“To HENRY OLDENBURG, Agent for Bremen with the English Government.

“Your letter, brought by young Ranelagh, has found me rather busy; and so I am forced to be briefer than I should wish.  You have certainly kept your departing promise of writing to me, and that with a punctuality surpassed.  I believe, by no one hitherto in the payment of a debt.  I congratulate you on your present retirement, to my loss though it be, since it gives pleasure to you; I congratulate you also on that happy state of mind which enables you so easily to set aside at once the ambition and the ease of city-life, and to lift your thoughts to higher matters of contemplation.  What advantage that retirement affords, however, besides plenty of books, I know not; and those persons you have found there as fit associates in your studies I should suppose to be such rather from their own natural constitution than from the discipline of the place,—­unless perchance, from missing you here, I do less justice to the place for keeping you away.  Meanwhile you yourself rightly remark that there are too many there whose occupation it is to spoil divine and human things alike by their frivolous quibblings, that they may not seem to be doing absolutely nothing for those many endowments by which they are supported so much to the public detriment.  All this you will understand better for yourself.  Those ancient annals of the Chinese from the Flood downwards which you say are promised by the Jesuit Martini[1] are doubtless very eagerly expected on account of the novelty of the thing; but I do not see what authority or confirmation they can add to the Mosaic books.  Our Cyriack, whom you bade me salute, returns the salutation.  Farewell.

  “Westminster:  June 25, 1656.”

[Footnote 1:  Martin Martini, Jesuit Missionary to China, was born 1614 and died 1661.]

That Count Bundt’s remonstrance on the employment of a blind man in the Protector’s diplomatic business had had no effect will be proved by the following list of state-letters written by Milton immediately after that remonstrance.  We bring the list down to Sept. 1656, the month in which the Second Parliament of the Protectorate met: 

(LXXVIII.) To KINGS AND FOREIGN STATES GENERALLY, June 1656:[1]—­This is a Passport by the Protector in favour of PETER GEORGE ROMSWINCKEL, Doctor of Laws.  He had been born and bred in the Roman Catholic Church, and had held high offices in that Church at Cologne, but had become an ardent Protestant, and had been for some time in England.  He was now on his way back to Germany, to assume the post of Councillor to the widowed Duchess of Symmeren (?); and the Protector desires all English officers, consuls, agents, &c., and also all foreign Governments, to give him free passage and handsome treatment.  The tone of the letter is even haughtily Protestant.  On the ground that “most people think in Religion with easy acquiescence in exactly what they have received