evil. It was to no purpose that Milton seems to
have practiced a sort of professional study of life. No man could rank
more highly the importance to a poet of an intellectual insight into
all-important pursuits and "seemly arts." But it is not by the mere
intellect that we can take in the daily occupations of mankind: we must
sympathize with them, and see them in their human relations. A
chimney-sweeper, _qua_ chimney-sweeper, is not very sentimental: it is
in himself that he is so interesting.

Milton's austere character is in some sort the more evident because he
possessed in large measure a certain relieving element, in which those
who are eminent in that character are very deficient. Generally such
persons have but obtuse senses: we are prone to attribute the purity of
their conduct to the dullness of their sensations. Milton had no such
obtuseness: he had every opportunity for knowing the "world of eye and
ear";[12] you cannot open his works without seeing how much he did know
of it. The austerity of his nature was not caused by the deficiency of
his senses, but by an excess of the warning instinct. Even when he
professed to delineate the world of sensuous delight, this instinct
shows itself. Dr. Johnson thought he could discern melancholy in
"L'Allegro";[13] if he had said "solitariness," it would have been
correct.

The peculiar nature of Milton's character is very conspicuous in the
events of his domestic life, and in the views which he took of the
great public revolutions of his age. We can spare only a very brief
space for the examination of either of these; but we will endeavor to
say a few words upon each of them.

The circumstances of Milton's first marriage are as singular as any in
the strange series of the loves of the poets. The scene opens with an
affair of business. Milton's father, as is well known, was a
scrivener,--a kind of professional money-lender, then well known in
London; and having been early connected with the vicinity of Oxford,
continued afterwards to have pecuniary transactions of a certain nature
with country gentlemen of that neighborhood. In the course of these he
advanced L500 to a certain Mr. Richard Powell, a squire of fair landed
estate, residing at Forest Hill, which is about four miles from the
city of Oxford. The money was lent on the 11th of June, 1627; and a
few months afterwards Mr. Milton the elder gave L312 of it to his son
the poet, who was then a youth a