pick them up, and burn them, in piety to the angry spirit of Milton.  This was certainly more sensible conduct than that of the Italian nobleman, who used to build MSS. of Martial into little pyres, and consume them with spices, to express his admiration of Catullus.  But no one can wonder that the world has not forgiven Winstanley for that atrocious phrase about Milton’s fame having “gone out like a candle in a snuff, so that his memory will always stink.”  No, Mr. William Winstanley, it is your own name that—­smells so very unpleasantly.

Yet I am paradoxical enough to believe that poor Winstanley never wrote these sentences which have destroyed his fame.  To support my theory, it is needful to recount the very scanty knowledge we possess of his life.  He is said to have been a barber, and to have risen by his exertions with the razor; but, against that legend, is to be posed the fact that on the titles of his earliest books, dedicated to public men who must have known, he styles himself “Gent.”  The dates of his birth and death are, I believe, a matter of conjecture.  But the Lives of the English Poets is the latest of his books, and the earliest was published in 1660.  This is his England’s Worthies, a group of what we should call to-day “biographical studies.”  The longest and the most interesting of these is one on Oliver Cromwell, the tone of which is almost grossly laudatory, although published at the very moment of Restoration.  Now, it is a curious, and, at first sight, a very disgraceful fact, that in 1684, when the book of England’s Worthies was re-issued, all the praise of republicans was cancelled, and abuse substituted for it.  And then, in 1687, came the Lives of the English Poets, with its horrible attack on Milton.  The character of Winstanley seems to be as base as any on literary record.  I have come to the conclusion, however, that Winstanley was guilty, neither of retracting what he said about Cromwell, nor of slandering Milton.  The black woman excused her husband for not answering the bell, “’Cause he’s dead,” and the excuse was considered valid.  I hope that when these interpolations were made, poor Winstanley was dead.

Any one who reads the Lives of the English Poets carefully, will be impressed with two facts:  first, that the author had an acquaintance with the early versifiers of Great Britain, which was quite extraordinary, and which can hardly be found at fault by our modern knowledge; while, secondly, that he shows a sudden and unaccountable ignorance of his immediate contemporaries of the younger school.  Except Campion, who is a discovery of our own day, not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean rhymester of the second or third rank escapes his notice.  Among the writers of a still later generation, I miss no names save those of Vaughan, who was very obscure in his own lifetime, and Marvell, who would be excluded by the same prejudice which mocked at Milton.  But among Poets of the Restoration, men and women who