44 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
are now out of date, is no fault of Milton’s. Natural science in 
the modern sense had then scarcely begun. The including of 
writers on agriculture, geography, medicine, and natural history 
must have appealed to Hartlib’s ‘‘practical” inclinations. At any 
rate, it has given rise to a widely spread notion that Milton’s 
academy was informational, rather than disciplinary, in method, 
and vocational, rather than cultural, in purpose. 
It is significant in this connection that the oldest edition of 
Milton’s treatise to be found in the library of Beloit College is 
bound in the same volume with Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Edu¬ 
cation, a work which is a main source of utilitarian doctrine. The 
association of the two is not accidental. The editors give as the 
reason for it, that the subject of Milton’s treatise “seemed more 
in harmony with the topics discussed by Mr. Locke than with the 
contents of any other volume in the intended series.”^ 
Charles Lamb in his essay. The Old and the New Schoolmaster, 
clearly strikes the note of criticism. ‘ ‘ The modern schoolmaster, ’ ’ 
says he, “is expected to know a little of everything, because his 
pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He 
must be superficially, if I may say so, omniscient. . . . You 
may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consult¬ 
ing the famous Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib.”® 
Dr. Johnson, however, puts the case with greater emphasis, and 
I may be pardoned for quoting his remarks at more length. In 
discussing Milton’s school he says: 
The purpose of Milton, as it seems, was to teach something more solid than 
the common literature of the Schools, by reading those authors that treat of 
physical subjects; such as the Georgick, and astronomical treatises of the 
ancients. . . . 
But the truth is, that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences 
which that knowledge requires, or includes, are not the great or the frequent 
business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, 
whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious 
and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with 
the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to em¬ 
body truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence 
and Justice are virtues and excellences, of all times and of all places; we are 
perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our inter¬ 
course with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are 
voluntary, and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergence, 
that one man may know another half his life, without being able to estimate 
''Library of Education, Gray and Bowen, Boston, 1830. 
* The Work of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, 2 vols., Oxford, 
1908, 1:536. 
