CURRENT LITERATURE.
Autobiography of John Milton. By the Rev. J. G. Graham. (Long- mans.)—Mr. Graham describes himself on his title-page as the editor of this book. If he had said it was compiled rather than edited by him he would have been more correct. It really is a very ingenious construction of passages from Milton's prose work and poems bearing on the writer's life, put together by a very diligent and careful student. Mr. Graham is already known as the author of "Selections from the Prose Works of John Milton ;" here we have some more results of his studies ; the " Auto- biography" makes a very interesting volume. "From his own verse," says Mr. Graham, "and still more from his own prose, we may learn what manner of man Milton was, and see him rise up before us, restored, as it were, to life, the very same that his contemporaries saw and knew him,—the clever boy, the hard student, the enthusiastic patriot, the patient and triumphant sufferer, beautiful in mind as in person, conscientious, stern, stately, stainless, and victorious, from first to last, under every trial, and in every duty and relation of life, whether private or public." Possibly some reader may think the colour of this portrait a little too bright. The sternness of Milton's character was too strongly developed for its general perfec- tion, but no one can scones the writer of this volume of partiality. In it Milton is put before us to be judged by his own words, only it is no ordinary student that would have such a command of his materials as has Mr. Graham. A labour so well done is emphatically a labour of love. In one point we venture to differ from our author. He says, with perfect correctness, that the "Samson Agonistes " is throughout painfully autobiographical." But he is not right, we think, in calling it Milton's "last poem." The "long pent-up feelings of sorrow, indigna- tion, and resignation" to which he there gives vent more properly belong to another period of his life. The actual end of that life was peaceful. In his third wife and in the attention of such friends as Ellwood he found all the solace that he wanted, and his undutiful daughters had then left him. It is to the time of the Restoration, when he saw his party rained, all hie hopes for the Commonwealth lost, and when he was suffering the keenest wrongs at home, his unfilial children reminding him of the first wife, whom he had never but half forgiven, that we must refer the bitter outpourings of the "Samson." Such a passage as,—
Exposed To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong, Within doors or without, still as a fool, In power of others, never in my own,"
would have been a cruel injustice to the kindly, dutiful wife whom he found in his third marriage.
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