stances of his relations to those most near to him in kindred. It is not difficult to see that, apart from the unhappy fate which seems often to pursue men of genius in their married life, there were reasons for his sorrows in the bitterness of party feeling which accompanied the strength of his convictions. Married life, we are told, must be always something of a compromise, and of compromise Milton was utterly abhorrent. The contrasts of his character and his life are reflected in his work. Who could believe that the same hand wrote "Il Penseroso" and "Eikonoklastes"? With all the softness of face and sweetness of imagination there is a certain hardness, even harshness, that will not be denied utterance, and the middle period of his life is that in which this harshness finds its chief expression. His personality, indeed, lacks a perfect harmony, and it is this, though it be temerarious to assert it, which makes him fail to reach the perfection of a religious poet. Magnificence in conception, profundity in thought, imagi

nation, reverence, truth, he has all these, and yet—if I may repeat with emphasis a statement which has been severely criticised-he has not that note of absolute sincerity and self-abandonment which makes Christina Rossetti supreme in spiritual verse. sides of life too keenly: with all his cloistered sympathies, he dwelt too much in the world, and when political and ecclesiastical warfare had soured his spirit, he never recovered the exquisite harmony of his earlier days. Landor has said very truly that in "Paradise Regained" he seems to be subject to strange hallucinations of the ear; he who before had greatly excelled all poets of all ages in the science and display of harmony.” I will complete the passage, for it may serve to correct my own less enthusiastic judgment. "And if in his last poem we exhibit his deficiencies, surely we never shall be accused of disrespect or irreverence to this immortal man. It may be doubted whether the Creator ever created

He felt, perhaps, the two

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one altogether so great; taking into our view at once (as much indeed as can at once be taken into it) his manly virtues, his superhuman genius, his zeal for truth, for true piety, true freedom, his eloquence in displaying it, his contempt of personal power, his glory and exaltation in his country's." Alas! his greatness is not untouched by his misfortunes; for indeed it is difficult for an unbiassed moral judgment to believe that his relations with his wife and with his daughters were entirely the succession of miseries utterly undeserved. However this may be, it is the rare merit of Miss Manning's sensitive imagination that, in "The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell" and "Deborah's Diary," while she has caught our sympathies for her heroines, she has never made us lose our love for Milton.

The historical facts on which these stories have been based are perhaps too familiar to need restatement; yet they may be briefly summarised. In 1643

John Milton was thirty-four. He was well known in high circles of literature and society he had travelled, studied, and thought. There was no living Englishman, it might be said, who had a higher ideal in life or a higher performance in literature. He had already reached, in "Lycidas," " "the high-water mark of English poesy and of his own production." But he was also already a keen politician, an eager supporter of the party which felt most strongly against the king and the Cavaliers.

It was then, about Whitsuntide, as his nephew tells us, "that he took a journey, nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was any more than a journey of recreation. After a month's stay, home he returns a married man that went out a bachelor: his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a Justice of Peace, of Forest Hill, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire." The county he knew already, and, it is most likely, the family. His father was born

at Stanton St. John, the next village to Forest Hill and Richard Powell, the father of his bride, was his debtor in the sum of £500. That Milton, a marked man, should have gone at this time so near to the Royalist camp at Oxford, and that his marriage should have been, as it seems, so hastily arranged, are other points in a mysterious story. The young bride went to lodgings in Aldersgate Street with her husband. After a month her friends at home "made earnest suit, by letter, to have her company the remaining part of the summer.' She went, and she did not return at Michaelmas, as Milton had desired. Letters were unanswered, and a messenger was "dismissed with some sort of contempt." Were the faults all on one side? At any rate it is certain that before his wife had left him Milton had

begun to write a pamphlet on "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," in which the freedom of a husband to part from his wife" for lack of a fit and matchable conversation" is vehemently asserted,