the Syrian dialect." This sublime confidence in the resources of the
human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose
mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his
thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement. As an
ode or poem on education, Milton's tract, doubtless, has delivered many
a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man's aims are so
high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited
and stimulated by reading it. As a practical treatise it is only
valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth,
whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the
advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up
steadily throughout the whole course. Neglect of this precept is the
principal reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, and
assiduously taught, leave school with hardly any knowledge of
languages. Milton's scheme is also remarkable for its bold dealing with
day schools and universities, which it would have entirely superseded.

The next publication of Milton's is another instance of the dependence
of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him. We
owe the "Areopagitica," not to the lonely overflowings of his soul, or
even to the disinterested observation of public affairs, but to the real
jeopardy he had incurred by his neglect to get his books licensed. The
Long Parliament had found itself, in 1643, with respect to the Press,
very much in the position of Lord Canning's government in India at the
time of the Mutiny. It marks the progress of public opinion that,
whereas the Indian Government only ventured to take power to prevent
inopportune publication with many apologies, and as a temporary measure,
the Parliament assumed it as self-evident that "forged, scandalous,
seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books" had
no right to exist, and should be nipped in the bud by the appointment of