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political influence in their behalf, when they were involved in the final overthrow of the royal cause.

The pen of Milton was again called into requisition on a subject of the highest public value. He put forth his" Treatise on Education," a work intended to strike at the root of the prevalent system of employing the whole time and energies of the youthful mind in mastering one or two dead languages. Fully two centuries have since elapsed, but so slow is the mass of mankind in receiving the wisdom of its great teacher, that we are only now beginning to apply the sound suggestions which he so eloquently enforced.

Within a year after his reunion with his wife, his family was increased by the birth of a daughter, Anne, the eldest of his children, who was lame either from her birth, or in consequence of some accident in her early infancy. His second daughter, Mary, was born in the same large house in the Barbican, which had sufficed to accommodate his numerous train of dependent relatives. Shortly after their departure, he quitted this house for a smaller one in Holborn, opening into Lincoln's Inn Fields; and there he continued to reside, closely engaged in a variety of studies, till his acceptance of the office of Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth rendered a situation nearer Whitehall an object of convenience to him.

In 1649 the grand climax of successive civil wars was at length accomplished in the death of the king. Milton was in no way implicated in this act of judicial judgment by the popular leaders on their king; but he viewed with disgust the lamentations of the Presbyterian party for the final accomplishment of the result which they had so long laboured to bring about; and to meet the exigences of the period, he published his "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." "This work," he says, "was not published till after the death of the king, and was written rather to tranquillize the minds of men, than to discuss any part of the question respecting Charles—a question the decision of which belonged to the magistrate, and not to me, and which had now received its final determination."

During Milton's residence in his new apartments in Scotland Yard, his third child, a son, was born, but he only survived a few months. From this he removed, in 1652, to a handsome house opening into St. James's Park, adjoining the

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