fair and noble offers of immediate liberty and happy con. dition, no doubt there be enough in every county who will thankfully accept them, your Excellency once more declaring publicly this to be your mind, and having a faithful veteran army, so ready and good, to assist you in the prosecution thereof. For the full and absolute administration of law in every county, which in the difficultest of these proposals, hath been of most long desired, and the not granting it held a general grievance. The rest, when they shall see the beginnings and proceedings of these constitutions proposed, and the orderly, the decent, the civil, the safe, the noble effects thereof, will be soon convinced, and by degrees come in of their own accord, and be partakers of so happy a government."

He next published "Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, entitled,The fear of God and the King;' preached and since published, by Matthew Griffith, D. D. and Chaplain to the King. Wherein many notorious wresting of Scripture, and other falsities, are observed."

"I affirmed, in the preface of a late discourse, entitled, The ready way to establish a free Commonwealth, and the dangers of re-admitting Kingship into this Nation,' that the humour of returning to our old bondage, was instilled of late by some deceivers: and to make good what I then affirmed was not without just ground, one of those deceivers I present here to the people, and if I prove him not such, refuse not to be so accounted in his stead.”

"He begins," says MILTON, "in his epistle to the General, [Monk,] and moves cunningly for a license to be admitted physician both to church and state; then sets out his practice in physical terms, an wholesome electuary, to be taken every morning next our hearts;' tells of the opposition which he meets with from the college of

state physicians: then lays before you his drugs and ingredients: strong purgations in the pulpit, contempered of the myrrh of mortification, the aloes of confession and contrition, the rhubarb of restitution and satisfaction. A pretty fantastic dose of divinity from a pulpit mountebank, not unlike the fox, that turning pedlar, opened his pack of wares before the kid; though he now would seem to personate the good Samaritan, undertaking to describe the Rise and Progress of our National Malady, and to prescribe the remedy, which how he performs we shall quickly see.

"He commences his address," says MILTON, "with an infamous calumny and address to his Excellency, [Monk,} that he would be pleased to carry on what he had so happily begun, in the name and cause, not of God only, which we doubt not, but of his anointed, meaning the late king's son; which is to charge him most audaciously and falsly with the renouncing of his own public promises and declarations both to the parliament and the army, and we trust his actions, ere long, will deter such insinuating slanderers from thus approaching him for the future.”

"The text, 'My son, fear God, and the king, and meddle not with them that be seditious or given to change.' "That we have no king," MILTON says, " since the putting down of kingship in this commonwealth, is manifest by this last parliament, who, to the time of their dissolving, not only made no address at all to any king, but summoned this next to come by the writ formerly appointed of a free commonwealth, without restitution, or the least mention of any kingly right or power; which could not be, if there were at present any king in England. The main part, therefore, of your Sermon, if it mean a king in the usual sense, is either impertinent and absurd," &c.

He says, "Nor are you happier in relating or moral

izing your fable. The Frogs (being once a free nation, saith the fable) petitioned Jupiter for a king: he tumbled among them a log; they found it insensible. They petitioned then for a king that should be active; he sent them a crane, (a stork, saith the fable,) which straight fell to picking them up.' This you apply to the reproof of them who desire change: whereas the true moral shows rather the folly of those, who being free, seek a king; which for the most part, as a log, lies heavy upon his subjects, without doing aught worthy of his dignity and the charge to maintain him, or, as a stork, is ever picking them up or devouring them."

He thus concludes: "As for your Appendix annexed, of the Samaritan revived,' finding it so foul a libel against all the well effected of this land since the very time of ship money; against the whole Parliament, both Lords and Commons, except those that fled to Oxford; against the whole reformed church, not only in England and Scotland, but all over Europe (in comparison of whom you and your Prelatical party are more truly Schismatics and Sectarians, nay, more properly Fanatics in your fanes and gilded temples, than those whom you revile by those names,) and meeting with no more Scripture or solid reason in your 'Samaritan wine and oyl,' than hath already been found sophisticate and adulterate; I leave your malignant narrative, as needing no other confutations than the just censure already passed upon it by the council of state,"

After having told the Parliament, the soldiers, and others, what they had to expect from "the Son of Charles returning," he thus concludes:-"What I have spoken, is the language of that which is. not called amiss, the good old cause: if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope than convincing to backsliders. Thus

much I should perhaps have said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the prophet, O Earth, Earth, Earth! to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen (which Thou suffe not, who didst create mankind free ; nor thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring liberty. But I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to an abundance of sensible and injenuous men ; to some, perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving liberty; and may reclaim, though they seem now choosing them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little, and consider whither they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people, not to be so impetuous, but to keep their due channel; and at length recovering and uniting their better resolutions, now that they see already how open and unbounded the rage is of our common enemy, to slay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurry us, through the general defection of a misguided and abused multitude." Thus nobly did this great man display his patriotic zeal for his favourite republic; but all in vain!

CHAPTER VI.

1655-1658.

THIS seems to be the proper place to introduce the history of that noble zeal, which the Protector Cromwell manifested in defending the protestant religion; especially as it will afford the opportunity of introducing all the letters written in Latin by MILTON in the name of his noble Master, to the Popish and Protestant Potentates on the continent. The intrepid and humane conduct of Cromwell on this sad occasion advanced his character to an unparalleled height, even in the estimation of the Popish monarchs themselves. "The duke of Savoy raised," says the author of the Critical History of England, "a new persecution of the Vaudois, massacreing many, and driving the rest from their habitations. Wherefore Crom. well sent to the French court, demanding of them to oblige that duke, [of Alva,] whom he knew to be in their power, to put a stop to his unjust fury, or otherwise he must break with them. The cardinal [Mazarini] objected to this as unreasonable; he would do good offices, he said, but could not answer for the effects. However, nothing would satisfy the Protector, till they obliged the duke to restore all that he had taken from his protestant subjects, and to renew their former privileges. Cromwell wrote on this occasion to the duke of Alva himself, and by mis. take omitted the title of Royal Highness on his letter, upon which the major part of the council of Savoy were for returning it unopened; but one representing that