education by the introduction of the methods of Comenius.  This Moravian pastor, the Pestalozzi of his age, had first of men grasped the idea that the ordinary school methods were better adapted to instil a knowledge of words than a knowledge of things.  He was, in a word, the inventor of object lessons.  He also strove to organize education as a connected whole from the infant school to the last touch of polish from foreign travel.  Milton alludes almost scornfully to Comenius in his preface to Hartlib, but his tract is nevertheless imbued with the Moravian’s principles.  His aim, like Comenius’s, is to provide for the instruction of all, “before the years of puberty, in all things belonging to the present and future life.”  His view is as strictly utilitarian as Comenius’s.  “Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.”  Of the study of language as intellectual discipline he says nothing, and his whole course of instruction is governed by the desire of imparting useful knowledge.  Whatever we may think of the system of teaching which in our day allows a youth to leave school disgracefully ignorant of physical and political geography, of history and foreign languages, it cannot be denied that Milton goes into the opposite extreme, and would overload the young mind with more information than it could possibly digest.  His scheme is further vitiated by a fault which we should not have looked for in him, indiscriminate reverence for the classical writers, extending to subjects in which they were but children compared with the moderns.  It moves something more than a smile to find ingenuous youth referred to Pliny and Solinus for instruction in physical science; and one wonders what the agricultural Hartlib thought of the proposed course of “Cato, Varro, and Columella,” whose precepts are adapted for the climate of Italy.  Another error, obvious to any dunce, was concealed from Milton by his own intellectual greatness.  He legislates for a college of Miltons.  He never suspects that the course he is prescribing would be beyond the abilities of nine hundred and ninety-nine scholars in a thousand, and that the thousandth would die of it.  If a difficulty occurs he contemptuously puts it aside.  He has not provided for Italian, but can it not “be easily learned at any odd hour”?  “Ere this time the Hebrew tongue” (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), “might have been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and the Syrian dialect.”  This sublime confidence in the resources of the human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement.  As an ode or poem on education, Milton’s tract, doubtless, has delivered many a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man’s aims are so high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited and