,
indiscriminate reverence for the classical writers, extending to
subjects in which they were but children compared with the moderns. It
moves something more than a smile to find ingenuous youth referred to
Pliny and Solinus for instruction in physical science; and one wonders
what the agricultural Hartlib thought of the proposed course of "Cato,
Varro, and Columella," whose precepts are adapted for the climate of
Italy. Another error, obvious to any dunce, was concealed from Milton by
his own intellectual greatness. He legislates for a college of Miltons.
He never suspects that the course he is prescribing would be beyond the
abilities of nine hundred and ninety-nine scholars in a thousand, and
that the thousandth would die of it. If a difficulty occurs he
contemptuously puts it aside. He has not provided for Italian, but can
it not "be easily learned at any odd hour"? "Ere this time the Hebrew
tongue" (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), "might have
been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and
the Syrian dialect." This sublime confidence in the resources of the
human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose
mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his
thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement. As an
ode or poem on education, Milton's tract, doubtless, has delivered many
a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man's aims are so
high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited
and stimulated by reading it. As a practical treatise it is only
valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth,
whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the
advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up
steadily throughout the whole course. Neglect of this precept is the
principal reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, and
assiduously taught, leave school with hardly any knowledge of
languages. Milton's scheme is also remarkable for its bold dealing with
day schools and universities, which it would have entirely superseded.

The next publication of Milton's is another instance of the dependence
of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him. We
owe the "Areopagitica," not to the lonely overflowings of his soul, or
even to the disinterested observation of public affairs, but to the real
jeopardy he had