No masculine head could be affected by them; but a manly heart may easily imbibe the generous contagion of their noble enthusiastic idealism.

No man with a single fibre of ideality or enthusiasm can help confessing that Milton has risen to a transcendent height, and he may imagine that it has been attained by the ladder of reason rather than the pinion of poetry.

Such an one may easily find reasons for agreeing with Milton in many inspired outbursts of eloquence simulating the logic that is in fact lacking to them.

The following splendid passage, for instance, and there are very many like it, merely proves that a seat in the House of Lords is not essential to the episcopal office, which no one ever denied.

It would have considerable force if the question involved the nineteenth century one of the Pope's temporal sovereignty:-- "Certainly there is no employment more honourable, more worthy to take up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of heavenly truth from God to man, and by the faithful work of holy doctrine to procreate a number of faithful men, making a kind of creation like to God's by infusing his spirit and likeness into them, to their salvation, as God did into him; arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge and good works.
Can a man thus employed find himself discontented or dishonoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and jail deliveries?
or because he may not as a judge sit out the wrangling noise of litigious courts to shrive the purses of unconfessing and unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be discouraged though men call him not lord, whereas the due performance of his office would gain him, even from lords and princes, the voluntary title of father ?" When it was said of Robespierre, _cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit tout ce qu'il dit_, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief place in the State.