[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books, July 13 and 14, 1657.]

Our first trace of Milton after the new inauguration of Cromwell is in one of his Latin Familiar Epistles, addressed to some young foreigner in London, of whom I know nothing more than may be learnt from the letter itself:—­

  “To the Very Distinguished MR. HENRY DE BRASS.

“I see, Sir, that you, unlike most of our modern youth in their surveys of foreign lands, travel rightly and wisely, after the fashion of the old philosophers, not for ordinary youthful quests, but with a view to the acquisition of fuller erudition from every quarter.  Yet, as often as I look at what you write, you appear to me to be one who has come among strangers not so much to receive knowledge as to impart it to others, to barter good merchandise rather than to buy it.  I wish indeed it were as easy for me to assist and promote in every way those excellent studies of yours as it is pleasant and gratifying to have such help asked by a person of your uncommon talents.

“As for the resolution you say you have taken to write to me and request my answers towards solving those difficulties about which for many ages writers of Histories seem to have been in the dark, I have never assumed anything of the kind as within my powers, nor should I dare now to do so.  In the matter of Sallust, which you refer to me, I will say freely, since you wish me to tell plainly what I do think, that I prefer Sallust to any other Latin historian; which also was the almost uniform opinion of the Ancients.  Your favourite Tacitus has his merits; but the greatest of them, in my judgment, is that he imitated Sallust with all his might.  As far as I can gather from what you write, it appears that the result of my discourse with you personally on this subject has been that you are now nearly of the same mind with me respecting that most admirable writer; and hence it is that you ask me, with reference to what he has said, in the introduction to his Catilinarian War—­as to the extreme difficulty of writing History, from the obligation that the expressions should be proportional to the deeds—­by what method I think a writer of History might attain that perfection.  This, then, is my view:  that he who would write of worthy deeds worthily must write with mental endowments and experience of affairs not less than were in the doer of the same, so as to be able with equal mind to comprehend and measure even the greatest of them, and, when he has comprehended them, to relate them distinctly and gravely in pure and chaste speech.  That he should do so in ornate style, I do not much care about; for I want a Historian, not an Orator.  Nor yet would I have frequent maxims, or criticisms on the transactions, prolixly thrown in, lest, by interrupting the thread of events, the Historian should invade the office of the Political Writer:  for, if the Historian, in explicating counsels and narrating