and Provincial Synods. The Declaration and Constitution of the Synod were adopted after a spirited debate. The great question discussed was whether the Synod should consist of three distinct branches, Bishop, Clergy, and Laity; or only of two, Clergy and Laity. In other words, whether the Bishop should have a veto, as it is called, on the Clergy and Laity; as both the Clergy and Laity have on the action of the Synod. That is, whether the Government of the Church shall be, in any respect, and that a very limited one, Episcopal; or, whether it shall be merely Presbyterian and Lay. On a division, this veto power was given to the Bishop, there being only twenty-three, in all, opposed to it. It is required that the Lay delegates shall be Communicants. It is noteworthy, that in all the Colonial Diocesan Synods, thus far organized, this veto power has been given to the Bishop; as in Toronto, Huron, Nova-Scotia, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and New Zealand.

The Bishop was also requested to petition her Majesty to appoint one of the Bishops a Metropolitan, to preside over Provincial Synods.

At this important primary Synod, the organization of our own Dioceses in the United States, and the history of that organization, were pretty freely and fully canvassed; and some things were said which deserve to be repeated in the hearing of every American Churchman; especially as there are principles involved in this whole question of vital importance. Government, Jurisdiction, Ministration, are terms so loosely used in our own American Church, as to indicate a great want of appreciation of certain fundamental principles which the Church has recognized from the very beginning. This whole subject is vastly important, and, we need not say, deserves to be thoroughly ventilated.

RELIGIOUS EXCITEMENT IN IRELAND.

The religious newspapers give information of a remarkable "awakening" in the districts about Belfast and throughout the north of Ireland. According to some of our own American papers, to express the least doubt as to the character of this excitement, would be little less than blasphemy. That there is a marked increase of religious feeling, and very striking changes in the moral habits of many of the lower class of people, is confessed on all hands; but that Satan, and ignorant and misguided men, are also busy at work, is manifest. Prostration of strength, spasms, convulsions, hysterics, idiocy, epilepsy, hopeless insanity, and even death, are among the fruits of the "Revival," so called. Meanwhile, many of the Clergy of the Irish Church are exerting themselves to turn the awakened religious feeling into the right channel. As a sample of what is said of this Revival, the Rev. George Gilfillan, a Scotch Presbyterian, and not the best authority, lately, in a Sermon, used the following language:

"As to the Irish revival he had great doubts. The excesses of excitement; the cries, shrieks, groans uttered; people carried out of Church in fits; some driven mad and others hurried into extravagances of fierce and savage fanaticism-all tended to convince him that, let Dr. Cook, of Belfast, say what he pleased, it was hitherto as authentic a work of the Devil as was ever transacted on this planet. There were, he understood, people who wished us to take a pattern from our Irish friends; but he would tell his people to be on their guard."

A large amount of Foreign Intelligence laid over for want of room.

The Life of John Milton. Narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his time. By DAVID MASSON, M. A., Professor of English Literature in University College, London. With portraits and specimens of his handwriting at different periods. In three volumes, 8vo. Vol. I. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 1859. pp. 658.

THIS work is indeed a more lasting monument than the marble of Westminster Abbey, to the memory of Milton. It is singular that English literature has never before had a complete life of him. There have been biographical sketches enough, not without merit, by Todd, Mitford, and a host of others; but they have chiefly served as introductory to some new editions of his works; and in them he has been regarded almost wholly as the scholar and poet, "whose soul was as a star and dwelt apart.' This volume is the fruit of our mod

VOL. XII.-NO. IV.

35

ern criticism, which grasps the idea of history, as no longer the bare chronicle of the Past, but in its connections with the growth of society in letters, art, and religion.

The life of such a man must be so read, to be fully under stood. In a few instances, as of Spinoza in his chamber at Amsterdam, never crossing the threshold for months, there is an utter severance of the mind from real life; and we might suppose the Ethica written in the moon, as well as in our own world. But a great poet, a Dante, a Schiller, must be the ontgrowth of his age. We can only thus measure his height, and fairly weigh his defects. He may seem a solitary theorist, but he is an insulated conductor, which has gathered its fire from the atmosphere around it; and when the communication comes, it is with a flash and a shock that shake the ground. This is especially true of Milton, whose life was cast in the chaos of an English Revolution, when all opinions and social forms were in the process of a new formation. It is in the biography of such men that the history of the struggle must be traced. As we open the pages of a Clarendon and a Whitelocke we see all the characters of the changeful drama before us; the English manhood of Hampden, the spotless loyalty of Falkland, the republican fanaticism of Vane, the iron will of Cromwell. Among these, Milton represents that ideal spirit, which filled so many noble minds, brooding over the dream of a Christian Commonwealth; martyrs of civil and religious liberty, but always too lofty for the coarse details of a Parliament; and at last surrendering all to a worse Charles than him they beheaded.

We must, however, say a word of the author, before we enter on his subject. This is no ephemeral work, but the ripe fruit of years. Mr. Masson has taken up his labor, in the wish to make it worthy of the name he reveres; he has given to it minute, careful research, and drawn his material from the parish register and academic roll, as well as all the sources of civil or literary history. One of the best sketches of English poetry from Spenser to Milton is furnished here, written with critical finish. The book, indeed, will frighten many with its formidable dimensions, for it is already an octavo, and two more are to come. We must, in some cases, blame its excess of material. We do not care to wade through such details of academy or college, to exhume the Rev. Richard Stocke, with a hundred more, long laid in just oblivion, when we would be enjoying the society of Milton himself; nor do we think it any addition to know all about Hobson, the carrier, albeit the poet wrote two humorous epitaphs upon him. Yet we will

not quarrel about this. Such labor has its worth, in gathering the "desiderata curiosa" of the past; and the fault leans toward a virtue, in this day of sketches for railway reading. Our author has done his work, with the conscientious care of the old architects, who carved the stone head of a spout as well as the great chancel window. The poet reposes under the shadow of a literary cathedral.

"And so sepulchred in such pomp doth lie,
As kings for such a tomb would wish to die."

The style of the biography, save here and there a Carlyleism, to be regretted in a writer so free from affectation, is terse, manly, and contains passages of descriptive beauty, which bring back a fair English landscape of Wilson. Of more importance is the stand-point of our author, as to his political and religious affinities. Mr. Masson is by no means a virulent, party writer, but a liberal scholar, a literary Independent. Yet he is far from the impartial critic he should be. He comes to his work with a disposition to identify himself too far with the spirit, of which Milton was the type; and is thus often unjust to the noblest sentiments, which upheld the throne and the Church. To write such a history asks, indeed, a rare balance of powers; and it seems impossible for an Englishman to free himself from the passions, handed down since that day to both Prelatist and Puritan. But we have had enough Macaulays, who love to hold up, like the revolutionary butchers of Paris, the heads of Charles and Laud on the_pike-point of an article; and enough, again, who worship the Royal Martyr and defend the Archbishop as the representative of Catholic principles. It is surely time for an impartial criticism.

We shall attempt such a review of the work and its subject, although, of course, it must be a brief one. Indeed the volume before us only embraces the early part of Milton's life. Mr. Masson divides it naturally into three periods; the first here given us, reaching to the outbreak of the Revolution; the second, the political career of Milton, to the close of the Protectorate; the third, his age, when he retires after the Restoration to write the Paradise and to die. The division happily confirms all we have said of the connection of the poet with his time. But while we are chiefly concerned with the life of the young scholar, we shall study there the causes and beginnings of that contest, which rent England asunder.

It is with delight we turn to this full record of Milton's youth. We love to linger on those thirty years, when his genius rose without a cloud on the sky of English letters, and

Milton is indeed the

promised a career of undimmed glory. same stately intellect everywhere, in youth or manhood, in his prose or his poetry. But the life of the poet and that of the man seem two distinct biographies; the Comus and the Paradise Lost are the fair morning and evening of a day overcast with storms. We see before us, in the picture of Masson drawn with a Flemish fidelity, the old house in Bread-street, where the good scrivener lived under the sign of the Spread Eagle, and look through the gable window on the household group at evening; the father, himself maker of a few Puritan hymns, reading perhaps Norden's "Progress of Piety, whose jesses lead into the harbour of heavenly heart's ease," while the eldest girl and her brother John turn over the pictured Bible; or we follow the boy in his rambles along Cheapside, and by Paul's cross; or among the pigeons' of Paul's school, gazing at the formidable words painted on the panes, aut doce, aut disce, aut discede.' The face in the frontispiece of Milton at ten, is of a healthy English lad, very unlike the sentimental fancy piece lately hung in our shop windows. It is pleasant to know that he was not a precocious, but only a studious youth, and had written nothing till fifteen but his version of two Psalms,' still preserved for us, over whose 'golden-tressed sun' and 'tawny king' the critics have spent so much vain labor. He enters Christ College, Cambridge, in 1624, a lesser pensioner.' Mr. Masson has given a careful chronicle of the old University life, where the students were duly drilled in the Trivium and Quadrivium, taught to hammer on the anvil of Ramusian logic, and repeat the quaint theories of science, which the Baconian genius had not yet driven from their owls' nests. But Milton's noble tractate of Education will best show us how high and large was his own ideal of Knowledge above the ragged notions and babblements' of that age. The college discipline was of the antique sort; and it still remains a question, although our critic stoutly resists, whether Milton were not whipped: a solace we should be sorry to take from any, whose remembrances of boyhood might be soothed by the knowledge, that the bard of Paradise had a closer ac quaintance than in verse with the nodding birch.' He was a ripe scholar in classic learning. Several of his academic Prolusions' are translated here, full of Miltonic glow, but grandiose, and stuffed, like most college themes, with Pythagoras, the melody of the spheres, Endymion, and the sacred Nine.

But we find, as with few minds, even at this early stage, the character of Milton. Of a calm, lofty intellect, with little disposition to active life, dwelling among books and his own thoughts,