excuse which
our great satirist has suggested for another unreliable lady: "My
mother was an angel; but angels are not always _commodes a vivre_."

This is not a pleasant part of our subject, and we must leave it. It
is more agreeable to relate that on no occasion of his life was the
substantial excellence of Milton's character more conclusively shown
than in his conduct at the last stage of this curious transaction.
After a very considerable interval, and after the publication of his
book on divorce, Mrs. Milton showed a disposition to return to her
husband; and in spite of his theories, he received her with open arms.
With great Christian patience, he received her relations too. The
Parliamentary party was then victorious; and old Mr. Powell, who had
suffered very much in the cause of the king, lived until his death
untroubled, and "wholly to his devotion," as we are informed, in the
house of his son-in-law.

Of the other occurrences of Milton's domestic life we have left
ourselves no room to speak; we must turn to our second source of
illustration for his character,--his opinions on the great public
events of his time. It may seem odd, but we believe that a man of
austere character naturally tends _both_ to an excessive party spirit
and to an extreme isolation. Of course the circumstances which develop
the one must be different from those which are necessary to call out
the other: party spirit requires companionship; isolation, if we may be
pardoned so original a remark, excludes it. But though, as we have
shown, this species of character is prone to mental solitude, tends to
an intellectual isolation where it is possible and as soon as it can,
yet when invincible circumstances throw it into mental companionship,
when it is driven into earnest association with earnest men on
interesting topics, its zeal becomes excessive. Such a man's mind is
at home only with its own enthusiasm; it is cooped up within the narrow
limits of its own ideas, and it can make no allowance for those who
differ from or oppose them. We may see something of this excessive
party zeal in Burke. No one's reasons are more philosophical; yet no
one who acted with a party went farther in aid of it or was more
violent in support of it. He forgot what could be said for the tenets
of the enemy; his imagination made that enemy an abstract incarnation
of his tenets. A man, too, who knows that he formed his opinions
originally by a genuine an