. . . Many have made a figure by their published writings whose living voice and daily conversation have presented next to nothing that was not low and common: if then, I can attain the distinction of seeming myself equal in mind and manners to any writings of mine that have been tolerably to the purpose, there will be the double effect that I shall so have added weight personally to my writings, and shall receive back by way of reflection from them credit, how small soever it may be, yet greater in proportion. For, in that case, whatever is right and laudable in them, that same I shall seem not more to have derived from authors of high excellence than to have fetched forth pure and sincere from the inmost feelings of my own mind and soul. I am glad, therefore, to know that you are assured of my tranquillity of spirit in this great affliction of loss of sight, and also of the pleasure I have in being civil and attentive in the reception of visitors from abroad. Why, in truth, should I not bear gently the deprivation of sight, when I may hope that it is not so much lost as revoked and retracted inwards, for the sharpening rather than the blunting of my mental edge? Whence it is that I neither think of books with anger, nor quite intermit the study of them, grievously though they have mulcted me,—were it only that I am instructed against such moroseness by the example of King Telephus of the Mysians, who refused not to be cured in the end by the weapon that had wounded him. . . .
Westminster, March 24, 1658.
To Henry Oldenburg. (Familiar Letters, No. XXIX.)
. . . Of any such work as compiling the history of our political troubles, which you seem to advise, I have no thought whatever [longe absum]: they are worthier of silence than of commemoration. What is needed is not one to compile a good history of our troubles, but one who can happily end the troubles themselves; for, with you, I fear lest, amid these our civil discords, or rather sheer madnesses, we shall seem to the lately confederated enemies of Liberty and Religion a too fit object of attack, though in truth, they have not yet inflicted a severer wound on Religion than we ourselves have been long doing by our crimes. But God, as I hope, on His own account, and for His own glory, now in question, will not allow the counsels and onsets of the enemy to succeed as they themselves wish, whatever convulsions Kings and Cardinals meditate and design. . . .
Westminster, December 20, 1659.
The following extract from the Prefatory address to the Parliament (the restored Rump) shows no misgivings, on the part of Milton, in regard to the stability of the Commonwealth. But he must have been secretly hopeless. Cromwell had died the previous year, on September 3, and his son Richard, his successor, had abdicated on the 25th of the following May. A state of things little short of anarchy had set in before the publication of Milton's pamphlet. But as late as near the end of February, 1660, he published 'The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,' still, as it appears, unable to believe, desperate as was the state of things, that the Commonwealth was in its death throes. On the 29th of the following May, Charles II. entered London amid the wildest
acclamations of the people; and the commonwealth, for which Milton had fought to the bitter end, was no more, and he himself was in concealment. But he must have been assured that the principles for which he had fought would sooner or later assert themselves in spite of all opposition that could be brought against them, though he could hardly have thought that these principles would assert themselves so soon as they did. Fourteen years after his death, James II. was driven from the throne, and the constitutional basis of the monarchy underwent a quite radical change—a change largely, if not wholly, due to the work of Puritanism, which, it was generally supposed, at the Restoration of Charles II., had been completely undone. 'It was,' says John Richard Green, 'from the moment of its (Puritanism's) seeming fall that its real victory began.'
From 'Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to remove Hirelings out of the Church.' (August, 1659)
Owing to your protection, Supreme Senate! this liberty of writing, which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of church and state, and so far approved, as to have been trusted with the representment and defence of your actions to all Christendom against an adversary of no mean repute; to whom should I address what I still publish on the same argument, but to you, whose magnanimous councils first opened and unbound the age from a double bondage under prelatical and regal tyranny; above our own hopes heartening us to look up at last, like men and Christians, from the slavish dejection, wherein from father to son we were bred up and taught; and thereby deserving of these nations, if they be not barbarously ingrateful, to be acknowledged, next under God, the authors