eloquent of men; and if this is a bold saying, it is scarcely too bold.
Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speaking
philosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or in
literary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression,
perhaps the superior of both his companions. The excellence of Browne is
indeed more purely literary and intensely artistic first of all--a matter
of expression rather than of substance,--while he is perhaps more flawed
than any of them by the fashionable vices of his time. Yet, as an artist,
or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vain
to look anywhere for his superior.

John Milton--the greatest, no doubt, of the five, if only because of his
mastery of either harmony--was born in London on 9th December 1608, was
educated at Cambridge, studied at home with unusual intensity and control
of his own time and bent; travelled to Italy, returned, and engaged in the
somewhat unexpected task of school-keeping; was stimulated, by the outbreak
of the disturbances between king and parliament, to take part with
extraordinary bitterness in the strife of pamphlets on the republican and
anti-prelatical side, defended the execution of the king in his capacity of
Latin secretary to the Government (to which he had been appointed in 1649);
was struck with blindness, lay hid at the Restoration for some time in
order to escape the Royalist vengeance (which does not seem very seriously
to have threatened him), composed and published in 1667 the great poem of
_Paradise Lost_, followed it with that of _Paradise Regained_, did not a
little other work in prose and poetry, and died on 8th November 1674. He
had been thrice married, and his first wife had left him within a month of
her marriage, thereby occasioning the singular series of pamphlets on
divorce, the theories of which, had she not returned, he had, it is said,
intended to put into practice on his own responsibility. The general
abstinence from all but the barest biographical outline which the scale of
this book imposes is perhaps nowhere a greater gain than in the case of
Milton. His personal character was, owing to political motives, long
treated with excessive rigour. The reaction to Liberal politics early in
the nineteenth century substituted for this rigour a somewhat excessive
admiration, and even now the balance is hardly restored, as may be seen
from the fact tha