330 Mev. F, D, Maurice, [Jan. 30, 



then wrote a vulgar satire upon Presbyterians ; became a travestier 

 of Virgil ; a dishonest translator of Don Quixote ; a hack of the 

 booksellers ; in one discreditable passage, a reviler of Milton. 

 No doubt the elevation of his uncle's character may have ex- 

 asperated the grovelling tendencies in him. If he had been under 

 the direction of a high-minded Royalist, he would probably 

 have become a self-willed Puritan. The flogging of Busby would 

 have been the most useful discipline for him. But he nowhere 

 attributes his disgust at Puritanism to Milton's austerity. Edward 

 Phillips, who shared that disgust, proves such a notion to be impos- 

 sible. Nearly the last of his long series of books was the biography 

 of his uncle. In it he recurs with aifectionate reverence to the 

 education he had received in Aldersgate Street, gives an account 

 of that education, which shows that it embraced, as we might expect 

 it would, every kind of study ; that the tone of the teaching 

 was noble, and that Milton knew when to unbend the bow as well as 

 to nerve it. Edward Phillips speaks with warmth, and something 

 of remorse, of the blessings which his school years might have been 

 to him if he had passed them aright. 



Johnson, who knew nothing concerning the Phillipses, except 

 that one of them had written the " Theatrum Poetarum," speaks of 

 the small fruit which proceeded from the " wonder-working 

 academy " in Aldersgate Street. The fruits may have been unripe 

 and unsatisfactory. Milton may have been disappointed in this as 

 in his other hopes ; other noble men have been so before and since. 

 No one ever doubted that his own Samson was the image of him- 

 self; that the strong warrior became the blind and despised 

 sufferer. But Samson was victorious in his death. There was a 

 " Paradise Regained " as well as a " Paradise Lost " in Milton's 

 history. His book on Education tells us what he learnt, and what 

 we may learn by his school experiments. He never pretended that 

 these worked any wonders ; he does not even allude to them in his 

 writings. His scheme of education certainly resembles in its prin- 

 ciples that which Edward Phillips speaks of. It was not, there- 

 fore, a mere paper scheme ; it referred to actual living boys, whom 

 he had seen and tried to form. But the scale of it is one which he 

 could never have attempted ; and for aught that appears in the 

 letter, he may have been led to it as much by a sense of his 

 failures as by pride in his success. 



In England we have grammar schools, and what are called 

 commercial schools. In Germany there are gymnasia and real 

 schools. The idea of the letter to Mr. Hartlib is, that this division 

 is unnecessary and artificial, that the knowledge of words is best 

 obtained in union with the knowledge of things ; that each is helpful 

 and necessary to the other. His maxim that " language is but the 

 instrument conveying to us things useful to be known," might lead 

 us to think that he did not regard language as a direct means of 

 culture. This would be a hasty inference. He looked upon the 



