9, 1656 (?):—­A Letter accompanying the above, and introducing LOCKHART specially to the Cardinal.  It is also worth translating entire:  “Seeing the affairs of France most happily administered by your counsels, and daily increasing in prosperity to such a degree that your high popularity and high authority in government are justly increased and enlarged accordingly, I have thought it fit, when sending an ambassador to your King with letters and instructions, to recommend him also most expressly to your Eminence:  to wit, WILLIAM LOCKHART, a man of honourable family, closely related to us, and respected by us besides for his singular trustworthiness.  Wherefore your Eminence may receive as our own whatsoever shall be communicated by him in our name, and may also freely commit and entrust to him in my confidence whatever you shall think fit to communicate in return.  From him too you will learn more at large, what I now again profess, as more than once already, how high is my feeling of your great services to France, and what a well-wisher I am to your reputation and dignity."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Neither of these Letters about Lockhart is in the Printed Collection or in Phillips; but both are in the Skinner Transcript (Nos. 110 and 111 there), whence they have been printed by Mr. Hamilton in his Milton Papers (pp. 9-10).  He dates them both, as in the Transcript, “West., Aug. 1658;” but that is clearly a mistake, and the letters are out of their proper places in the Transcript.  Lockhart was nominated for the Embassy in Dec. 1655, and he “took ship at Rye on the 14th of April, 1656, on his way to France” (see a letter of Thurloe’s to Pell in Vaughan’s Protectorate, I. 376-377).  I have ventured to affix the exact date “April 9, 1656” to the two letters, because it is on that day that I find Lockhart’s departure on his embassy definitely settled in the Council Order Books.  Before “Aug. 1658” Lockhart had known Louis XIV. and the Cardinal intimately for more than two years and needed no introduction.]

(LXXIV.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, April 17, 1656:—­Another extremely polite letter of the Protector to his Swedish Majesty, marking a farther stage in the proceedings of the Swedish Treaty.—­That Treaty had been going on at Dorset House, the Swedish Ambassador and the Swedish Resident, continuing their colloquies with Whitlocke.  Fiennes, and Strickland, about pitch, tar, hemp, mutual privileges of trade between England and Sweden, trade also with Prussia, Poland, and Russia, and all the other items of the Treaty, and the Ambassador always pushing on the business and chafing at the slow progress made.  Again and again he had taken serious offence at something.  Once it was because, waiting on the Protector at Whitehall, he had been kept half-an-hour before the Protector appeared.  It was with difficulty he was prevented from going away without seeing his Highness; “he durst not for his head,”