d intellectual process is but little aware of
the undue energy those ideas may obtain from the concurrence of those
around. Persons who first acquired their ideas at second hand are more
open to a knowledge of their own weakness, and better acquainted with
the strange force which there is in the sympathy of others. The
isolated mind, when it acts with the popular feeling, is apt to
exaggerate that feeling for the most part by an almost inevitable
consequence of the feelings which render it isolated. Milton is an
example of this remark. In the commencement of the struggle between
Charles I. and the Parliament, he sympathized strongly with the popular
movement, and carried to what seems now a strange extreme his
partisanship. No one could imagine that the first literary Englishman
of his time could write the following passage on Charles I.:--

"Who can with patience hear this filthy, rascally fool speak so
irreverently of persons eminent both in greatness and piety? Dare you
compare King _David_ with King _Charles_: a most religious king and
prophet with a superstitious prince, and who was but a novice in the
Christian religion; a most prudent, wise prince with a weak one; a
valiant prince with a cowardly one; finally, a most just prince with a
most unjust one? Have you the impudence to commend his chastity and
sobriety, who is known to have committed all manner of lewdness in
company with his confidant the Duke of _Buckingham_? It were to no
purpose to inquire into the private actions of his life, who publicly
at plays would embrace and kiss the ladies." [15]

Whatever may be the faults of that ill-fated monarch,--and they
assuredly were not small,--no one would now think this absurd invective
to be even an excusable exaggeration. It misses the true mark
altogether, and is the expression of a strongly imaginative mind, which
has seen something that it did not like, and is unable in consequence
to see anything that has any relation to it distinctly or correctly.
But with the supremacy of the Long Parliament Milton's attachment to
their cause ceased. No one has drawn a more unfavorable picture of the
rule which they established. Years after their supremacy had passed
away, and the restoration of the monarchy had covered with a new and
strange scene the old actors and the old world, he thrust into a most
unlikely part of his "History of England" [Book iii.] the following
attack on them:--

"But when once the