“A Protector!  What’s that?  ’Tis a stately thing
  That confesseth itself but the ape of a King;
  A tragical Caesar acted by a clown,
  Or a brass farthing stamped with a kind of crown;
  A bauble that shines, a loud cry without wool;
  Not Perillus nor Phalaris, but the bull;
  The echo of Monarchy till it come;
  The butt-end of a barrel in the shape of a drum;
  A counterfeit piece that woodenly shows;
  A golden effigies with a copper nose;
  The fantastic shadow of a sovereign head;
  The arms-royal reversed, and disloyal instead;
  In fine, he is one we may Protector call,—­
  From whom the King of Kings protect us all!”

With this piece of doggrel, the intercepted letters, and the other informations, Overton was shipped off by Monk from Leith to London on the 4th of January, 1654-5; and on the 16th of that month he was committed to the Tower.  Thence the next day he wrote a long letter to a private friend, in which he enumerates the charges against him, and replies to them one by one.  He denies that he has broken trust with the Protector; he denies that he is a Leveller; and, what pleases us best of all, he denies the authorship of the doggrel lines just quoted.  His exact words about these may be given.  “But, say some, you made a copy of scandalous verses upon the Lord Protector, whereby his Highness and divers others were offended and displeased ...  I must acknowledge I copied a paper of verses called The Character of a Protector; but I did neither compose them, nor (to the best of my remembrance) show them to any after I had writ them forth.  They were taken out of my letter-case at Leith, where they had been a long time by me, neglected and forgotten.  I had them from a friend, who wished my Lord [Cromwell] well, and who told me that his Lordship had seen them, and, I believe, laughed at them, as, to my knowledge, he hath done at papers and pamphlets of more personal and particular import and abuse.”  It is really a relief to know that Overton, who is still credited with these lines by Godwin, Guizot, and others, was not the author of them, and this not because of their peculiar political import, but because of their utter vulgarity.  How else could we have retained our faith in Milton’s character of Overton—­“you, Overton, bound to me these many years past in a friendship of more than brotherly closeness and affection, both by the similarity of our tastes, and the sweetness of your manners”?  Still to have copied and kept such lines implied some sympathy with their political meaning; and, Thurloe’s investigations having made it credible otherwise that Overton was implicated, more than he would admit, in the design of a general rising against the Protector’s Government, there was an end to the promising career of Milton’s friend under the Protectorate.  He remained from that time a close prisoner while Oliver lived.  On the 3rd of July, 1656, I find, his wife, “Mrs. Anne Overton,” had liberty from the Council “to abide with her husband in the Tower, if she shall so think fit."[1]