ROM Shakespeare to Miltonfrom Elizabeth to Cromwellthe parallelism of the two changes at once suggests the influence exercised upon literature by the external forces which control the religious and political life of the time. Whatever be the causes which lead to the production of great literature or great art at a given place or time, it may safely be averred that it demands the concurrence of a virile energy, strung to its highest pitch, with the moderating influence of ideas which impose limitations on the worker or the thinker, and preserve the sanity of those who act upon their contemporaries in the world of external achievement as well as in the world of mental conception. It was this combination which, on the one hand, sent forth the members of a single Athenian tribe to fight in one year in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, and on the soil of Greece itself, at a time when the most thorough political revolution had been carried out by constitutional methods unstained by the horrors of civil war; and, on the other hand, manifested itself alike in the counsels of Pericles, the graving-tool of Phidias, and the written word of Sophocles.

The Elizabethan age in England showed an energy as intense as that of Athens, displaying itself in a far wider field. With an outlook upon a new world still to be won to the use of civilised mankind, a religion-or rather, more than one religion-claiming not to be national but universal, the nobler Elizabethan found the boundary lines of thought and of moral rectitude pushed forward beyond the limits which had satisfied his ancestors. It is hardly strange that these spacious times' gave birth to the greatest of dramatists, who worked, not only for an age, but for all time,' and who, whilst he gave with unerring touch vitality to all his characters, limited their action by nothing less than the forces of nature herself, whether acting by external compulsion or by the influence of individual character.

the greatest of his contemporaries. It was on nature and her material laws that Bacon strove to found the new science. It was on nature and her moral laws that Hooker strove to found

ecclesiastical peace. One voice, however, in

the Elizabethan choir sounded a note apart. Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hooker alike deal with men and things as they are. Spenser aimed at depicting men as they ought to be, and it was the Spenserian tradition which was taken up by Milton in his earlier poems. With Milton, from the beginning, it is not the real individual man, acting in harmony with his own nature and controlled by the forces of the external world, but the individual man idealised looking forth on a world also idealised. So it is with the verses on the deaths of Bishops Andrewes and Felton (1626), with L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1632?), and with Comus (1634). last-named poem is especially characteristic of Milton's frame of mind at this period of his life. In it not merely is virtue exalted and vice scorned, but the inward purity of mind is represented, as by Plato and Spenser, as holding sway over the outward appearance :

The

So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity ·
That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear ;
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence
Till all be made immortal.

the home of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, but the abode of very prosaic English colonists in Virginia and New England. England no longer confronted the world in arms, but was called on to work out her own domestic problems at home. The world had grown smaller, and the boundary of political action had been drawn closer. Puritanism, which had furnished to the Elizabethan one of the phenomena of which he had to take account, threatened in the reign of Charles to absorb all others. It is unnecessary to argue that Puritanism, conceived as an ecclesiastical system, with its unbending theology and its strict discipline, was hostile to literary effort. No great work was ever inspired by the tone of thought which expressed itself in the Admonition to Parliament or in the Westminster Confession. Even the moral restrictions of Puritanism were too sternly pressed to be congenial to the artistic nature. 'Touch not, taste not, handle not,' seems best answered by the flippant comment, 'Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?' Yet the essence of Puritanism did not lie in its prohibitions but in its aspirations, in its desire to avoid the excess and riot of the world around. It was this, for instance, that imposed on men like Baxter the name of Puritan. Baxter, as he himself tells us, 'never scrupled common prayers or ceremonies, nor spoke against Bishops, nor ever so much as prayed but by a book or form, being not even acquainted then with any that did otherwise; but only for reading Scripture when the rest were dancing on the Lord's Day, and for praying-by a form out of the end of the Common Prayer Book-in his house, and for reproving drunkards and swearers, and for talking sometimes a few words of Scripture and the life to come, he was reviled commonly by the name of Puritan, precisian, and hypocrite.'

The aims of such men were of necessity individualistic. They sought to strengthen and purify the soul rather than to increase the power of their country or to spread its influence abroad. For such the imposition of the stern Puritan discipline upon the conscience was almost a necessity lest, becoming merely selfcentred, they should loosen the bonds which imposed some check on the divergencies of thought and action and hindered the dissolution. of the nation into a thousand hostile sects. Yet, checked as it might be, the sense of individuality was there, and bore with increasing

force upon the art as well as upon the mind of Milton.

Such a system of thought could not fail to be as repulsive to one order of minds as it was attractive to another. Hostility, not to the moral tendencies but to the intellectual fetters of Puritanism, developed itself amongst scholars at the universities, where the students of Patristic literature were familiarised with thoughts very different from those which inspired Calvinistic theology. The attack on that theology led to a somewhat uncertain progress in the direction of intellectual freedom, whilst those who carried it on sought, in their reverence for external forms of worship, for that fixed order which was accepted by their opponents as residing in the sphere of intellectual belief. The English world was entering on a period of unrest and controversy, and for the first time religious controversy, which had found its way into Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, left its mark on a truly great poem in Lycidas (1637). The lines in which the Laudian system is attacked can hardly be regarded as enhancing the merits of that splendid verse, yet it must be acknowledged that in introducing them Milton had too fine an artistic sense to take notice of the more prominent subjects under discussion at the time, and contented himself with dwelling on the neglect of duty which he ascribed to a hireling clergy. The highest poetry refused to touch satirically on such topics as the position of the communion-table or the wearing of the surplice.

Yet, on the other side, reverence rendered it possible to touch on them, if only by a tour de force. The tendency to subordinate thought to words had shown itself in the quaintness of Donne and Andrewes, and it was but a step further in George Herbert when he subordinated thought to symbolism:

Mark you the floor? That square and speckled

stone

Which looks so firm and strong
Is Patience :

And th' other black and grave, wherewith each

one

Is checkered all along,
Humility.

The gentle rising, which on either hand
Leads to the Quire above,
Is Confidence:

But the sweet cement, which in one sure band
Ties the whole frame, is Love

And Charity.

Such lines appeal to a restricted audience. Later generations find more sympathy with the tolerant spirit of such men as Chillingworth or John Hales, but their writings are too far involved in the special controversies of the day to give them a hold on the universal intelligence of mankind. Sir Thomas Browne, on the other hand, rises into a higher atmosphere, and aims at reconciling faith and thought in words which find an echo in later times.

Deleterious as was the effect of controversy on the literature of the time, the individualistic tendency of the day was favourable to the production of work that has lived. The poetry of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century is remarkable for its panegyrics on individual personages, of which Lycidas furnishes an early and perhaps the best example. The handling of the subject by Milton is as unlike what Shakespeare's would have been as it is possible to be. The personality of Edward King, the hero of the piece, is more than idealised, as it is not in any way brought before our eyes; and the beauty of his character is left to be inferred from its effect upon the mind of the poet, as the beauty of Helen was left to be inferred from the passion it excited. As with Lycidas, so with the sonnets, the controversial and the panegyrical are found in close connection with one another; but fortunately Milton for the most part reserved his most transient contentions for his prose and the more permanent for his poetry. The arguments about the abominations of Episcopacy or the demerits of King Charles-still more, the scurrilous assaults on his literary opponents— fall dead on the ear, whilst the proclamation of the principles of freedom which lighten up the sonnets On the new Forcers of Conscience, To the Lord General Cromwell, or To Sir Henry Vane, is of universal application, and is as fresh now as on the day when they were written. Not, indeed, that Milton kept his higher thoughts always in abeyance when he addressed himself to political or ecclesiastical argument, as is witnessed by many passages which might be selected out of works otherwise scurrilous and forbidding, and especially by the noble Areopagitica, in which reason appears instinct with imagination.

The tendency to idealise individuals was not of any sect or party. It is to be found as strongly on the Royalist as on the Parliamentary sidewith this difference, that whereas Royalists preferred to make woman the theme of their verse,

more especially by reason of her physical charms, the Parliamentarians preferred to dwell on the heroism and virtue of men. We have to set Carew's:

He that loves a rosy cheek

Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires;
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.
But a smooth and steadfast mind,

Gentle thoughts, and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires :-
Where these are not, I despise

Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes;

or even Herrick's worship of the 'tempestuous petticoat,' against Milton's:

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,

To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed,

And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud

Hast reared God's trophies, and this work pursued,

While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued,

And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath : yet much remains To conquer still; Peace hath her victories No less renowned than War: new foes arise, Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. The echo in the concluding lines, written in 1652, of the scathing attack in the Lycidas, fifteen years before, on those who

For their bellies' sake,

Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold, shows us Milton unchanging and unchangeable in his belief that it was possible to free the nobler work of men from earthly complications. So too, in 1654, a few months after the establishment of the Protectorate, he strove in his Second Defence of the English People to invest the coming Parliament in the ideal robes which he found suitable to the Protector. The character of his appeal to the voters on the eve of a general election is surely unparalleled before or since:

'Unless by true and sincere piety towards God and man,' he tells them, 'not vain and wordy, but efficacious and active, you drive from your souls all superstitions sprung from ignorance of true and solid religion, you will always have those who will

...

make you their beasts of burden and sit upon your backs and necks; they will put you up for sale as their easily gotten booty, all your victories in war notwithstanding, and make a rich income out of your ignorance and superstition. Unless you expel avarice, ambition, luxury from your minds, aye, and luxurious living also from your families, then the tyrant you thought you had to seek externally in the battlefield you will find in your own home--you will find within yourselves a still harder taskmaster, nay there will sprout daily out of your own vitals a numerous brood of intolerable tyrants. . . . Were you fallen into such an abyss of easy self-corruption, no one--not even Cromwell himself, nor a whole host of Brutuses, if they could come to life again, could deliver you if they would, or would deliver you if they could. For why should any one then assert for you the right of free suffrage, or the power of electing whom you will at the Parliament? Is it that you should be able, each of you, to elect in the cities men of your faction, or that person in the boroughs, however unworthy, who may have feasted yourselves most sumptuously or treated the country-people and the boors to the greatest quantity of drink? Then we should have our members of Parliament made for us, not by prudence and authority, but by faction and feeding; we should have vintners and hucksters for city taverns, and graziers and cattle men for the country districts. Should one entrust the Commonwealth to those to whom nobody would entrust a matter of private business? Know that as to be free is the same

thing exactly as to be pious, wise, just, temperate, self-providing, abstinent from the property of other people, and, in fine, magnanimous and brave, so to be the opposite of all that is the same thing as being a slave; and by the customary judgment of God, and a thoroughly just law of retribution, it comes to pass that a nation that cannot rule and govern itself, but has surrendered itself in slavery to its own lusts, is surrendered also to other masters whom it does not like, and made a slave not only with its will, but also against its will.'

One reads no such election addresses now. For all that, Milton's burning words- -a paraphrase of the saying in Comus, 'Love virtue, she alone is free-are not for an age but for all time. The outward vestments of Puritanism were dropping away. The strict theologies of Calvinism were growing less in repute, and those who most firmly advanced the Puritan standard were growing weary of the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty under which its tender years had sheltered themselves. The assurance that constitutions, and, above all, success military and civil, are of small avail to a nation corrupt in heart and self-seeking in its aims is never out of place.

It is this which gives to Milton's political verse and to the better part of his prose a

dignity and value which is shared by none of his contemporaries. In 1655, the year after this appeal was penned, Waller wrote of the external glories of the Protector :

The sea 's our own; and now all nations greet,
With bending sails, each vessel of our fleet;
Your power resounds as far as winds can blow,
Or swelling sails upon the globe may go ;

or, better still, of Oliver's desire to succour
others than those under his own government :
Whether this portion of the world were rent
By the rude ocean from the continent,
Or thus created, it was sure designed
To be the sacred refuge of mankind.

Hither the oppressed shall henceforth resort, Justice to crave and succour at your court, And then your Highness, not for ours alone, But for the world's protector shall be known. So too in Marvell's three panegyrics: the first, An Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland, written in 1650, combines a strong appreciation of Cromwell's intellectual qualities, whilst retaining the belief that he had tricked Charles to his confusion; the second, The first Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector, written probably in the opening weeks of 1655, is an encomium upon Cromwell's character as well as a defence of his

political system; whilst the third, A poem upon the death of his late Highness the Lord Protector, written after Cromwell's death in 1658, treads in Waller's steps, giving honour to the man

Who planted England on the Flandrick shore, And stretched our frontier to the Indian ore. It is possible that disappointment at the course taken by popular feeling drove Milton back into more ideal work. Paradise Lost, taken up seriously about the time of the great Protector's death, resumes the burden of Comus. Its central thought is the temptation of a single human soul-a masculine soul drawn down to its fate by woman's weakness. In Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained we find the theme of temptation successfully resisted, which is, after all, no other than the theme of the triumphant virtue of the lady of the Comus. In the former poem the wiles of an evil-minded woman are defied. In the latter such influences, by the nature of the case, do not enter into consideration. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress we have once more attention called to the struggle of the individual against evil and his escape therefrom; the man painfully emerging-the woman lingering behind and only freeing herself

under the conduct of Greatheart, whose character is said—and probably with truth-to have been moulded on that of Cromwell. The surroundings of the personages concerned are those of the Calvinistic theology; but the book lives, in spite of this, by the life-like presentation of the allegorical personages which enter upon the stage.

The Puritan manifestation in literature, like the Puritan manifestation in the State and nation, had run its triumphant course, though in literature as well as in the nation it was to continue to exercise, when mingled with other elements, a powerful influence. Its decline may be traced to many causes, but above all to the growth of a conviction that it exalted the few at the expense of the many. The

highest aim of the Protectorate was the defence of the so-called 'people of God.' The highest aim of Puritan literature was the exaltation of the strong at the expense of the weak-of the pre-eminently good at the expense of the more moderately virtuous. It was not Milton's personal misogyny resulting in the substitution of Eve or Dalila for Juliet and Rosalind; it was the habit of looking for more than was to be achieved by human nature, till the search for ideal beauty and goodness led to contemptuous blindness to the beauty and goodness inherent in our mingled nature. Human nature took its revenge both in politics and literature. The age of Cromwell and Milton passed away, to be succeeded by the rule of Charles II. and the dramatists of the Restoration.

SAMUEL R. GARDINER.

John Selden (1584-1654) was one of the most illustrious scholars of his time, a learned jurist, a powerful publicist, and a conspicuous political personage. He was born 16th December 1584, of a respectable family, at Salvington, near Worthing, in Sussex. After being educated at Chichester and Oxford, he studied law in London, at Clifford's Inn and the Inner Temple. Here his learning secured for him the friendship of Camden, Spelman, Sir Robert Cotton, Ben Jonson, Browne, and also of Drayton, to whose Polyolbion he furnished notes. By Milton he is spoken of as 'the chief of learned men reputed in this land.' As a conveyancer and chamber-counsel he acquired wealth, yet found time for studies at once profound and wide in range. He wrote his first treatise, Analecton Anglo-Britannicon (1606), on the civil government of Britain before the Norman Conquest, when only twenty-two years of age. In 1610 appeared his Jani Anglorum Facies Altera (Eng. trans. 1683), on the history of the laws of England to the death of Henry II., and also The Duello or Single Combat, a history of trial by battle. His largest English work, A Treatise on Titles of Honour, was published in 1614, and still continues an authority. In 1617 his fame was extended, both at home and abroad, by his Latin work on the gods of the Syrians and the heathen deities mentioned in the Old Testament. In his History of Tythes (1618), by demolishing the divine right of the Church to that tax he gave great offence to the clergy. He was summoned to the king's presence, reprimanded, and (no doubt) confuted. He was, moreover, called before several members of the formidable High Commission Court, who extracted from him a written declaration of regret for what he had done, but without any retractation of his

opinion. Several replies appeared, but to these he was not allowed to publish a rejoinder, and the Privy Council suppressed the work itself. In 1621 he suffered a brief imprisonment for advising the Parliament to repudiate King James's doctrine that their privileges were originally royal grants. In 1623 he was elected member for Lancaster; in 1626 for Great Bedwin, and in 1628 for Ludgershall, both in Wilts, and henceforward till his death he took a considerable part in public affairs.

Yet

He was sincerely attached to the cause of the Parliament, and as sincerely opposed to the views of the court party and the king; but he was above all things a constitutional lawyer, and derived his ideas of the rights of the subject from the history of the nation, and not from religious fanaticism or metaphysical considerations. Still, he 'loved his ease,' as Clarendon says, and so let things be done without protest of which he did not approve. he often stood up to defend the liberty of the subject. In 1628 he was active in the proceedings of the Commons that issued in the Petition of Right, and the year after he was committed to the Tower with Eliot, Holles, and the rest. After eight months' rigorous imprisonment he was transferred to the Marshalsea, but soon after was released. In 1640 he was chosen member of the Long Parliament for the University of Oxford; and now, when the struggle between the king and the nation began to point towards the fatal rupture, he was suspected of not being zealous enough by such as were themselves perhaps over-zealous. Already in 1636 he had dedicated to the king his Mare Clausum (an answer to the Mare Liberum of Grotius and the Dutch claims to fish off the British coasts), and there is evidence that Charles personally looked on him with favour. Selden was one of the com