MILTON'S PROSE WORKS

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they were not Milton's we should not read one of them. As they are his, we are constrained to search for beauties, and we find them in the Areopagitica, more than half of

FROM "AREOPAGITICA.”

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest judgment on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are. Nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable crea

ture, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books, since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that elemental and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

VOL. III.

Clarendon

FROM "THE READY AND EASY WAY" (1659).

To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education, to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honour; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty, and safety. They shall not then need to be much mistrustful of their chosen patriots in the grand council; who will then be rightly called the true keepers of our liberty, though the most of their business will be in foreign affairs. But to prevent all mistrust, the people then will have their several ordinary assemblies (which will henceforth quite annihilate the odious power and name of committees) in the chief towns of every county, without the trouble, charge, or time lost of summoning and assembling from far so great a number, and so long residing from their own houses, or removing of their families, to do as much at home in their several shires, entire or subdivided, toward the securing of their liberty, as a numerous assembly of them all formed and convened on purpose with the wariest rotation.

CLARENDON was by a few months Milton's senior, yet in reading him we seem to have descended to a later age. That he owed not a little to the Theophrastian fashion of his youth is certain; but the real portraits which he draws with such picturesque precision are vastly superior to any fantastical abstractions of Overbury or Earle. Clarendon writes, in Wordsworth's phrase, with his eye upon the object, and the graces of his style are the result of the necessity he finds of describing what he wishes to communicate in the simplest and most convincing manner. The History of the Great Rebellion is not the work of a student, but of a soldier, an administrator, a practical politician in stirring times. To have acted a great part publicly and spiritedly is make a man the fit chronicler the case of Clarendon these

advantages were bestowed upon a man who, though not a rare artist in words, had a marked capacity for expression and considerable literary training. It is his great distinction that, living in an age of pedants, he had the courage to write history-a species of literature which, until his salutary example, was specially over-weighted with ornamental learning in a spirit of complete simplicity. The diction of Clarendon is curiously modern; we may read pages of his great book without lighting upon a single word now no longer in use. The claims of the great Chancellor to be counted among the classics of his country were not put forward in the seventeenth century, the first instalment of his history remaining unprinted until 1702-4, and the rest of it ("The Continuation") until 1759.

us,

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1608-1674) was the son of a Cheshire gentleman of fortune residing at Dinton, near Hindon, in Wilts, where the future historian was born on the 16th of February 1608. He was intended for the Church, and his education began at home; he went up to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, early in 1623. His stay at the University was brief, for, determining to take up the law for a profession, he entered at the Middle Temple at the age of seventeen. He was not called to the Bar until 1633. During the early years of his career in London, Hyde consorted with many of the most brilliant of his contemporaries, of many of whom he has preserved invaluable portraits. He delighted in the best society, and, as he tells never was so proud, or thought myself so good a man, as when I was the worst man in the company." Hyde entered the House of Commons as M.P. for Wootton Basset, in 1640, but in the Long Parliament he represented Saltash. He was not inclined at first to be a partisan, but the vehemence of public feeling forced him to take up a position, and he threw in his lot with the king, and he was expelled from the House in 1642. Charles I., however, knighted him and appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Privy Councillor; he sat in the Parliament which assembled at Oxford in January 1643. During these years he made All Souls College, Oxford, his residence, until, early in 1645, he felt himself forced to fly with the other leading royalists. He escaped from Pendennis Castle in Cornwall to Jersey, where he joined the Prince of Wales. Here he remained for two years, in undisturbed retirement, and here he began his History of the Rebellion. In 1648 he believed it to be his duty to join the royal party in Holland, and he was sent to Spain, where from 1649 to 1651 he held the very irksome position of joint-ambassador extraordinary from Charles II. to the court of Madrid. For the next two years his fortunes were at their lowest; he wrote from Paris in 1652 saying that he had neither clothes nor fire to preserve him from the cold, nor a livre to spend on his necessities. He found the frivolous and thankless character of the king extremely irksome, but Charles II. understood Hyde's value, and gave him the titular positions of Secretary of State (1653) and Lord High Chancellor of England (1657). The reward of his fidelity came with the Restoration. Hyde accompanied the king on his progress into London, his daughter married the Duke of York, and he himself was raised to the peerage as Baron Hyde of Hindon. His love of letters was gratified by being made, at the same time, High Steward of the University of Cambridge and Chancellor at Oxford. He had been Lord Hyde only six months, when he was promoted to be Viscount Cornbury and Earl of Clarendon,

and received immense rewards in money and estate. He now "held the first place in his Majesty's confidence, and was Prime Manager, if not Prime Minister, under

Montpellier, immersed in literary work, and then at Moulins. He had travelled to Rouen, perhaps with the intention of returning to England, when he was taken ill there, and died on the 9th of December 1674. His body was brought to London and buried

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