A comparison, it is true, between the respective styles of these two writers would be in some measure an injury to the immortal author of the 'Provincial Letters;' for Barrow's writings, vigorous and even admirable as they undoubtedly are, hardly exhibit that wonderful condensation and originality which make every line of Pascal appeal so irresistibly and so instantaneously to the highest powers of our intellect, and make us pause and meditate as each new expression seems to open to us a long vista of deductions, or suggests to us a vast and complex train of reasoning. Nor indeed is the style of Barrow remarkable, in so high a degree at least, for the frequent occurrence of those admirable expressions so abundant in every page of the great French theologian: expressions at once simple and profound, intensely idiomatic, yet perfectly new. Yet if we look for a manly and fervid eloquence, for a mighty and sustained power kept under control by the severest logic, for a peculiar quality of mastery and vigour to which all tasks appear equally easy, we may point with pride to the writings of Barrow. "He is equally distinguished," says an acute and able critic, "for the redundancy of his matter, and for the pregnant brevity of his expression; but what more particularly characterises his manner is a certain air of powerful and of conscious facility in the execution of whatever he undertakes. Whether the subject be mathematical, metaphysical, or theological, he seems always to bring to it a mind which feels itself superior to the occasion, and which, in contending with the greatest difficulties, 'puts forth but half its strength.' Like Pascal, Barrow was one of the greatest physical philosophers. of his own, or indeed of any, age; he was the friend and the preceptor of Newton, and a fellow-labourer with the most illustrious of modern investigators in many fields of natural science, particularly in the departments of optics and astronomy. He thus brought to the task of demonstrating the nature and necessity of our Christian duties, and of inculcating the precepts of evangelic morality, a mind trained in the investigation of abstract truth, and a severe and majestic eloquence, the handmaid of the strictest and most comprehensive logic. He was a man of vast and multifarious attainments, as a very brief sketch of his life will sufficiently prove. Born in London, in 1630, of humble though not indigent parentage, he early entered, at Cambridge, on that career which ultimately rendered his name one of the brightest ornaments of that university. Finding that the religious dissensions of the period of the Commonwealth, and particularly the predominance during that period of opinions totally at variance with his own, precluded any hope of success in the clerical profession, he turned his attention to medicine, and culti vated with ardour many of the sciences which are subservient to that pursuit, as anatomy, botany, and chemistry. Nor did he neglect the studies which we should consider more peculiarly congenial to the venerable walls of his "Alma Mater;" he became a candidate for the professorship of Greek in 1655, but, failing in his attempt to obtain that dignity, he went abroad, and passed some years in the East, and particularly at Smyrna and Constantinople. Returning to England in 1659, Barrow obtained the professorship for which he had been before an unsuccessful candidate, and to this post were added several others, of less dignity indeed, but sufficiently proving the high reputation enjoyed by Barrow in many different and dissi milar departments of knowledge. In 1663 he resigned these appoint ments for that of Lucasian professor of mathematics in the university, a post which he filled with increasing glory for six years, at the end of which period he vacated it in favour of his immortal contemporary, Newton. His rise to public distinction was now steady and rapid: he was successively appointed one of the king's chaplains; nominated, in 1672, Master of his college-that of Trinity, which thus possessed within its bosom at one time two of the greatest and most virtuous men who ever dignified humanity-the king paying Barrow, as he conferred upon him this deserved honour, the just compliment of saying that he had bestowed it "on the best scholar in England;" and lastly he was elected, in 1675, Vice-Chancellor of the University, which dignity he enjoyed only two years, as he died of a fever in 1677, at the age of forty-six. . Barrow is an admirable specimen of a class of men who, fortunately for the political, the literary, and the theological glory of England, have adorned her two great seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, at almost every period of her history. Possessed of vast, solid, and diversified learning, with practice and experience in the affairs of real life corrected and rendered philosophical by retirement and meditation, with the intense and concentrated industry of the monk guided by the sense of utility of the man of the world, these rigorous scholars seem peculiarly adapted by Providence to become firm and majestic pillars of such an ecclesiastical establishment as the Church of England. "Blessed is she," we may venture to apply the words of Scripture," for she has her quiver full of them !" CHAPTER IX. JOHN MILTON. Character of the Poet-Religious and Political Opinions-RepublicanismHis Learning-Travels in Italy-Prose Works-Areopagitica-Prose Styl -Treatises on Divorce-His Literary Meditations-Tractate of Education-Passion for Music-Paradise Lost-Dante and Milton compared-Study of Romance-Campbell's Criticism-Paradise Regained-Minor PoemsSamson Agonistes. MILTON says, in one of the most admirable and characteristic of his prose works, that a poet should be in his own life and person a "true poem-that is, a composition of the best and noblest things;" and whatever discrepancy we may find between the works and the characters of inferior writers, we shall never fail to remark, in the case of that small number consisting of the very greatest names in the history of the human mind, a certain, perfect, and wonderful accordance between the character of the man and the peculiar excellences of his productions. Of the four great Evangelists of the human mind, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, each is in some measure, personally as well as intellectually, the type and reflection of the epoch in which he lived; and, as the appearance of these great luminaries of man's spiritual horizon was coincident with great events affecting the social destinies of our race, we may even say that these sublime minds at once guided and followed the direction of the opinions and condition of their times. Homer is, in fact, a short expression for the heroic or mythic epoch, taken in its sublimer and more lovely manifestation; Virgil is the incarnation of the power, grandeur, and development of the nationality of empire; Dante was no less the literary embodiment of medieval Christianity-that wild and wondrous phase of humanity which is found petrified, as it were, and presented to us in a tangible form, in the great triumphs of Gothic art; and our great countryman will seem no unapt or imperfect type of the Christianity of the Reformation—that is, of Christianity combined with freedom of opinion and the right of private judgment carried to its extremest conse quences. Wonderful, indeed, and complicated as is the combination of causes and conditions which must conspire to the production of any work of permanent and universal importance, and to the existence, consequently, of a mind capable of creating such a work, in no case in the whole history of mankind does that combination appear to have been so wonderful as in the example of Milton. Born in an age when the great advance of civilization appeared to preclude the possibility of any great work appearing to rival the immortal monuments of ancient literature, and when men despaired-as they always have done-of a great epic being ever again given to the world-as if the fountains of the beautiful were not inexhaustible as the rivers of Paradise-he appears to have had a vast and all-embracing sympathy with whatever was ennobling in the opinions of his times. His mind was profoundly and wonderfully eclectic. His political and religious sentiments were of the extremest and even most violent character; he was a devoted republican, with his grand imagination ever dwelling upon the visionary phantoms of antique glory and virtue. In the earthquake which overthrew the regal and hierarchic institutions of his country, his unworldly and heroic soul saw only a beneficent and temporary convulsion, clearing the ground of its load of false temples, and preparing it for the erection of a new and glorious social edifice, with something of the pure proportions of the Roman Capitol or of the Attic Acropolis. In religion, too, his haughty intellect and pure morals revolted at that admixture of human motives without which, like the baser alloy in metallurgy, the pure gold of Christianity can hardly be formed— at least as society is now constituted-into a practically useful instrument for the improvement of humanity; and he hoped that, by forcibly bringing back the Church to the structural simplicity of the primitive times, he would restore the pure, ardent, and evangelic spirit which characterised those ages. And perhaps, in a world peopled by Miltons and by Harringtons, such schemes and hopes might cease to be Utopian. Visionary as they were, these convictions gave a peculiar character of elevation to Milton's meditations; and it is not too much to say that, had his opinions on government in church and state been other than they were, we could have possessed neither the 'Areopagitica' nor the 'Paradise Lost’· "And Heaven had wanted one immortal song.' But the profession of these opinions, and the fierce zeal with which he advocated them, could not efface in such a mind as Milton's the impressions made by medieval art and by the chivalrous history of his country. And thus there appears continually in his works, we will not say a contest, but a contrast, between his convictions and his sympathies-between his logic and his fancy. And this, which in an inferior mind would not have failed to produce an incessant uncertainty and inconsistency, in such a soul as John Milton's was a healthy and vivifying action: it was like the conflicting currents of the galvanic battery, whose opposing poles give out intensest light and heat. Thus, while Milton the polemic was advocating the overthrow of the monarchic institutions of England, and the de struction of the hierarchic edifice of its Church, Milton the poet had his soul deeply penetrated with the enthusiasm inspired by his country's history, and his ear ever thrilling to the niajestic services of its half-Roman worship. The man who desired the abolition of all external dignities on earth has given us the grandest picture of such a graduated hierarchy of orders in heaven ፡፡ Thrones, Princedoms, Virtues, Dominations, Powers." He who would have reduced the externals of Christianity to a simplicity and meanness compared with which the subterranean worship of the persecuted Christians of the primitive times was splendour, has exhibited a deeper and more prevailing admiration than any other poet ever showed for the grandeur of Gothic architecture and the charms of the solemn masses of the ancient cathedrals: "But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale; As may with sweetness, through mine ear, And bring all heaven before mine eyes." In the same way, the learning of this wondrous being helped to give his mind that catholicity of taste which is above all things necessary to the production of an immortal work. His favourite reading, it is true, lay chiefly among the sages and tragic poets of ancient Greece: he loved to wander through "the shady spaces of philosophy," as he beautifully calls them, with his beloved Plato, to follow the soaring of Aristotle's eagle intellect, to listen to the chime of Homer's oceanic harmony, and to the more irregular music of Pindar, or "sad Electra's poet." But all this never deadened his ear, or impaired his sensibility, for the wilder poesy of the chivalric age, nor for the more feminine and artificial graces of the Italian Muse. He was perhaps the most learned man who ever lived, and at the same time the man who had his learning the most completely under his command. Like Rabelais, Milton may without exaggeration be said to have traversed every region in the world of knowledge explored down to his age; but at the same time we must not forget the immense difference, not only in point of extent, but in point also of kind, existing between the state of human knowledge in the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The first of these two wonderful men was the type of the infancy of the Reformation, the second the embodiment of its manhood. Milton enjoyed the rare advantage of a purely literary education. The intellect and aptitude for study exhibited by him in his earliest childhood seems |