travel. Milton alludes almost scornfully to Comenius in his preface to
Hartlib, but his tract is nevertheless imbued with the Moravian's
principles. His aim, like Comenius's, is to provide for the instruction
of all, "before the years of puberty, in all things belonging to the
present and future life." His view is as strictly utilitarian as
Comenius's. "Language is but the instrument conveying to us things
useful to be known." Of the study of language as intellectual discipline
he says nothing, and his whole course of instruction is governed by the
desire of imparting useful knowledge. Whatever we may think of the
system of teaching which in our day allows a youth to leave school
disgracefully ignorant of physical and political geography, of history
and foreign languages, it cannot be denied that Milton goes into the
opposite extreme, and would overload the young mind with more
information than it could possibly digest. His scheme is further
vitiated by a fault which we should not have looked for in him,
indiscriminate reverence for the classical writers, extending to
subjects in which they were but children compared with the moderns. It
moves something more than a smile to find ingenuous youth referred to
Pliny and Solinus for instruction in physical science; and one wonders
what the agricultural Hartlib thought of the proposed course of "Cato,
Varro, and Columella," whose precepts are adapted for the climate of
Italy. Another error, obvious to any dunce, was concealed from Milton by
his own intellectual greatness. He legislates for a college of Miltons.
He never suspects that the course he is prescribing would be beyond the
abilities of nine hundred and ninety-nine scholars in a thousand, and
that the thousandth would die of it. If a difficulty occurs he
contemptuously puts it aside. He has not provided for Italian, but can
it not "be easily learned at any odd hour"? "Ere this time the Hebrew
tongue" (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), "might have
been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and