[Footnote 1:  Wood’s Ath.  IV. 760-769 and 212; Lawes’s Ayres and Dialogues; Thurloe, II. 226-227.—­At the date of the letter to Thurloe (April 11, 1654) Sandelands was still in great straits.  He had been arrested for debt and was then in prison.  He reminds Thurloe of his attempts to be useful for the last year or more, not forgetting his project, in the winter of 1652-3, of timber and tar from the Scottish woods.  The “stirs in Scotland” since, it appears, had obstructed that design after it had been lodged, through Milton, with the Committee of the Admiralty; but Sandelands hopes it may be revived, and recommends a beginning that summer in the wood of Glenmoriston about Loch Ness, where the English soldiers are to be plentiful at any rate.  “Sir,” he adds, “if a winter journey into Scotland to do the State service, and my long attendance here, hath not deserved a small reward, or at least the taking off of the sequestration from my parsonage in Yorkshire, I hope ere long I shall merit a far greater, when by my means his Highness’s revenues shall be increased.”—­Milton, I may mention, had, about this time, several old acquaintances in the Protector’s service in Scotland.  One was the ex-licencer of pamphlets, Gilbert Mabbot.  I find him, in June 1653, in some official connexion with Leith (Council Order Book, June 3).]

On the 17th of August, 1655, or just nine days after the publication of Milton’s Pro Se Defensio, there appeared anonymously in London, in the form of a small quarto pamphlet of twenty-two pages, a poem in rhyming heroics, entitled A Satyr against Hypocrites.  In evidence that it was the work of a scholar, there were two mottoes from Juvenal on the title-page, one of them the well known “Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.”  Of the performance itself there can be no more exact description than that of Godwin.  “It is certainly written,” he says, “with considerable talent; and the scenes which the author brings before us are painted in a very lively manner.  He describes successively a Sunday, as it appeared in the time of Cromwell, a christening, a Wednesday, which agreeably to the custom of that period was a weekly fast, and the profuse and extravagant supper with which, according to him, the fast-day concluded.  The christening, the bringing home the child to its mother, who is still in confinement, and the talk of the gossips, have a considerable resemblance to the broadest manner of Chaucer.”  This last remark Godwin at once qualifies.  Whereas in Chaucer, he says, we have sheer natural humour, with no ulterior end, the The Satyr against Hypocrites “is an undisguised attack upon the National Religion, upon everything that was then visible in this country and metropolis under the name of Religion.”  In other words, it is in a vein of anti-Puritanism, or even anti-Cromwellianism, quite as bitter as that of any of the contemporary Royalist writers, or as that of Butler and the post-Restoration wits, with a decided tendency also to indecency in ideas and expression, Of the more serious parts this is a specimen:—­