§ 1. The beginning of the 17th century brought with it a change in the main direction of thought and interest. As we have seen, the 16th century adored literature and was thrown back on the remote past. Some of the great scholars like Sturm had indeed visions of literary works to be written, that would rival the old models on which they were fashioned; but whether they hoped or not to bring back the Golden Age all the scholars of the Renascence thought of it as having been. With the change of century, however, a new conception came into men’s minds. Might not this worship of the old writers after all be somewhat of a superstition? The languages in which they wrote were beautiful languages, no doubt, but they were ill adapted to express the ideas and wants of the modern world. As for the substance of these old writings, this did not satisfy the cravings of men’s minds. It left unsolved all the main problems of existence, and offered for knowledge mere speculations or poetic fancies or polished rhetoric. Man needed to understand his position with regard to God and to Nature; but on both of these topics the classics were either silent or misleading. Revelation had supplied what the classics could not give concerning man’s relation to God; but nothing had as yet thrown light on his relation to Nature. And yet with his material body and animal life he could not but see how close that relation was, and could not but wish that something about it might be known, not simply guessed or feigned. Hence the demand for real knowledge, that is, a knowledge of the facts of the universe as distinct from the knowledge of what men have thought and said. We have heard of the mathematician who put down Paradise Lost with the remark that it seemed to him a poor book, for it did not prove anything; and it was just in this spirit that the new school of thinkers, the Realists, looked upon the classics. They wanted to know Nature’s laws: and words which did not convey such knowledge seemed to them of little value.

§ 2. Here was a tremendous revolution from the mode of thought prevalent in the Renascence. No longer was the Golden Age in the past. In science the Golden Age must always be in the future. Scientific men start with what has been discovered and add to it. Every discovery passes into the common stock of knowledge, and becomes the property of everyone who knows it just as much as of the discoverer. Harvey had no more property in the circulation of the blood, Newton and Leibnitz no more property in the Differential Calculus than Columbus in the Continent of America; indeed not so much, for Columbus gained some exclusive rights in America, but Harvey gained none over the blood.

So we see that whereas the literary spirit made the dominant minds reverence the past, the scientific spirit led them to despise the past; and whereas the literary spirit raised the value of words and led to the study of celebrated writings, the scientific spirit was totally careless about words and prized only physical truths which were entirely independent of words. Again, the literary spirit naturally favoured the principle of authority, for its oracles had already spoken: the scientific spirit set aside all authority and accepted nothing that did not of itself satisfy the reason. (Compare Comenius, supra p. 152.)

§ 3. The first great leader in this revolution was an Englishman, Francis Bacon. But the school-room felt his influence only through those who learnt from him; and among educational reformers, the chief advocates of realism have been found on the Continent, e.g., Ratke and Comenius.[99] But the desire to learn by “things, not words” affected the minds of many English writers on education, and we find this spirit showing itself even in Milton and Locke, and far more clearly in some writers less known to fame.

§ 4. There is a wide distinction in educational writers between those who were schoolmasters and those who were not. Schoolmasters have to come to terms with what exists and to make a livelihood by it. So they are conservatives by position, and rarely get beyond an attempt at showing how that which is now done badly might be done well. Suggestions of radical change usually come from those who never belonged to the class of teachers, or who, not without disgust, have left it.

Among English schoolmasters of the olden times the chief writers I have met with besides Mulcaster are John Brinsley the elder, and Charles Hoole.

§ 5. John Brinsley the elder, a Puritan schoolmaster at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, a brother-in-law of Bishop Hall’s, and father of John Brinsley the younger who became a leading Puritan minister and author, was a veritable reformer, but only with reference to methods. His most interesting books are Ludus Literarius or the Grammar Schoole, 1612 (written after 20 years’ experience in teaching, as we learn from the Consolation, p. 45), and A Consolation for our Grammar Schooles: or a faithfull and most comfortable incouragement for laying of a sure foundation of all good learning in our schooles and for prosperous building thereupon, 1622. The first of these, when reprinted, as it is sure to be, will always secure for its author the notice and the gratitude of students of the history of our education; for in this book he tells us not only what should be done in the school-room, but also what was done. In a dialogue with the ordinary schoolmaster the reformer draws to light the usual practice, criticizes it, and suggests improvements.

§ 6. In Brinsley we get no hint of realism; but by the middle of the sixteen hundreds we find the realistic spirit is felt even by a schoolmaster, Charles Hoole,[100] who was a kinsman of Bishop Sanderson, the Casuist, and was master first of the Grammar School at Rotherham, then of a private Grammar School in London, published besides a number of school books, a translation of the Orbis Pictus (date of preface, January, 1658), and also “A New Discovery of the old art of teaching schoole ... published for the general profit, especially of young Schoolemasters” (date of preface, December, 1659). In these books we find that Hoole succeeded even in the school-room in keeping his mind open. He complains of the neglect of English, and evidently in theory at least went a long way with the realistic reformers. “Comenius,” he says, “hath proceeded (as Nature itself doth) in an orderly way, first to exercise the senses well by presenting their objects to them, and then to fasten upon the intellect by impressing the first notions of things upon it and linking them one to another by a rational discourse; whereas indeed we generally, missing this way, do teach children as we do parrots to speak they know not what, nay, which is worse, we taking the way of teaching little ones by grammar only, at the first do puzzle their imaginations with abstractive terms and secondary intentions, which, till they be somewhat acquainted with things, and the words belonging to them in the language which they learn, they cannot apprehend what they mean. And this I guess to be the reason why many greater persons do resolve sometimes not to put a child to school till he be at least eleven or twelve years of age.... You then, that have the care of little children, do not too much trouble their thoughts and clog their memories with bare grammar rudiments, which to them are harsh in getting, and fluid in retaining; because indeed to them they signifie nothing but a meer swimming notion of a general term, which they know not what it meaneth till they comprehend all particulars: but by this [i.e., the Orbis P.] or the like subsidiarie inform them first with some knowledge of things and words wherewith to express them; and then their rules of speaking will be better understood and more firmly kept in mind. Else how should a child conceive what a rule meaneth when he neither knoweth what the Latine word importeth, nor what manner of thing it is which is signified to him in his own native language which is given him thereby to understand the rule? for rules consisting of generalities are delivered (as I may say) at a third hand, presuming first the things and then the words to be already apprehended touching which they are made.” This subject Hoole wisely commends to the consideration of teachers, “it being the very basis of our profession to search into the way of children’s taking hold by little and little of what we teach them, that so we may apply ourselves to their reach.” (Preface to trans. of Orbis Pictus.)

§ 7. “Good Lord! how many good and clear wits of children be now-a-days perished by ignorant schoolmasters!” So said Sir Thomas Elyot in his Governor in 1531, and the complaint would not have been out of date in the 17th century, possibly not in the 19th. In the sixteen hundreds we certainly find little advance in practice, though in theory many bold projects were advanced, some of which pointed to the study of things, to the training of the hand, and even to observation of the “educands.”

§ 8. The poet Cowley’s “proposition for the advancement of experimental philosophy” is a scheme of a college near London to which is to be attached a school of 200 boys. “And because it is deplorable to consider the loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing or rather casting away six or seven years in the learning of words only, and that too very imperfectly; that a method be here established for the infusing knowledge and language at the same time, [Is this an echo of Comenius?] and that this may be their apprenticeship in Natural Philosophy.”[101]

§ 9. Rarely indeed have those who either theoretically or practically have made a study of education ever acquired sufficient literary skill to catch the ear of the public or (what is at least as difficult) the ear of the teaching body. And among the eminent writers who have spoken on education, as Rabelais, Montaigne, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, we cannot find one who has given to it more than passing, if not accidental, attention. Schoolmasters are, as I said, conservative, at least in the school-room; and moreover, they seldom find the necessary time, money, or inclination for publishing on the work of their calling. The current thought at any period must then be gathered from books only to be found in our great libraries, books in which writers now long forgotten give hints of what was wanted out of the school-room and grumble at what went on in it.

§ 10. One of the most original of these writers that have come in my way is John Dury, a Puritan, who was at one time Chaplain to the English Company of Merchants at Elbing, and laboured with Comenius and Hartlib to promote unity among the various Christian bodies of the reformed faith (see Masson’s Life of Milton, vol. iii). About 1649 Dury published The Reformed Schoole which gives the scheme of an association for the purpose of educating a number of boys and girls “in a Christian way.”

§ 11. That Dury was not himself a schoolmaster is plain from the first of his “rules of education.” “The chief rule of the whole work is that nothing be made tedious and grievous to the children, but all the toilsomeness of their business the Governor and Ushers are to take upon themselves; that by diligence and industry all things may be so prepared, methodized and ordered for their apprehension, that this work may unto them be as a delightful recreation by the variety and easiness thereof.”

§ 12. “The things to be looked unto in the care of their education,” he enumerates in the order of importance: “1. Their advancement in piety; 2. The preservation of their health; 3. The forming of their manners; 4. Their proficiency in learning” (p. 24). “Godliness and bodily health are absolutely necessary,” says Dury; “the one for spiritual and the other for their temporal felicitie” (p. 31): so great care is to be taken in “exercising their bodies in husbandry or manufactures or military employments.”[102]

§ 13. About instruction we find the usual complaints which like “mother’s truth keep constant youth.” “Children,” says Dury, “are taught to read authors and learn words and sentences before they can have any notion of the things signified by those words and sentences or of the author’s strain and wit in setting them together; and they are made to learn by heart the generall rules, sentences and precepts of Arts before they are furnished with any matter whereunto to apply those rules and precepts” (p. 38). Dury would entirely sweep away the old routine, and in all instruction he would keep in view the following end: “the true end of all human learning is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures, and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them” (p. 41).

§ 14. “Our natural faculties”—here Dury struck a new note, which has now become the keynote in the science of education. He enforces his point with the following ingenious illustration:—“As in a watch one wheel rightly set doth with its teeth take hold of another and sets that a-work towards a third; and so all move one by another when they are in their right places for the end for which the watch is made; so is it with the faculties of the human nature being rightly ordered to the ends for which God hath created them. But contrariwise, if the wheels be not rightly set, or the watch not duly wound up, it is useless to him that hath it. And so it is with the faculties of Man; if his wheels be not rightly ordered and wound up by the ends of sciences in their subordination leading him to employ the same according to his capacity to make use of the creatures for that whereunto God hath made them, he becomes not only useless, but even a burthen and hurtful unto himself and others by the misusing of them” (p. 43).

§ 15. “As in Nature sense is the servant of imagination; imagination of memory; memory of reason; so in teaching arts and sciences we must set these faculties a-work in this order towards their proper objects in everything which is to be taught. Whence this will follow, that as the faculties of Man’s soul naturally perfect each other by their mutual subordination; so the Arts which perfect those faculties should be gradually suggested: and the objects wherewith the faculties are to be conversant according to the rules of Art should be offered in that order which is answerable to their proper ends and uses and not otherwise.”

§ 16. In this and much else that Dury says we see a firm grasp of the principle that the instruction given should be regulated by the gradual development of the learner’s faculties. The three sources of our knowledge, says he, are—1. Sense; 2. Tradition; 3. Reason; and Sense comes first. “Art or sciences which may be learnt by mere sense should not be learnt any other way.” “As children’s faculties break forth in them by degrees to be vigorous with their years and the growth of their bodies, so they are to be filled with objects whereof they are capable, and plied with arts; whence followeth that while children are not capable of the acts of reasoning, the method of filling their senses and imaginations with outward objects should be plied. Nor is their memory at this time to be charged further with any objects than their imagination rightly ordered and fixed doth of itself impress the same upon them.” After speaking of the common abuse of general rules, he says: “So far as those faculties (viz., sense, imagination, and memory) are started with matters of observation, so far rules may be given to direct the mind in the use of the same, and no further.” “The arts and sciences which lead us to reflect upon the use of our own faculties are not to be taught till we are fully acquainted with their proper objects, and the direct acts of the faculties about them.” So “it is a very absurd and preposterous course to teach Logick and Metaphysicks before or with other Humane Sciences which depend more upon Sense and Imagination than reasoning” (p. 46).

§ 17. In all this it seems to me that the worthy Puritan, of whom nobody but Dr. Barnard and Professor Masson has ever heard, has truly done more to lay a foundation for the art of teaching than his famous contemporaries Milton and Locke.

§ 18. Another writer of that day better known than Dury and with far more power of expression was Sir William Petty. He is the “W.P.,” who in an Epistle “to his honoured friend Master Samuel Hartlib,” set down his “thoughts concerning the advancement of real learning” (1647). This letter is to be shown only “to those few that are Reall Friends to the Designe of Realities.”[103]

§ 19. Petty sees the need of intercommunication of those who wish to advance any art or science. He complains that “the wits and endeavours of the world are as so many scattered coals or fire-brands, which for want of union are soon quenched, whereas being but laid together they would yield a comfortable light and heat.” This is a thought which may well be applied to the bringing up of the young; and the following passage might have been written to secure a training for teachers: “Methinks the present condition of men is like a field where a battle hath been lately fought, where we may see many legs and arms and eyes lying here and there, which for want of a union and a soul to quicken and enliven them are good for nothing but to feed ravens and infect the air. So we see many wits and ingenuities lying scattered up and down the world, whereof some are now labouring to do what is already done, and puzzling themselves to re-invent what is already invented. Others we see quite stuck fast in difficulties for want of a few directions which some other man (might he be met withal) both could and would most easily give him.” I wonder how many young teachers are now wasting their own and their pupils’ time in this awkward predicament.

§ 20. “As for ... education,” says Petty, “we cannot but hope that those who make it their trade will supply it and render the idea thereof much more perfect.” His own contributions to the more perfect idea consist mainly in making the study of “realities” precede literature, and thus announcing the principle which in later times has led to the introduction of “object lessons.” The Baconians thought that the good time was at hand, and that they had found the right road at last. By experiments they would learn to interpret Nature. After scheming a “Gymnasium, Mechanicum, or College of Tradesmen,” Petty says, “What experiments and stuff would all those shops and operations afford to active and philosophical heads, out of which to extract that interpretation of nature whereof there is so little, and that so bad, as yet extant in the world!”[104] And this study of things was to affect the work of the school-room, and redeem it from the dismal state into which it was fallen. “As for the studies to which children are now-a-days put,” says Petty, “they are altogether unfit for want of judgment which is but weak in them, and also for want of will, which is sufficiently seen ... by the difficulty of keeping them at schools and the punishment they will endure rather than be altogether debarred from the pleasure which they take in things.”

§ 21. The grand reform required is thus set forth; “Since few children have need of reading before they know or can be acquainted with the things they read of; or of writing before their thoughts are worth the recording or they are able to put them into any form (which we call inditing); much less of learning languages when there be books enough for their present use in their own mother-tongue; our opinion is that those things being withal somewhat above their capacity (as being to be attained by judgment which is weakest in children) be deferred awhile, and others more needful for them, such as are in the order of Nature before those afore-mentioned, and are attainable by the help of memory which is either most strong or unpreoccupied in children, be studied before them. We wish, therefore, that the educands be taught to observe and remember all sensible objects and actions, whether they be natural or artificial, which the educators must upon all occasions expound unto them.”

§ 22. In proposing this great change Petty was influenced not merely by his own delight in the study of things but by something far more important for education, by observation of the children themselves. This study of things instead of “a rabble of words” would be “more easy and pleasant to the young as the more suitable to the natural propensions we observe in them. For we see children do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of elder sticks, and bellows’ noses, piped keys, &c., painting flags and ensigns with elderberries and cornpoppy, making ships with paper, and setting even nut-shells a-swimming, handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs and trying to work themselves; fishing, fowling, hunting, setting springes and traps for birds and other animals, making pictures in their writing-books, making tops, gigs and whirligigs, gilting balls, practising divers juggling tricks upon the cards, &c., with a million more besides. And for the females they will be making pies with clay, making their babies’ clothes and dressing them therewith; they will spit leaves on sticks as if they were roasting meat; they will imitate all the talk and actions which they observe in their mother and her gossips, and punctually act the comedy or the tragedy (I know not whether to call it) of a woman’s lying-in. By all which it is most evident that children do most naturally delight in things and are most capable of learning them, having quick senses to receive them and unpreoccupied memories to retain them” (ad f.).

§ 23. In these writers, Dury and Petty, we find a wonderful advance in the theory of instruction. Children are to be taught about things and this because their inward constitution determines them towards things. Moreover the subjects of instruction are to be graduated to accord with the development of the learner’s faculties. The giving of rules and incomprehensible statements that will come in useful at a future stage is entirely forbidden. All this is excellent, and greatly have children suffered, greatly do they suffer still, from their teachers’ neglect of it. There seems to me to have been no important advance on the thought of these men till Pestalozzi and Froebel fixed their attention on the mind of the child, and valued things not in themselves but simply as the means best fitted for drawing out the child’s self-activity.

§ 24. In several other matters we find Sir William Petty’s recommendations in advance of the practice of his own time and ours. He advises “that the business of education be not (as now) committed to the worst and unworthiest of men [here at least we have improved] but that it be seriously studied and practised by the best and abler persons.” To this standard we have not yet attained.

§ 25. Handwork is to be practised, but its educational value is not clearly perceived. “All children, though of the highest rank, are to be taught some gentle manufacture in their minority.” Ergastula Literaria, literary workhouses, are to be instituted where children may be taught as well to do something towards their living as to read and write.[105]

§ 26. Education was to be universal, but chiefly with the object of bringing to the front the clever sons of poor parents. The rule he would lay down is “that all children of above seven years old may be presented to this kind of education, none being to be excluded by reason of the poverty and unability of their parents, for hereby it hath come to pass that many are now holding the plough which might have been made fit to steer the state.”[106]

§ 27. From these enthusiasts for realities we find a change when we turn to their contemporary, a schoolmaster and author of a Latin Accidence, who was perhaps the most notable Englishman who ever kept a school or published a school-book.

§ 28. Milton was not only a great poet: he was also a great scholar. Everything he said or wrote bore traces of his learning. The world of books then rather than the world of the senses is his world. He has benefited as he says “among old renowned authors” and “his inclination leads him not” to read modern Januas and Didactics, or apparently the writings of any of his contemporaries including those of his great countryman, Bacon. But, as Professor Laurie reminds us, no man, not even a Milton, however he may ignore the originators of ideas can keep himself outside the influence of the ideas themselves when they are in the air; and so we find Milton using his incomparable power of expression in the service of the Realists.

§ 29. But brief he endeavours to be, and paying the Horatian penalty he becomes obscure. In the “few observations which flowered off and were the burnishing of many studious and contemplative years,” Milton touches only on the bringing up of gentlemen’s sons between the ages of 12 and 21, and his suggestions do not, like those of Comenius, deal with the education of the people, or of both sexes.[107] This limit of age, sex, and station deprives Milton’s plan of much of its interest, as the absence of detail deprives it of much of its value.

§ 30. Still, we find in the Tractate a very great advance on the ideas current at the Renascence. Learning is no longer the aim of education but is regarded simply as a means. No finer expression has been given in our literature to the main thesis of the Christian and of the Realist and to the Realist’s contempt of verbalism, than this: “The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every Nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother-dialect only.”

§ 31. The several propositions here implied have thus been “disentangled” by Professor Laurie (John Milton in Addresses, &c., p. 167).

1. The aim of education is the knowledge of God and likeness to God.

2. Likeness to God we attain by possessing our souls of true virtue and by the Heavenly Grace of Faith.

3. Knowledge of God we attain by the study of the visible things of God.

4. Teaching then has for its aim this knowledge.

5. Language is merely an instrument or vehicle for the knowledge of things.

6. The linguist may be less learned (i.e., educated) in the true sense than a man who can make good use of his mother-tongue though he knows no other.

§ 32. Elsewhere, Milton gives his idea of “a complete and generous education;” it “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and War.” (Browning’s edition, p. 8.) Here and indeed in all that Milton says we feel that “the noble moral glow that pervades the Tractate on Education, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and written, and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting.” (Masson iij, p. 252.)

§ 33. But in this moral glow and in an intense hatred of verbalism lie as it seems to me the chief merits of the Tractate. The practical suggestions are either incomprehensible or of doubtful wisdom. The reforming of education was, as Milton says, one of the greatest and noblest designs that could be thought on, but he does not take the right road when he proposes for every city in England a joint school and university for about 120 boarders. The advice to keep boys between 12 and 21 in this barrack life I consider, with Professor Laurie, to be “fundamentally unsound;” and the project of uniting the military training of Sparta with the humanistic training of Athens seems to me a pure chimÆra.

§ 34. When we come to instruction we find that Milton after announcing the distinctive principle of the Realists proves to be himself the last survivor of the Verbal Realists. (See supra, p. 25.) No doubt

but his thoughts had been even more in his books; and for the young he sketches out a purely bookish curriculum. The young are to learn about things, but they are to learn through books; and the only books to which Milton attaches importance are written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. He held, probably with good reason, that far too much time “is now bestowed in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry.” “We do amiss,” he says, “to spend 7 or 8 years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.” Without an explanation of the “otherwise” this statement is a truism, and what Milton says further hardly amounts to an explanation. His plan, if plan it can be called, is as follows: “If after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, the boys were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then proceed to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This,” adds Milton, “I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages.” It is, however, not the most intelligible.

§ 35. “I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubbs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.” We cannot but wonder whether this belief survived the experience of “the pretty garden-house in Aldersgate.” From the little we are told by his nephew and old pupil Edward Phillips we should infer that Milton was not unsuccessful as a schoolmaster. In this we have a striking proof how much more important is the teacher than the teaching. A character such as Milton’s in which we find the noblest aims united with untiring energy in pursuit of them could not but dominate the impressionable minds of young people brought under its influence. But whatever success he met with could not have been due to the things he taught nor to his method in teaching them. In spite of the “moral glow” about his recommendations they are “not a bow for every [or any] man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher.”

§ 36. Nor did he do much for the science of education. His scheme is vitiated, as Mark Pattison says, by “the information fallacy.” In the literary instruction there is no thought of training the faculties of all or the special faculties of the individual. “It requires much observation of young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilable information stupefies the faculties instead of training them,” says Pattison; and Milton absorbed by his own thoughts and the thoughts of the ancients did not observe the minds of the young, and knew little of the powers of any mind but his own.

For information the youths are not required to observe for themselves but are to be taught “a general compact of physicks.” “Also in course might be read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of Physick; that they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and how to manage a crudity.”

§ 37. Even the study of the classics is advocated by Milton on false grounds. If, like the Port-Royalists, he had recommended the study of the classical authors for the sake of pure Latin and Greek or as models of literary style, the means would have been suited to the end; but it was very different when he directed boys to study Virgil and Columella in order to learn about bees and farming. In after-life they would find these authorities a little out of date; and if they ever attempted to improve tillage, “to recover the bad soil and to remedy the waste that is made of good, which was one of Hercules’s praises,” they would have found a knowledge of the methods of Hercules about as useful as of the methods of the Romans.

§ 38. Milton was then a reformer “for his own hand;” and notwithstanding his moral and intellectual elevation and his superb power of rhetoric, he seems to me a less useful writer on education than the humble Puritans whom he probably would not deign to read. In his haughty self-reliance, he, like Carlyle with whom Seeley has well compared him (Lectures and Addresses: Milton), addressed his contemporaries de haut en bas, and though ready to teach could learn only among the old renowned authors with whom he associated himself and we associate him.

§ 39. Judged from our present standpoint the Tractate is found with many weaknesses to be strong in this, that it co-ordinates physical, moral, mental and Æsthetic training.

§ 40. But nothing of Milton’s can be judged by our ordinary canons. He soars far above them and raises us with him “to mysterious altitudes above the earth” (supra, p. 153, note). Whatever we little people may say about the suggestions of the Tractate, Milton will remain one of the great educators of mankind.[108]