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which Cicero called the thunderbolts of Demosthenes, were never hurled with a more terrific impetuosity than the anathemas of Milton against the king and the episcopacy. When Socrates was asked in what strength consisted, he replied, "In the motion of the soul with the body." This is the secret of Milton's vigour; his soul went with his hand.

If contrasted with some of his immediate contemporaries, he will be found wanting in harmony, in purity, and in condensation; even in his own day his style was remarkable for its peculiarities; he professes his inability to conceive what it "ailed to be so soon distinguishable." The subjects that occupied his attention did not readily admit the milder Graces that adorn the contemplations of his antagonist Bishop Hall, or the florid and aureate pages of Jeremy Taylor, in whom the Loves are always seen the companions of Wisdom. A comparison of Milton's various eulogies of marriage, in the Treatise upon Divorce, with the eloquent enthusiasm of Taylor overflowing in the Sermon on the Wedding Ring, would place their merits in a very striking light. It is in the indignant, the scornful, the denouncing, that his genius seems to speak with the clearest voice; nothing can exceed the glare of his hatred; a single flash lights us through a page. His portraits of Zeal; of Truth; of Justice; "the strength, the kingdom, the power, and the majesty of all ages;" of Error, with her huge overshadowing train sweeping the stars out of the firmament of the church, in the dark era preceding the Reformation; of Antiquity, the "unactive and lifeless Colossus;" the comparison of the Gospel to a mirror of diamond, dazzling and piercing the misty eye-ball; the description of God's opening the drowsy eyelids by the glimmering light which Wickliffe

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and his followers dispersed,-all these passages are nobly conceived and vividly expressed. Not less beautiful is the observation at the conclusion of the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth,-" By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines where daylight and twilight meet us with a clear dawn, presenting to our view, though at a far distance, clear colours and shapes." Or the allusion to the legend of the martyr Polycarp,-" The fire, when it came to proof, would not do its work; but, starting off like a full sail from the mast, did but reflect a golden light upon his unviolated limbs, exhaling such a sweet odour, as if all the incense of Arabia had been burning." Southey has introduced this poetical description into his criental romance of Thalaba. And this is the writer whom Voltaire, with all the malignity of ignorance, pronounced a miserable writer of prose!

The reasons which have induced me to pass over thus rapidly the polemical disquisitions of Milton, render a review of his political character inexpedient. That criticism, however, is certainly unjust to his memory, which supposes him to have been actuated by any feeling but the loftiest patriotism; the patriotism, indeed, of a visionary, full of dangerous experiments and extravagant expectations, but, nevertheless, sincere and disinterested. He confessed to his friend Heimbach that he possessed no influence with the individuals in power. The crafty hypocrisy of Cromwell and his peers differed widely from that noble and heroic wisdom, to be obtained, he declared, by imbuing the mind with foreign writings, and the examples of the best ages. Carried by an ardent imagination into earlier times, and among the simpler and

severer manners of patriarchal society, he was always grasping at some ideal excellence-some beautiful shadow. In all the struggles of controversial animosity, in all the fierceness of his republican zeal, he was never forsaken, as he affirmed, by the hope of " clasping inseparable hands with joy and bliss," where they who, "by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of their country," shall receive a glorious reward. It becomes us, therefore, while sighing over the intemperance of his anger, to remember that he lived in the midst of the battle*, when the passions of men were goaded into fury, when fanaticism darkened into madness, and the voice of reason was drowned in the tumult of an arming nation.

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THOMAS KEN.

THE life of Bishop Ken, in connexion with the political history of our Church, has been written with great zeal and affection by Mr. Bowles; and his Prose Works have been recently published under the superintendence of Mr. Round. In the following pages he is viewed more particularly in the character of a Christian and a poet.

THOMAS KEN was born in July, 1637, at Little Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, where his father, a solicitor of Furnival's Inn, appears to have possessed a temporary residence. He had two sisters, of whom Anne, the elder, was married to the excellent Isaac Walton, and Martha, the younger, to a gentleman of the name of Beacham. It is not known in what place he received the first rudiments of his education. His parents watched over him with affectionate solicitude and early implanted those principles of piety which took such deep root in his heart. In one of his poems he has a touching allusion to their tenderness.

E'er since I hung upon my mother's breast,

Thy love, my God, has me sustained and blest;
My virtuous parents, tender of their child,
My education, pious, careful, mild.

By whose interest he procured admission into the venerable establishment of William of Wykeham, we are not informed. The melody of his voice, for which as a child he was remarkable, although a qualification of great

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