Milton and School-Reform.

§ 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 66 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

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use such exercises whether in work or for recreation as tend to the health, agility, and strength of their bodies."

I have quoted Petty from the very valuable collection of English writings on Education reprinted in Henry Barnard's English Pedagogy, 2 vols. Petty is in Vol. I. In this vol. we have plenty of evidence of the working of the Baconian spirit; e.g., we find Sir Matthew Hale in a Letter of Advice to his Grandchildren, written in 1678, saying that there is little use or improvement in "notional speculations in logic or philosophy delivered by others; the rather because bare speculations and notions have little experience and external observation to confirm them, and they rarely fix the minds especially of young men. But that part of philosophy that is real may be improved and confirmed by daily observation, and is more stable and yet more certain and delightful, and goes along with a man all his life, whatever employment or profession he undertakes,"

M. as spokesman of Christian Realists.

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.* 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

"In this respect," says Professor Masson, "the passion and the projects of Comenius were a world wider than Milton's." (L. of M. iij, p. 237.)

Language an instrument. Object of education.

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,

M. for barrack life and Verbal Realism.

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

"His daily teachers had been woods and rills,"

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 Greck as might be learned otherwise easily and delight.

Milton succeeded as man not master.

fully 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 throughly 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