given vent elsewhere to his discontent with the system of Cambridge,
"which, as in the time of her better health, and mine own younger
judgment, I never greatly admired, so now (1642) much less." In the
letter to Hartlib he denounces with equal fierceness the schools and
"the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing
and so unsuccessful." The alumni of the universities carry away with
them a hatred and contempt for learning, and sink into "ignorantly
zealous" clergymen, or mercenary lawyers, while the men of fortune
betake themselves to feasts and jollity. These last, Milton thinks,
are the best of the three classes.

All these moral shipwrecks are the consequence, according to Milton,
of bad education. It is in our power to avert them by a reform of
schools. But the measures of reform, when produced, are ludicrously
incommensurable with the evils to be remedied. I do not trouble the
reader with the proposals; they are a form of the well-known mistake
of regarding education as merely the communication of useful
knowledge. The doctrine as propounded in the _Tractate_ is complicated
by the further difficulty, that the knowledge is to be gathered out of
Greek and Latin books. This doctrine is advocated by Milton with the
ardour of his own lofty enthusiasm. In virtue of the grandeur of zeal
which inspires them, these pages, which are in substance nothing more
than the now familiar omniscient examiner's programme, retain a place
as one of our classics. The fine definition of education here given
has never been improved upon: "I call a complete and generous
education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and
magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and
war." This is the true Milton. When he offers, in another page, as an
equivalent definition of the true end of learning, "to repair the ruin
of our first parents by regaining to know God aright," we have the