pestilence, fire, sword, or famine, which may all turn to their good, and takes up his severest punishments, hardness, besottedness of heart, and idolatry, to their final perdition. Idolatry brought the Heathen to heinous transgressions, Rom. ii. And heinous transgressions ofttimes bring the slight professors of true religion to gross idolatry: 2 Thess. ii. 11, 12: "For this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that they all might be damned who believe not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. And, Isaiah xliv. 18, speaking of Idolaters, "They have not known nor understood, for he hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and their hearts that they cannot understand." Let us therefore, using this last means, last here spoken of, but first to be done, amend our lives with all speed; lest through impenitency we run into that stupidity which we now seek all means so warily to avoid, the worst of superstitions, and the heaviest of all God's judgments-popery. END OF THE TREATISE OF TRUE RELIGION. APPENDIX. Extracts from LORD MONBODDO's Origin and Progress of Language. ON THE STYLE OF MILTON. THIS Author I have frequently mentioned before, and shall, in the sequel, quote him oftener than any other English writer, because I consider him as the best standard for style, and all the ornaments of speech that we have in our language. He was a singular man in this respect, that he had as much original genius as any man, and at the same time, more learning than perhaps any, even of that learned age in which he lived. For, it appears from his writings, both in prose and verse, and particularly from his little tractate upon education, that his course of study had taken in the whole circle of human knowledge. His poetic genius appeared very early, both in Latin and English; and there is an elegiac epistle of his in Latin, written, as it is supposed, when he was about seventeen or eighteen years old, to his companion, Carolus Diodati, who, it seems, had pressed him much to leave London, where he was then residing, and return to the University of Cambridge, where he had been educated, which I will venture to set against any thing of the elegiac kind to be found in Ovid, or even in Tibullus. I shall only quote four F verses of it, which will give the reader some taste of the whole. It is where he speaks of his residence in London, the place of his birth: Me tenet urbs, reflua quam Tamesis alluit unda; O utinam vates nunquam graviora tulisset, There can be nothing, I think, finer of the elegiac kind than in these lines. In the first, London is most beautifully and poetically described, by the circumstance of its being washed by the refluent water of the Thames. The second line has the proper cadence, as well as turn of expression, of this kind of verse; and the two last lines, for the elegance of the composition, and the sweetness of the versification, are hardly to be matched in Latin, or in any other language. It is pleasant, I think, to observe this great genius teneris juvenescens versibus,' to use an expression of Horace, wantoning in the soft elegiac, playing with fable and mythology, as he does in those Latin poems; and by this exercise of his young muse, preluding to his great work, which he executed in the full maturity of his age, 6 (6 Long chusing and beginning late ;" I mean his Paradise Lost. To his other accomplishments he joined the advantage of travelling, and in a country which was then the seat of arts and sciences; I mean Italy, where it appears that he applied himself much to the study of the Italian Authors, particularly the poets. And his muse exercised herself in that language, as well as in Greek, Latin, and English. And though his genius was so early, and even what we may call premature; yet it did not, like other things that grow hastily, decline soon. For, at the age of sixty-two, when, besides his blindness, and the infirmities accompanying so advanced a period of life, he was involved in the ruin of his party, and, as he himself has said, Fallen on evil days, and evil tongues; With dangers and with darkness compass'd round, he wrote the Sampson Agonistes, the last and the most faultless, in my judgment, of all his poetical works, if not the finest. And his poetic genius was as extensive as it was lasting; for it is difficult to say whether he excels most in the heroic, the tragic, the elegiac, the lyric, the pastoral, or the anacreontic. Of this last kind is a great part of the Comus, which is not to be equalled for scenes of festivity, jollity, and riotous mirth, as well as for the noblest sentiments of virtue.-(Origin and Progress of Language, vol. iii. p. 68, Note.) It may be objected, that in the simple compositions mentioned in the preceding chapter, the arrangement may be either way, without any injury to the sense or the perspicuity. But what shall we say to those artificial arrangements, by which the parts of speech that ought always to go together, are set often at a great distance from one another, as a verb from its nominative, or the word governed by it, or the adjective from its substantive; by which means the mind is kept in suspense, sometimes for a great while, and the words so jostled out of their natural order, that it requires often a great deal of pains and skill to restore them to that order; and, in short, the sentence is made little better than a riddle? The thing will be better understood by an example; and I will take one from the last stanza of an Ode of Horace, which Milton has translated literally, and thereby indeed shown, very clearly, that the genius of the English language will not bear such an arrangement. But the question is, Whether the genius of the Latin be equally stinted? and, Whether there be any beauty or utility in ranging the words in so |