hicc, hocc, being contracted from hicce and hocce, and were always long. Vossius on the contrary asserts that these pronouns were long only when they were written with the double cc. Ad quantitatem hujus pronominis quod attinet, producebant et hic et hoc veteres quando per duplex c scribebant hicc vel hocc, abjecto, e; corripiebant cum c simplex scripsere. Art. Gram. 29. Of a short hic more than one instance may be produced: "Hic vir hic est, tibi quem promitti sæpius audis; but not one, as far as my recollection is accurate, of a short hoc. "Hoc illud, germana, fuit." "Hic labor hoc opus est." "Hōc erat, alma parens." "Hoc erat experto frustra Varrone.""Hōc erat in votis." My friend, Dr. Parr, however, has suggested that, hoc, is to be found short in the comic poets; and k Non ego vel profugi nomen sortemque recuso Lætus et exilii conditione fruor. has referred me to two places, one in Plautus and one in Terence, where it certainly occurs with this quantity. If this authority, from poetry neither epic, elegiac nor lyric, can save Milton in this instance, it will be well; and one sin against prosody will be struck from his account. Salmasius, in his abusive reply to "The Defence of the People of England,' charges our author's Latin verse with many of these violations of quantity, and the accusation is repeated, as I shall remark in the proper place, by N. Heinsius. Though Milton's Latin metre be not proof against rigorous inquisition, yet are its offences against quantity very few-not more, perhaps, (if the scazons, addressed to Salsilli, which seem to be constructed on a false principle, and some of the lines in the ode to Rouse, which appear to have been formed in defiance of every principle, be thrown out of the question,) than four or, at the most, five, of a nature not to be disputed. Of these I shall notice two in the Damon, one of them evidently a slip of the pen, as in a former instance he had observed the right quantity, and the other an unwarrantable licence rather than a fault of this specific description. In the Ideá Platonicâ, he is guilty of shortening the second syllable of, sempiternus, which beyond all controversy is long; and in his poem to his Father he makes the last syllable of, ego, long, when it is unquestionably short; though here perhaps he might be justified in lengthening it, as the ictus of the verse falls on it. Of Academia, in the second Elegy, he shortens the penult in opposition to the uniform practice of the Greeks, and not sanctioned by any authorities though countenanced, as Dr. Parr has acutely discriminated, by some examples among the Latins; and lastly, in the Alcaic ode on the death of Dr. Goslyn, he has left the interjective, O, open in a situation in which it is never found open in the Roman classics. When, contrary to the usage of Virgil, Horace, &c. he lengthens the first syllable of Britonicum, in the Damon, he is supported by the authority of Lucretius, vi. 1104. "Nam quid Britannis cœlum differre putamus;" and when he makes the final syllable of temere short in-" Quid temere violas |