appeal to the first Parliament of the reign for more money than the King and Buckingham, his chief friend and adviser, chose to name. Money also was asked without any distinct information as to what was to be done with it. Parliament was sitting in London during plague-time; it offered at most two subsidies, when the King's unexpressed wish was for ten, and it was dismissed that the members might escape danger of plague. Sir John Eliot had spoken in that Parliament for continued action against the Roman Catholics as disturbers of the essential unity within the Church, yet Eliot agreed with Milton in his way of harmonising unity with liberty of conscience. He sought, as Laud sought also in his different way, what is now almost attained-"Unity of spirit in the bond of peace;" but he agreed then with all Protestant England, and with Milton, in withholding toleration from the Roman Catholics. It was withheld because their principles then seemed to bind them to contend by all means in their power against opinions not sanctioned by their Church. Milton felt in this with Eliot, Pym, and all other Reformers of his day, but I think he was not unconscious of a touch of infidelity to his own principles, for he is careful to guard himself against showing any desire to interfere with Roman Catholic opinions, except as they produced intolerance of the opinions of others. To Charles's Parliament in June 1625 Sir Thomas Wentworth, who was then twenty-nine years old and had an estate of six thousand a year, was elected as Member for Yorkshire. This was the future Earl of Strafford. On the first day of the reassembling of Parliament— at Oxford, to escape the danger of the plague raging in London— complaint was made of pardon to a Jesuit. On the second day Sir Edward Coke complained that permission was given to every particular man to put out books of all sorts, and he wished that "none concerning religion might be printed but such as were allowed by Convocation.” Soon afterwards three Bishops, of whom Laud was one, reasoned that the place of the Pope in the English Church, as final appeal in matters of division among the clergy, was with the King and the Bishops in a National Synod or Convocation, the King first giving leave under his broad

seal to handle the points in difference. After a session of twelve days, in which the Parliament showed its distrust of Buckingham, though he sought favour by throwing over the cause of the Catholics and risking the displeasure of the King of France, that first Parliament of Charles the First was suddenly dismissed, and the divisions, of which the seed had been planted by King James the First, began to put out more vigorous shoots.

In the summer of 1626 Charles made Buckingham, at a time when he was under impeachment, Chancellor of Milton's University of Cambridge. After Buckingham's assassination in 1628, the King sought to be himself the ruler, and in Laud he found a supporter who believed sincerely that the only cure for the dissensions in the land was to uphold as strongly as he could the King's single authority. The theory of Monarchy was being reasoned out from many points of view, and Laud was among those who held the view that was expressed afterwards by Hobbes in his "Leviathan." The King was the centre of Unity, the mind of the body politic; and as the body natural could not safely obey separate promptings of two or three separate brains, so to the body of a state the king's should be a single, absolute authority. That is what Milton meant by a single ruler" when he pleaded, at the breaking up of the Commonwealth, for any readjustment except that, provided also liberty of conscience was maintained.

Laud sought, as he himself said, to make truth and peace kiss each other. He moved, he said to a correspondent, every stone to avoid discussion of knotty and perplexed questions before the people, "lest we should violate charity under the appearance of truth. I have always counselled moderation, lest everything should be thrown into confusion by fervid minds, to which the care of religion is not the first object." The much-vexed questions of predestination and election, Laud, as far as he was able, kept from argument before the people. refused to license a book by the Cambridge, though assured that it would crush the Puritans. His desire was to stay controversy upon those knotty questions

As Bishop of London, he Master of Trinity College,

about which, he said, that there was something "unmasterable in this life." He did what he could to suppress alike controversial books and controversial preaching upon such questions, that so he might abate the causes of disunion. His prohibition of books was under a Star Chamber decree of Elizabeth's reign, which prohibited printing of books without the license of one of the Archbishops or of the Bishop of London. His prohibiting of controversial preaching took in December 1629 the form of instructions sent by the King to the Bishops, enforcing his Declaration against the introduction of controversial topics in the morning sermons and forbidding afternoon sermons. These were to be replaced by the catechising of children. As there were in many churches lecturers appointed by the laity, who were paid only to preach, and preachers so appointed were usually devout expounders of the Word, inclined to the Puritan view of Church duties, Laud caused the King to require that nobody should preach, even in the morning, until he had first read divine service according to the Liturgy printed by authority, and read it in a surplice. The Bishops were required also to observe the behaviour of the preachers, and "take order for any abuse accordingly."

It was in April of the next year, 1630, that Laud became Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He had then recently read Alexander Leighton's argument for the extirpation of Bishops in "An Appeal to Parliament, or, Sion's Plea against Prelacy.” He had caused the arrest of the author and lodged him, Leighton said, in "a nasty dog-hole full of rats and mice." Leighton was brought before the Star Chamber, where Laud was among his judges and spoke for two hours in defence of Episcopacy. Leighton was sentenced to pay a fine of £10,000, to be set in the pillory of Westminster, to be there whipped, to have one of his ears cut off and his nose slit, and to be branded in the face with S.S. as a Sower of Sedition. At some later time he was to be pilloried and whipped at Cheapside, and then to be imprisoned for life, unless it should please his Majesty to enlarge him. The sentence against Leighton was carried out at Westminster. The second pillorying was remitted.

It was in April 1630 that John Winthrop sailed for Massachusetts, and within no long time a thousand souls were added to those who endeavoured to establish in New England such rule of God upon earth as Calvin had endeavoured to establish in Geneva. But the Presbyterian Church rule in New England was as strict as the Episcopal rule of Laud in its enforcements of conformity; and when, a few years afterwards, in England the Presbyterians had power in their hands, Milton expressed his sense of the continual forcing of conscience in the assertion that

"New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.

Laud was enforcing his view of a strict observance of all rules and ordinances of the Church; he had given occasion for new bitterness of controversy over bowings in direction of the altar, while he sought to stay discussion upon what many regarded as essentials of Christian faith; and we may partly learn what it was to be ordained to the service of the Church of England in the year 1632, when Milton felt himself to be excluded from ordination by the action of the prelates, from a letter sent to Laud in that year by the Vicar of Braintree. "If," he said, "I had suddenly and hastily fallen upon the strict practice of conformity, I had undone myself and broken the town to pieces. For upon the first notice of alteration many were resolving to go to New England, others to remove elsewhere, by whose departure the burden of the poor and charges of the town had grown insupportable to those who should have stayed behind. By my moderate and slow proceeding I have made stay of some, and do hope to settle their judgment and abode with us, when the rest that are inexorable are shipped and gone."

Milton, then, in July 1632, in his twenty-fourth year, completed his college studies, became Master of Arts, and was prevented by the policy of those who ruled the Church from carrying out his design of taking orders in it. The world was before him, and a fresh choice must be made of his vocation. There was open to him only one profession worth his following.

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He could not enter upon a new course of training for the law or medicine, and would have had no aptitude for either calling. But the mind quickened by culture could diffuse its light, when the day came for independent labour. If he was shut out of the Church, the School was open; he could be a teacher, and so earn his bread by a right service to the Commonwealth.

But there was one other consideration. The gift of the poet's faculty assigned to him another service for which he was answerable to God. It was not a duty by which he could win daily bread, but there was a duty not the less, a talent to be put to highest use. Milton set an ideal before him towards which he could only strive on by long labour. The work of preparation for the full use of whatever gifts God had bestowed upon his mind yet needed years of quiet thought and study. He might have gone abroad when he left college, as others did for whom, as for Milton, home supplies were prompt in aid of a full training. To Milton as to others the time of foreign travel came; but later. It came after his mother died. I think that his mother's weak health caused him to delay it. He could not put mountains and seas between himself and her when her life perhaps might be ebbing away without the consolation of his presence and his daily care. We may safely infer such a feeling from Milton's expression of grief at having been in Italy when his school friend Charles Diodati died.

Milton's father had retired from business, and was living in the rural village of Horton, within easy walk of Datchet Mead, Eton, and Windsor. The house he occupied was near the church. It was pulled down at the end of the last century. Milton went home to Horton after taking his degree. A Latin poem of loving thanks to his father for the liberal education given to him closed this period of training, and the poem includes reference to questions that must have been between them when he wished to give some further time to quiet cultivation of his faculty of verse—a wish to which few fathers could assent without some hesitation. The son's argument would have been based upon the Parable of the Talents, but pleasant blandishment went with it; witness these