and justify their conduct to themselves. Prayer certainly was not
thought superfluous by him, who represents our first parents as
praying acceptably in the state of innocence, and efficaciously
after their fall. That he lived without prayer can hardly be
affirmed; his studies and meditations were an habitual prayer. The
neglect of it in his family was probably a fault for which he
condemned himself, and which he intended to correct; but that death,
as too often happens, intercepted his reformation.

His political notions were those of an acrimonious and surly
Republican; for which it is not known that he gave any better reason
than that "a popular government was the most frugal; for the
trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth." It
is surely very shallow policy that supposes money to be the chief
good; and even this, without considering that the support and
expense of a court is, for the most part, only a particular kind of
traffic, for which money is circulated, without any national
impoverishment.

Milton's Republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious
hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in
petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority.
He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the Church; for he
hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that
his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and
that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to
authority.

It has been observed that they who most loudly clamour for liberty
do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character,