too, recommends painting for its usefulness in the conduct of military operations. Other Italian humanists, also, left a traceable influence on the Gouernour. Among them Professor Woodward mentions, Matteo Palmieri, Francesco Patrizi, Aeneas Sylvius, and Macchiavelli. Their ideal of a courtly education for public service, so persuasively set forth by Sir Thomas Elyot, could not be forgotten. In an anonymous tract, The Institution of a Gentleman, published in 1555, a gentleman is defined as "a man fit for the wars and fit for the peace." In another tract, Queen Elizabeth's Academy, written in 1572 by the great explorer, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Milton's famous definition is again anticipated in the phrase, "matters of action meet for present practice, both of peace and war." 23 The courtly ideal had indeed taken firm root in

England.

The need for trained men was seemingly greater in Milton's time, especially in his own party, than it had been when Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote. The universities, for which Milton had never full respect, were in 1644 in the hands of the Royalists. Oxford was the refuge of King Charles, and Cambridge, only a little later, expelled twelve heads of colleges and almost two hundred fellows. The war, also, was then turning against the Puritans. When Milton penned the Tractate, Cromwell had not yet proved his power of leadership, and the Parliamentary cause seemed liable to shipwreck. The need for true soldiers and far-seeing statesmen was imperative, and Milton felt that England's schools had been remiss in preparing the youth of the country for the crisis. He himself had been taught the use of weapons, and he insisted on early military training.34 For the times demanded of men "firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations, rather than to see the ruin of our protestation, and the inforcement of a slavish life." With the right training the English youth would be "stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages"; and in times of war there would step forth "renowned and perfect commanders in the service of their country." 36

35

33 Woodward, Studies in Education, pp. 296 ff.

34 Contemporary Life of Milton, ed. Lockwood, p. xxxv.

Apology, P. W., 3, p. 113. Read the account of his early life, pp. 110-122. Education, P. W., 3, pp. 468, 477.

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The Puritans felt the want of trained men most urgently after the cessation of hostilities, when the reorganization of the state taxed Cromwell's powers to the utmost. "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war." So Milton, in the eloquent admonition of the Second Defence, warned Cromwell that the cares and dangers of peace are exertions compared with which the labour of war is mere pastime." 37 To prepare men for such service had been the poet's earliest aim, as an educator; for he had included political science among the studies of his model school, that men "may not, in a dangerous fit of the commonwealth, be such poor, shaken, uncertain reeds, of such a tottering conscience, as many of our great counsellors have lately shewn themselves, but steadfast pillars of the state.” 38 The same distrust of England's statesmanship was expressed again in his trenchant review of the Long Parliament's career. He felt that England was "fruitful enough of men stout and courageous in war," but not over-fertile of men able to govern justly and prudently in peace." His countrymen seemed lacking in "civility, prudence, love of the public good"; they were "valiant indeed, and prosperous to win a field; but to know the end and reason of winning, unjudicious and unwise in good or bad success, alike unteachable." Mliton even ventured to suggest that, because their country was without the warm sun that "ripens wits as well as fruits," England would have to learn the "civil virtues" in southern lands.

39

For the rearing of public men, able to guide the country in war and peace, the Tractate was designed. Naturally, the author's chief concern was the nurture of gentlemen's sons. But it does not follow that he cared nothing for the education of the common people, and in other tracts he pleaded eloquently for that. Milton's first prose treatise, Of Reformation in England, is dominated by the ideal of a people universally educated. At the Reformation, he argued, the Bible had been "sought out of the dusty corners where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it, the schools opened, divine and human learning raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues." The English people, therefore, were to be reproached for relinquishing to the bishops "the earnest

37 P. W., 1, p. 290.

Education, P. W., 3, p. 472.

"History of Britain, P. W., 5, pp. 239-240.

study of virtue and godliness, . . . and the search of divine knowledge." For the Fathers had "sent all comers to the Scriptures," believing that its essential parts were not too difficult for the common man. Thus the whole argument rests on the assumption of adequate training of all men. The world-old truth was expressed again, and eloquently, in the passage: "to govern well is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that which springs from thence, magnanimity, . . . and that which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likeness of God. . . . This is the true flourishing of a land, other things follow as the shadow does the substance." 40

Even more plainly Milton's last two tracts, written in 1659 and 1660, urge the necessity of universal education. In the Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, a nation's safety is said to lie in making "the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern." To this end the citizens "should have here also schools and academies at their own choice, wherein their children may be bred up in their own sight to all learning and noble education; not in grammar only, but in all liberal arts and exercises." Such conditions would communicate "the natural heat of government and culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie dumb and neglected; would soon make the whole nation more industrious, more ingenious at home, more potent, more honourable abroad."

The same plea for universal education had been advanced in Milton's argument of the preceding year for a purely voluntary church. Such a church can exist only if the people as a whole are soundly educated. Consequently, the author proposed "to erect in greater number, all over the land, schools, and competent libraries to those schools, where languages and arts may be taught free together." Those who were so taught, "freely at the public cost," and given a "competence of learning," especially if "an honest trade" were included in the training, would make in the end ample return for the opportunities afforded them.

No one who examines all these various passages will regard the treatise Of Education alone as a complete statement of Milton's

theories on England's schools. The work stands chronologically about midway between his open criticism of the traditions at Cambridge and the argument of these last two tracts. He wrote the Tractate without ostentation, but with a very obvious sense of his right to speak. Was he not well fitted, by actual experience as a teacher, by wide reading, especially in the treatises of the Italian humanists, and by a closely felt appreciation of the needs of the time, to claim authority? In this one work, prompted by the interest of Hartlib, Milton was concerned only with a particular type of school and the needs of a certain class. But already he had considered the needs of the nation as a whole. Then, as time went on and as the Puritans faced defeat,

On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues;

In darkness, and with dangers compast round,

Milton seemed to have thought more of universal education and less of courtly training. A long passage in Paradise Regained on ancient literature might be taken to indicate a changed attitude toward the humanities. One suspects, however, that even in his last years he would still have urged on the sons of gentlemen much that same training that he had offered in 1644. But in late life the larger needs of the common people seemed to him the greater need. He still looked with reverence to the "old, renowned authors"; but he had learned lessons, too, in the school of experience. Viewed in this light, his proposed scholastic reforms assume a new importance. The Tractate was not an accidental effort, hastily put together to satisfy a friend. It marks only one stage of the author's endeavor to spread the benefits of education throughout England. His interest in the cause was lifelong, and his words on the subject, scattered here and there through his writings, represent his widest scholarship and his vital interest in the welfare of mankind.

The State University of Iowa.

THE TEMPTATION MOTIVE IN MILTON

BY JAMES HOLLY HANFORD

Milton, like all Puritans, was prone to detect in almost every phase of human experience the presence of a moral conflict, to interpret even those aspects which to other men raise no moral questions, in terms of the eternal struggle of good and evil. Victory or defeat in this struggle is the crucial issue in the lives of men as Milton read them, and accordingly temptation, yielded to or overcome, is a dominant motive of his creative art. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate the application of this principle, not merely to those poems in which it is obvious and universally recognized, but to the whole body of his imaginative work. Such an application, though suggested everywhere in Milton criticism, has never been fully made. The investigation involves a classification of the chief aspects in which the lure of evil presented itself to Milton's consciousness and raises some important questions of interpretation. It serves to throw into strong relief the conflict between the Puritan and the merely human sides of Milton's nature and to emphasize in a new way the well recognized relation between his personal character and the objective creations of his imagination.

I

It was inevitable that Milton should have dealt largely with the subject of temptation. It was no less inevitable that the phases of temptation which he depicts should have been those which presented themselves most characteristically to his own experience. Of these the most obvious is what may be called the temptation of the sense. Milton's strongly sensuous nature and his Renaissance inheritance of appreciation of the absolute value of the life of sensation found themselves in conflict with the inherent asceticism of the Puritan ideal. In his earliest works there is but slight trace of such a conflict. The love of moral purity and the love of beauty, which were the dominant passions of his youth, exist side by side without contradiction. Most of the Latin poems are frank in their avowal of delight in the So also are the Italian sonnets and the English sonnet

senses.

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