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not been suspected of deficient tenderness to his wives: to his first his conduct seems at least to have been exempt from blame; to his two last to have been distinguished by uniform kindness and affection. His supposed rigour to his daughters, which has always been asserted on very defective or very questionable testimony, has of late, been entirely disproved by the attestations, attached to the nuncupative will of which we have already spoken. From the whole of the evidence, old and new, which is now before us, we know that two of Milton's daughters were taught to read several languages, without understanding what they were reading, for the purpose of being useful to him, and that one of them was frequently employed as his amanuensis: that, on their expressing their dislike of these occupations in the service of their blind father, he dispensed with their assistance, ́and, expending a large part of his moderate income on their education, he dismissed them

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z The eldest, Anne, was excused from reading on account of an imperfection in her speech.

"Further this deponent saith, that she hath several times heard the said deceased, (John Milton,) since the time deposed, declare and say, that he had made provision for his children in his life-time, and had spent the greatest part of his estate in providing for them, &c." (See Nunc. Will of Milton, Appen, to Warton's ed. of M. Juvenile Poems, p. xxxvii.)

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to tasks better adapted to their inclinations and their sex: that with peculiar inhumanity they neglected him in his blindness, and were capable even of defrauding or robbing & him: that, with all these provocations, the injured father complained, it is true, of his children, but complained of them without passion; and seems never to have treated them with harshness. After the intervention of many years the youngest of these ladies, Mrs. Clarke, spoke of her father with great tenderness, and, on being shown a portrait which strongly resembled him, she exclaimed with transport, ""Tis my father! 'tis my dear father!"f an expression of affectionate remembrance not likely to break from the lips of a child sensible of injuries, and irritated by causeless severity. She is reported, indeed, to have been her father's favourite, and, she had not, perhaps, been so deep in undutifulness as her sisters; but it must be recollected that on the testimony of this daughter's daughter alone, Mrs. Foster I mean, has been supported all that charge of domestic tyranny, with which

b The working of embroidery in gold and silver is specified on this occasion by Philips :-an art which, at that time, formed one of the chief employments of females of rank and fortune. • Warton's Appendix, p. xxxiii. d Wart. Append. p. xxxix. Wart. Append. p. xxxiii.

f Richards. Remarks, &c.

an attempt has been made to sully the memory of Milton.

Of his erudition so much has necessarily been said in the progress of this work, that it would be superfluous to enlarge upon the subject. To Doctor Ward, the rhetoric professor of Gresham College, Mrs. Clarke related that extraordinary circumstance of her and her sisters (it ought with strict accuracy to have been sister) having been accustomed to read to their father in eight different languages. The languages are not specified, and, unless we separate the two dialects of the Hebrew and the two also of the Spanish, we can reckon only six of them; but with Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish we know that Milton was intimately conversant; and that, by unremitting study, he improved this large acquaintance with language into the mean of the most ample knowledge. If his Greek learning must be allowed to have been less accurate than that of a few of his contemporaries or of some of the illustrious scholars of the present day, it was unquestionably not less extensive; and it gave him full dominion of the historians, the poets, the orators, the philosophers of that favoured country, in which the human intellect seems to have at

tained its highest stature, its keenest vision, and its most comprehensive embrace. Among the Greeks, his favourite authors are said to have been Euripides, Demosthenes, Plato and Homer, whose long poems he could nearly recite by memory. Of the Latins, Ovid, as we are certain, possessed a prime place in his regard; and, from the circumstantial eulogy which he pronounces, in one of his familiar epistles, on the merits of Sallust, we may infer the superior value which he assigned to the weighty and pregnant compression of that admirable historian. He zealously, however, followed the precept of the Roman critic," and sedulously formed his taste on the great models of Greece. But we must not imagine that Milton's knowledge was confined within the pale of classical erudition. His active and strong intellect traversed the whole circle of the sciences, and there was scarcely one of them of which he had not penetrated more than the surface.

For those political opinions, by which he was steadily actuated from the beginning to the termination of his career, some apology has always been expected, when in truth.

Henrico de Bras, P. W. v. vi. 135.

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Vos exemplaria Græca

Nocturnâ versate nanu versate diurnâ.

HOR.

none can be necessary. From his own to the present times, the republicanism of this great man has uniformly been regarded as throwing a shade over his character, which the most affectionate of his biographers have rather hoped to extenuate than been ambi

tious to remove.

To the sagacious and unprejudiced eye, which contemplates the constitution of England, as it was established at the Revolution in 1689,-to the eye, which can command this admirable system of liberty in all its beautiful complexity; which sees it diffusing through the whole subordination of its community more equal freedom than has ever yet resulted from any other plan of political institution; which observes it extending the controll of law to its highest subject and the protection of law to its lowest; which views it every where jealously checking and balancing its trust of power; which beholds it opening all its emoluments and honours, with exception to one unattainable dignity, to the exertions of ability and virtue, and thus uniting the animation of a commonwealth with the tranquillity and the executiveness of a monarchy;-which surveys it, in short, as it efficiently combines democratic energy with hereditary power in its legislature, and de

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