MILTON'S PROSE. HEN your committee did me the honour of asking me to meet you here this day, I did not feel at liberty to decline an invitation, for which I was indebted to their too partial kindness. I do not entertain any vain expectation of being able to bring before you special attraction, much less that I could produce any discourse worthy of being classed with the many admirable and telling addresses you have heard from my predecessors in this place during the present and past season; but though I well knew that neither from ability nor information I could dare to instruct a company which I believe to be as well informed upon all subjects of general literature and as well disciplined in all contentions. of fair and upright thought as any that could be brought together in such numbers in any city of the empire, yet I hoped that, without making pretence to any power of lofty thought or ambitious speaking, I might, as an humble friend, render some service to those amongst you who are not familiar with the prose writings of him under the protection of whose name I appear here to-day, could words of mine prevail to induce you to devote some small portion of your leisure hours, stolen though it might be from the pleasant paths of sensational or periodical literature, to those great productions of John Milton, in which the stanchest friend of freedom and of truth that ever lived has made the most successful war against tyranny and falsehood-in which he has proclaimed, in tones not unworthy of the Apostle of the Gentiles, that education really free is the only genuine source of political and individual liberty— the only true safeguard of States and bulwark of their renown-in which he has for ever "justified the ways of God to man" by asserting the right of all men to exercise unrestrained their intellectual faculties upon all the gifts of God-to determine for themselves what is truth and what is falsehood-to circulate their thoughts from one to another, from land to land, from tribe to tribe, from nation to nation, free as "the winds that from four quarters blow"-to raise their thoughts and to pour forth their words above the level of vulgar superstition, unrestricted by any illiberal or illiterate licenser. There you will find that he has risen, as mortal man never did before, to the height of greatest argument, and proclaimed, in language which is affecting the fate of millions, even at this hour, on the banks of the Mississippi and in the remote forests of the far West, that He who has made of "one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth," willeth not that man shall any longer hold in bondage as a property the bodies or the souls of men, but that all alike shall have, unobstructed by any ordinance, a free book, a free press, a free conscience. If any words of mine shall tempt you to approach these considerations, to ponder upon them as they are to be found in the tractates of Milton, in a tranquil, in large and comprehensive spirit, and, when you have done so, to make their fit application not only at home but abroad, not only abroad but at home-then you and I shall not have met in vain in this assembly. And now let me say to you ;-I am well aware that in some of those writings opinions are maintained upon the most important subjects which may not find entire acceptance in any mixed assemblage; and which, indeed, as applied to our present limited and happily established institutions, have lost, in Great Britain at least, much of their point and significance. I must beg of you not to suppose that, whilst I give my unbounded admiration to the eloquence with which those opinions are maintained, I adopt all his conclusions, or that, as regards this distinguished audience, if they wish to form an estimate of Milton's character as a politician and a statesman, I desire any more than that they should themselves read and impartially consider the productions of his mind, and calmly decide how far these were justified by the times in which he lived, and to what extent their wisdom is still applicable-though not required in this enlightened country-to other parts of the world, more favoured mayhap by the gifts of nature, whose prosperity is still marred by the ignorance, the infatuation, and the oppression of man. For this purpose it is not necessary, nor within my intention, in the brief period during which I shall occupy your time, to go in chro |