to his poetical writings.  In 1673 the poems published in 1645, both English and Latin, appeared in a second edition, disclosing novas frondes in one or two of Milton’s earliest unprinted poems, and such of the sonnets as political considerations did not exclude; and non sua poma in the Tractate of Education, curiously grafted on at the end.  An even more important publication was the second edition of “Paradise Lost” (1674) with the original ten books for the first time divided into twelve as we now have them.  Nor did this exhaust the list of Milton’s literary undertakings.  He was desirous of giving to the world his correspondence when Latin Secretary, and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” which had employed so much of his thoughts at various periods of his life.  The Government, though allowing the publication of his familiar Latin correspondence (1674), would not tolerate the letters he had written as secretary to the Commonwealth, and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” was still less likely to propitiate the licenser.  Holland was in that day the one secure asylum of free thought, and thither, in 1675, the year following Milton’s death, the manuscripts were taken or sent by Daniel Skinner, a nephew of Cyriack’s, to Daniel Elzevir, who agreed to publish them.  Before publication could take place, however, a clandestine but correct edition of the State letters appeared in London, probably by the agency of Edward Phillips.  Skinner, in his vexation, appealed to the authorities to suppress this edition:  they took the hint, and suppressed his instead.  Elzevir delivered up the manuscripts, which the Secretary of State pigeon-holed until their existence was forgotten.  At last, in 1823, Mr. Robert Lemon, rummaging in the State Paper Office, came upon the identical parcel addressed by Elzevir to Daniel Skinner’s father which contained his son’s transcript of the State Letters and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine.”  Times had changed, and the heretical work was edited and translated by George the Fourth’s favourite chaplain, and published at his Majesty’s expense.

The “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” is by far the most remarkable of all Milton’s later prose publications, and would have exerted a great influence on opinion if it had appeared when the author designed.  Milton’s name would have been a tower of strength to the liberal eighteenth-century clergy inside and outside the Establishment.  It should indeed have been sufficiently manifest that “Paradise Lost” could not have been written by a Trinitarian or a Calvinist; but theological partisanship is even slower than secular partisanship to see what it does not choose to see; and Milton’s Arianism was not generally admitted until it was here avouched under his own hand.  The general principle of the book is undoubting reliance on the authority of Scripture, with which such an acquaintance is manifested as could only have been gained by years of intense study.  It is true that the doctrine of the inward