sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity
to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on
Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is
so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it
until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pass
on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on
education and on the freedom of the press.

Milton's tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was the
fruit of an impulse from without. "Though it be one of the greatest and
noblest designs that can be thought on, and for want of which this
nation perishes, I had not at this time been induced but by your earnest
entreaties and serious conjurements." The efficient cause thus referred
to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and
polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the
succeeding century. The son of a Polish exile of German extraction,
Hartlib had settled in England about 1627. He found the country
behindhand both economically and socially, and with benign fervour
applied himself to its regeneration. Agriculture was his principal
hobby, and he effected much towards its improvement in England, rather
however by editing the unpublished treatises of Weston and Child than by
any direct contributions of his own. Next among the undertakings to
which he devoted himself were two of no less moment than the union of
British and foreign Protestants, and the reform of English education by
the introduction of the methods of Comenius. This Moravian pastor, the
Pestalozzi of his age, had first of men grasped the idea that the
ordinary school methods were better adapted to instil a knowledge of
words than a knowledge of things. He was, in a word, the inventor of
object lessons. He also strove to organize education as a connected
whole from the infant school to the last touch of polish from foreign