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 tc 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 a 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

nological order, or, indeed, at all in detail, through his numerous tracts. I shall confine myself to a rapid sketch of those with which I am most familiar; nor shall I stop to indulge in any verbal criticism of the language in which they are written (exhaustive as it is of the English tongue), or indulge in any vain commentaries upon styles of composition, already justly characterized by the late Lord Macaulay in language which I shall not spoil by attempting to paraphrase. "As compositions which deserve the attention of every one who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language, they abound," says that distinguished man (himself, like Milton, poet, orator, and historian), "with passages, compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Paradise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own, majestic language

'A sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.'

In truth, I know no English writer with whom to compare him either for matter or style. He arose in the best era of the English language-that which witnessed the publication of the authorized version of the Scriptures-never since, and never likely to be surpassed for vigorous simplicity of style and stern purity of expression. He lived beside Hooker and Taylor

and Raleigh and Bacon and Spenser, and may have spoken with Shakespeare, as he certainly was familiar with his works. But none of the writings of these can stand comparison with the gorgeous panoply in which he arrays his arguments, or the resistless flow of rhetoric and eloquence with which he overwhelms his antagonists. His pathos-and he is often profoundly patheticwill stand comparison with the lamentations of Job. His invocation of the liberty which is to be sought from within, not taken from without; his appeals to the purity, the chastity, the charities of human life, will not be found unworthy of being placed in juxtaposition with the eloquent words of him who said, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal; and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing." In that sacred volume I believe he found his great prototypes and earliest inspirations. There, and there only, if elsewhere, within himself, Milton against Milton, can we find his parallel.

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I have said that Milton arose ere yet the great Elizabethan writers had passed away. He was in early boyhood instructed, by a father who had sacrificed for conscience' sake a fair inheritance, in all scriptural lore, of which he drank with a thirst which was never satisfied. In his youth he was already a lyric poet of the first rank; in his middle age he had to bid a long farewell to cherished hopes and beloved studies and gird