anned it. So long as we set up
our modern views as a standard, and by this standard judge the ancient
men, we fail in hospitality of thought, and come short of our duty as
readers.

This consideration suggests yet another purpose in setting youth to the
reading of Milton. By no means an ancient poet, he takes us,
nevertheless, to a world different from our own, and in some sense helps
us out of the modern time in which our lives have fallen, to show us how
other ages conceived of God and Heaven. The mark of an educated man is
respect for the past; the old philosophies and religions do not startle
and repel him; his ancestors were once in those stages of belief; in some
stage of this vast movement of thought he and his fellows are at the
present moment. This largeness of view can be fruitfully impressed on
youth only by letting them read, under wise guidance, the older poets.

OUTLINES OF THE LIFE OF MILTON.

John Milton was born in London on the ninth of December, 1608. Queen
Elizabeth had then been dead five years, and the literature which we call
Elizabethan was still being written by the men who had begun their
careers under her reign. Spenser had died in 1599. The theatres were yet
in the enjoyment of full popularity, and the play-writers were producing
works that continued the traditions and the manner of the Elizabethan
drama. Shakespeare had still eight years to live, and at least four of
the great plays to write. Bacon's fame was already great, but the events
of eighteen years were to cloud his reputation and establish his renown.
Jonson, great as a writer of masks, was to live till he might have seen,
in Comus, how a young and scholarly puritan humanist thought that a mask
should be conceived.

Born thus in the fifth year of the first of the Stuarts, Milton lived to
witness all the vicissitudes of English politics in which that family was
involved, except the very last. He did not see the Revolution of 1688.
Surviving for fourteen years the restoration of Charles II., he died in
1674, at the age of sixty-six.

Milton's social position can be inferred from the fact that his father
was what was then called a scrivener,--that is, he kept an office in his
dwelling, and was employed to draw up contracts, wills, and other legal
documents. This occupation implied knowledge at least of the forms of the
law, though not of its history or principles. It did not imply liberal
education, th