on the other side we prefer a free government, though for the present not obtained, yet all those suggested fears and difficulties, as the event will prove, easily overcome, we remain finally secure from the exasperated regal power, and out of snares; shall retain the best part of our liberty, which is our religion, and the civil part will be from these who defer us, much more easily recovered, being neither so subtle nor so awful as a king reinthroned. Nor were their actions less both at home and abroad, than might become the hopes of a glorious rising commonwealth: nor were the expressions both of army and people, whether in their public declarations, or several writings, other than such as testified a spirit in this nation, no less noble and well-fitted to the liberty of a commonwealth, than in the ancient Greeks or Romans.* Nor was the heroic cause unsuccessfully defended to all Christendom, against the tongue of a famous and thought invincible adversary; nor the constancy and fortitude, that so nobly vindicated our liberty, our victory at once against two the most prevailing usurpers over mankind, superstition and tyranny, unpraised or uncelebrated in a written monument, likely to outlive detraction, as it hath hitherto convinced or silenced not a few of our detractors, especially in parts abroad.+

After our liberty and religion thus prosperously fought for, gained, and many years possessed, except in those unhappy interruptions, which God hath removed; now that nothing remains, but in all reason the certain hopes of a speedy and immediate settlement for ever in a firm and free commonwealth, for this extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed from heaven, to fall back, or rather to creep back so poorly, as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom

* Such were the hopes then entertained by men, themselves enthusiastic, and filled with the noblest maxims; but Milton lived to be convinced that a people, for the most part ill-instructed, can never be free. Liberty must be based on education, on a political education, adapted to that end. Had the commonwealth long enough subsisted, the knowledge necessary to its conservation would doubtless have been soon diffused; but it was destroyed before it had properly taken root, though there remained in the public mind a hankering after popular institutions, which, up to this day, seems to have gone on constantly increasing in strength.-ED.

+ He here makes manifest with what satisfaction he looked back upon his own achievements in defending the people of England against their foreign defamers, and the advocates of prelacy at home.-ED.

VOL. II.

I

of kingship, to be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds, though done by some to covetous and ambitious ends, yet not therefore to be stained with their infamy, or they to asperse the integrity of others; and yet these now by revolting from the conscience of deeds well done, both in church and state, to throw away and forsake, or rather to betray a just and noble cause for the mixture of bad men who have ill-managed and abused it, (which had our fathers done heretofore, and on the same pretence deserted true religion, what had long ere this become of our gospel, and all protestant reformation so much intermixed with the avarice and ambition of some reformers?) and by thus relapsing, to verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured both us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious; not only argues a strange, degenerate contagion suddenly spread among us, fitted and prepared for new slavery, but will render us a scorn and derision to all our neighbours. And what will they at best say of us, and of the whole English name, but scoffingly, as of that foolish builder mentioned by our Saviour, who began to build a tower, and was not able to finish it? Where is this goodly tower of a commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow kings, and be another Rome in the west? The foundation indeed they lay gallantly, but fell into a worse confusion, not of tongues, but of factions, than those at the tower of Babel; and have left no memorial of their work behind them remaining but in the common laughter of Europe! Which must needs redound the more to our shame, if we but look on our neighbours the United Provinces, to us inferior in all outward advantages; who notwithstanding, in the midst of greater difficulties, courageously, wisely, constantly went through with the same work, and are settled in all the happy enjoyments of a potent and flourishing republic to this day.

Besides this, if we return to kingship, and soon repent, (as undoubtedly we shall, when we begin to find the old encroachment coming on by little and little upon our consciences, which must necessarily proceed from king and bishop united inseparably in one interest,) we may be forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought, and spend over again all that we have spent, but are never like to attain thus far as we

are now advanced* to the recovery of our freedom, never to have it in possession as we now have it, never to be vouchsafed hereafter the like mercies and signal assistances from Heaven in our cause, if by our ingrateful backsliding we make these fruitless; flying now to regal concessions from his divine condescensions and gracious answers to our once importuning prayers against the tyranny which we then groaned under; making vain and viler than dirt the blood of so many thousand faithful and valiant Englishmen, who left us in this liberty, bought with their lives; losing by a strange after-game of folly all the battles we have won, together with all Scotland as to our conquest, hereby lost, which never any of our kings could conquer, all the treasure we have spent, not that corruptible treasure only, but that far more precious of all our late miraculous deliverances; treading back again with lost labour all our happy steps in the progress of reformation, and most pitifully depriving ourselves the instant fruition of that free government, which we have so dearly purchased, a free commonwealth, not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equallest, the justest government, the most agreeable to all due liberty and proportioned equality, both human, civil, and Christian, most cherishing to virtue and true religion, but also (I may say it with greatest probability) plainly commended, or rather enjoined by our Saviour himself, to all Christians, not without remarkable disallowance, and the brand of Gentilism upon kingship.

God in much displeasure gave a king to the Israelites, and imputed it a sin to them that they sought one; but Christ apparently forbids his disciples to admit of any such heathenish government: "The kings of the Gentiles," saith he, "exer cise lordship over them," and they that "exercise authority upon them are called benefactors: but ye shall not be so;

Nearly two hundred years have elapsed, and he has not yet been proved a false prophet. We have in our own day, indeed, witnessed great reforms, and others are even now in progress. But we have still a house filled with hereditary legislators, with men, who, without understanding the question under debate, without even hearing the reasons urged for or against a measure, send their blind votes from beyond the seas, or commission another man to oppose, in their names, the interests of their country; and in that same house all the out-of-date prejudices, all the feudal notions of our ignorant ancestors, with many others, worse than they ever entertained, are by great numbers fostered, openly professed, gloried in, to the shame of our age.-ED.

but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that serveth." The occasion of these his words was the ambitious desire of Zebedee's two sons to be exalted above their brethren in his kingdom, which they thought was to be ere long upon earth. That he speaks of civil government, is manifest by the former part of the comparison, which infers the other part to be always in the same kind. And what government comes nearer to this precept of Christ, than a free commonwealth; wherein they who are the greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own cost and charges, neglect their own affairs, yet are not elevated above their brethren; live soberly in their families, walk the street as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration?* Whereas

a king must be adored like a demigod, with a dissolute and haughty court about him, of vast expense and luxury, masks and revels, to the debauching of our prime gentry, both male and female; not in their pastimes only, but in earnest, by the loose employments of court-service, which will be then thought honourable.+ There will be a queen of no less charge; in most

* Dr. Gillies, many years ago, translated the Politics of Aristotle for the purpose, which Johnson might, perhaps, had he been a reformer, have termed "fantastical,"—of combating the popular predilection in favour of liberal institutions; and, with this view, he endeavoured, both in his notes, and the peculiar phraseology he adopted in rendering the text, to misrepresent the sense of the original, which, as Hobbes clearly perceived, is hostile to monarchy. Nevertheless, in this elegant but faithless translation, the reader will find the following passage, among many others which shew the conformity of Aristotle's and Milton's opinions. "Were one portion of the community as far distinguished above the rest, as we believe the gods and heroes to be exalted above men, or, as Scylax says, that the kings of India are superior to their subjects, in the virtues of mind and body," (a glance at the doctrine of castes,) "it would be proper that these dignified races or families should be invested with hereditary and unalterable authority; and, for this purpose, trained and educated in a manner peculiar to themselves, and relative to that pre-eminent rank which they were for ever destined to hold. But, since such races or fumilies are nowhere to be found in these parts of the world, JUSTICE concurs with GOOD POLICY, in requiring that the citizens should rule by vicarious succession; and how this ought to be done, Nature herself sufficiently indicates." The doctor's ingenuity in selecting a work of which such is the spirit, in order to advance the cause of royalty, cannot be sufficiently admired.—(See book iv. ch. 14, 1. vii. of the origi nal.)-ED.

+We have here a sufficient refutation of Johnson's notion, that in opposing monarchy, Milton looked chiefly, if not solely, at its expensiveness. He

likelihood outlandish and a papist; besides a queen-mother such already; together with both their courts and numerous train then a royal issue, and ere long severally their sumptuous courts; to the multiplying of a servile crew, not of servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court-offices, to be stewards, chamberlains, ushers, grooms even of the close-stool; and the lower their minds debased with court-opinions, contrary to all virtue and reformation, the haughtier will be their pride and profuseness. * We may well remember this not long since at home; nor need but look at present into the French court, where enticements and preferments daily draw away and pervert the protestant nobility.

As to the burden of expense, to our cost we shall soon know it; for any good to us deserving to be termed no better than the vast and lavish price of our subjection, and their de bauchery, which we are now so greedily cheapening, and would so fain be paying most inconsiderately to a single person: who, for anything wherein the public really needs him, will have little else to do, but to bestow the eating and drinking of excessive dainties, to set a pompous lace upon the superficial actings of state, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him for nothing considered a king's court as a great reservoir of vice, from whence every evil and corruption of manners flowed down upon the community; and Charles II., as if to convince the world of the correctness of his theory, more than realized his worst predictions, more than justified his severest reprobation In fact, the world never witnessed, not even in Capri, scenes more revolting or disgraceful to human nature than the English court then exhibited; proofs of which the reader may find in the Memoires de Grammont.-Ed.

* Of this the history of our aristocracy furnishes but too many examples. Look back; what were the women, who were the men, from whom some of the proudest houses in the kingdom derived what are denominated their honours? 'It were well had they been nothing worse than stewards, chamberlains, and grooms. To thrive in a court, no one can be ignorant what qualities are requisite, "Three kings protested to me," says Swift, in his political romance, "that in their whole reigns, they never did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake, or treachery of some minister in whom they onfided: neither would they do it if they were to live again; and they showed, with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into a man, was a perpetual clog to public business.”—(Gulliver's Travels, part iii. c. 8.)-Ed.