tain testimony, if not a trophy. For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the commonwealth: that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. To which if I now manifest, by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles, as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will be attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God, our deliverer; next, to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom, lords and commons of England! Neither is it in God's esteem, the diminution of his glory, when honourable things are spoken of good men, and worthy magistrates; which if I now first should begin to do,+ after so fair a progress of your laudable deeds, and such a long obligement upon the whole realm to your indefatigable virtues, I might I be justly reckoned among the tardiest and the unwillingest of them that praise ye.

Nevertheless there being three principal things, without which all praising is but courtship and flattery: first, when that only is praised which is solidly worth praise; next, when greatest likelihoods are brought, that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed; the other, when he who praises, by shewing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two of these I have heretofore endeavoured, rescuing the employment from him who went about to impair your merits with a trivial and malignant encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine own acquittal,

His discourse may, perhaps, be regarded, he says, as a trophy of liberty, as proving, by the boldness with which he speaks, that England was then free.-ED.

He reminds the parliament that this was not the first time he had spoken their praises, both that he might not be suspected of endeavouring to purchase a favour by fine words, and that they, on the other hand, might learn, in all they did, to seek the approbation of the public. His former panegyric occurs in the "Apology for Smectymnuus."-ED.

Bishop Hall's encomium is unskilful, because it betrays the insincerity of the writer. He could not conceal how unwillingly he even augured well of them; and afterwards, in his reply to Smectymnuus, the different spirit

that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath been reserved opportunely to this occasion. For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on your proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainest advice is a kind of praising; for though I should affirm and hold by argument, that it would fare better with truth, with learning, and the commonwealth, if one of your published orders, which I should name, were called in; yet at the same time it could not but much redound to the lustre of your mild and equal government, whenas private persons are hereby animated to think ye better pleased with public advice than other statists have been delighted heretofore with public flattery. And men will then see what difference there is between the magnanimity of a triennial parliament, and that jealous haughtiness of prelates and cabin counsellors that usurped of late, whenas they shall observe ye in the midst of your victories and successes more gently brooking written exceptions against a voted order, than other courts, which had produced nothing worth memory but the weak ostentation of wealth, would have endured the least signified dislike at any sudden proclamation.

If I should thus far presume upon the meek demeanour of your civil and gentle greatness, lords and commons! as what your published order hath directly said, that to gainsay, I might defend myself with ease, if any should accuse me of in which he addressed the king, rendered the insipidity of his praise of the parliament the more palpable.-ED.

We may learn from Baxter, a great and holy man, in what light the members of the hierarchy were then very generally viewed: "If we meet with a clergy that are high, and have a great deal of worldly interest at stake; or if they be in councils and synods, and have got the major vote, they too easily believe that either their grandeur, reverence, names, or numbers, must give them the reputation of being orthodox, and in the right, and will warrant them to account and defame him as erroneous, heretical, schismatical, singular, factious or proud, that presumeth to contradict them, and to know more than they; of which not only the case of Nazianzen, Martin, and Chrysostom are sad proofs, but also the proceedings of too many general and provincial councils. And so our hard studies and darling truth must make us as owls, or reproached persons among those reverend brethren, who are ignorant at easier rates, and who find it a far softer kind of life to think and say as the most or best esteemed do, than to purchase reproach and obloquy so dearly."—Dying Thoughts, p. 111, Sacred Classics' edition.)—ED.

being new or insolent, did they but know how much better I find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece, than the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. And out of those ages, to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not yet Goths and Jutlanders, I could name him + who from his private house wrote that discourse to the parliament of Athens, that persuades them to change the form of democracy which was then established. Such honour was done in those days to men who professed the study of wisdom and eloquence, not only in their own country, but in other lands, that cities and signiories heard them gladly, and with great respect, if they had aught in public to admonish the state. Thus did Dion

* Greek authors were in those times diligently studied, at least by all who aimed at distinction in politics or literature; and this will always perhaps, be the case, when a democratic feeling exists in the public mind. Hobbes, the Philistus of modern history, is accused of having, for this reason, counselled the destruction of Greek authors; but he translated Homer and Thucydides, from neither of whom could absolute monarchy derive much support.

He means Isocrates, who, in a discourse, in title almost identical with his own, ventured upon the bold step here mentioned. In his sonnet to the Lady Margaret Leigh he again alludes to this great man, but without naming him: "As that dishonest victory"

At Chæronea, fatal to liberty,

Killed with report that old man eloquent.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus entertained a no less lofty opinion of Isocrates. "Who," says he, “can read his Areopagitic discourse without improving in wisdom? Or, who but must admire the enterprise of the orator that, in addressing the Athenians on the affairs of government, had the boldness to advise the abandonment of the form of democracy then established, as highly injurious to the interests of the state: Τίς δὲ τὸν Αρεοπαγιτικών ἀναγνοὺς λόγον, κ. τ. λ. Περὶ Των ̓Αρκαίων Ρήτορων Ὑπομνημ. Ισοκράτης, ή.—ED.

This particularly applies to the Sophists, such as Protagoras and Hippias, who travelled from city to city, lecturing on the science of politics, and leading about with them, as their pupils, young men of the most dis tinguished families in Greece.-Plato, in the Hippias and Protagoras. Hume, himself a sophist of the school of Protagoras, entertained a high veneration for the rhetorical art; and, speaking of the comparative neglect of it by the moderns, observes:-"We are told, that when Demosthenes was to plead, all ingen.ous men flocked to Athens from the most remote parts of Greece, as to the most celebrated spectacle of the world. At London you may see men sauntering in the court of requests, while the most important debate is carrying on in the two houses; and many do not think themselves sufficiently compensated for the losing of their dinners, by all the eloquence

Prusæus, a stranger and a private orator, counsel the Rhodians against a former edict; and I abound with other like examples, which to set here would be superfluous. But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours, and those natural endowments haply not the worst for two and fifty degrees of northern latitude, so much must be derogated, as to count me not equal to any of those who had this privilege, I would obtain to be thought not so inferior, as yourselves are superior to the most of them who received their counsel; and how far you excel them, be assured, lords and commons! there can no greater testimony appear, than when your prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason, from what quarter+ soever it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any act of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your prede

cessors.

*

If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye were not, I know not what should withhold me from presenting ye with a fit instance wherein to show both that love of truth which ye eminently profess, and that uprightness of your judgment which is not wont to be partial to yourselves; by judging over again that order which ye have ordained to regulate printing: that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such, or at least one of such, as shall be thereto appointed." For that part which preserves justly every man's copy to himself, ‡ or provides for the poor, of our most celebrated speakers. When old Cibber is to act, the curiosity of several is more excited, than when our prime minister is to defend himself from a motion for his removal or impeachment."-(Essays, &c. 4to. p. 63.)—ED. * A noble compliment both to himself and the parliament. Old Montaigne would have been satisfied with this self-confidence.-ED.

Milton appears in this passage to glance at a sportive and beautiful remark of Socrates in the Phædrus. His youthful companion having insinuated that the Egyptian story of Theuth and Thamus, which he had just been relating, was one of his own amusing inventions, the philosopher replies: "The ministers of the Dodonæan Jupiter inform us, my friend, that the first oracles were delivered from an oak; and the people of those days, not being so wise as we are now become, cared not, so that what they heard were true, whether it proceeded from a rock or a tree. But to you, perhaps, the country of the speaker makes a difference; to discover what is true, not being your sole object."-(T. I. p. 98)-ED.

See this order in Rushworth's Hist. Col. V. 335. Lord Mansfield, in the case of literary property, laid considerable stress on this passage, as an

I touch not; only wish they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute honest and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars. But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had died with his brother quadragesimal and matrimonial* when the prelates expired, I shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before ye, first, the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to own; next, what is to be thought in general of reading, whatever sort the books be; and that this order avails nothing to the suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, which were mainly intended to be suppressed.+ Last, that it will be primely to the discourageauthority of weight for the judgment he was pronouncing in favour of copyrights :-"The single opinion of such a man as Milton, speaking after much consideration on the very point, is stronger than any inferences from gathering acorns, and seizing a vacant piece of ground; when the writers, so far from thinking of the very point, speak of an imaginary state of nature before the invention of letters." (Haiday's Life of Lord Mansfield, p. 232.) Our author, adds Holt White, could not have ventured to expect that his tract would be cited from the bench in such terms of praise by a Chief Justice of England.-ED.

However quaintly the word quadragesimal now sounds, we must not impute this Latin synonyme for the English adjective lenten to Milton as a pedantic intrusion of his own on our language. I find it in the "Ordinary," one of Cartwright's comedies:

"But Quadragesimal wits and fancies lean
As Ember weeks."

Quadragesimal licences, I conclude to have been the permissions which, even subsequently to the Reformation, were granted for eating white meats in Lent, on Ember days, and on others, which were appointed by Act of Parliament for Fish Days. Queen Elizabeth used to say, that she would never eat flesh in Lent without obtaining licence from her little black husband, (Walton's Life of Hooker, 209, ed. of 1807,) as she called Archbishop Whitgift. During the interregnum, marriages were, by an ordinance of Parliament, solemnized before a civil magistrate, and without a licence. I copy the form of a certificate on the occasion from the original now before me :-" Sussex.-These are to certify those whom it may concern, that Thomas Holt of Petersfield, in the county of Louth, clerk, and Charity Shirley of Kirdford, in the county of Sussex, spinster, were married at Plaistow, in the parish of Kirdford, on the one and twentieth of May, by Richard Knowles, Esq. one of the Commissioners for the Peace in the said county of Sussex. (L.S.) "RICHARD KNOWLES." "In the presence of WM. MILLWOOD, "JOHN BEATON."

Milton's allusion must have been to this practice. (Holt White.)-ED. + See in proof of this, Note p. 101, at the conclusion of this speech, where we find, by the testimony of Mabbot, himself a licenser, how easily men devised means of eluding the ridiculous severity of the law, and of convert