with Henry Hills and John Field, his Highness’s Printers, to see to the strict enforcement in future of the restrictions of certain cited Press Acts,—­to wit, the ordinance of the Long Parliament of June 14, 1643 (that against which Milton had written his Areopagitica), the similar ordinance of the same Parliament of date Sept. 28, 1647, the Act of the Rump Parliament of Sept. 20, 1649 (Bradshaw’s Press Act of the first year of the Commonwealth), and the renewal of the same Jan. 7, 1652-3.  Had this been all, one might have inferred nothing more than one of those occasional panics about Press licentiousness from the recurrence of which even Milton’s reasoning had never been able to free the Government with which he was connected.  But at the same meeting it was referred to Lord Fleetwood, Lord Wolseley, Lord Pickering, Lord Jones, Lord Desborough, Lord Viscount Lisle, and Lord Strickland, or to any two of them, “to consider of fit persons to be added for licensing of books and to report the names of such persons to the Council.”  This was distinctly retrogressive; and the regret of Milton must have been none the less because four of the Committee that were to find the new licensers were men he had named in his Defensio Secunda as heroes of the Commonwealth, and because, as appears from a marginal jotting to the minute as it stands in the Council Order Books, the man thought of at once for one of the new licensers, or as the person fittest to be first consulted in the business, was Marchamont Needham.  After all, it may have been, like some of the previous movements for press-regulation, only a push from Paternoster Row in defence of the legitimate book-trade, and the main intention of the Council itself may have been against pamphlets like Killing no Murder or publications of the indecent order.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books of dates, and Nickolis’s Milton State Papers, 143-144 (the last for Malyn’s Letter about Nayler).  For previous Press Acts referred to by the Council, see ante Vol.  III. 266-271, and Vol.  IV. 116-118.]

O how stable and grand seemed the Protectorate in the month of July 1658!  Rebellion at home in all its varieties quashed once more, and now, as it might seem, for ever; the threatened invasion of the Spaniards and Charles Stuart dissipated into ridicule; a footing acquired on the Continent, and 6000 Englishmen stationed there in arms; Foreign Powers, with Louis XIV. at their head, obeisant to the very ground whenever they turned their gaze towards the British Islands, and dreading the next bolt from the Protector’s hands; those hands evidently toying with several new bolts and poising them towards the parts of Europe for which they were intended; great schemes, besides, for England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Colonies, in that inventive brain!  All this, we say, in July 1658, by which time also it was known that the Protector, so far from fearing to face a new Parliament,