It would seem, however, that it had occurred to the Protector and the Council that they were again troubling Mr. Milton too much or left too dependent on him, and that, with the increase of foreign business now in prospect in consequence of the Swedo-Danish war and its complications, it would be well to have an assistant to him, such as Meadows had been.  Accordingly, at a meeting of the Council on Tuesday Sept. 8, 1657, Cromwell himself present, with Lawrence, Fleetwood, Lord Lisle, Strickland, Pickering, Sydenham, Wolseley, and Thurloe, there was this minute:  “Ordered by his Highness the Lord Protector, by and with the advice of the Council, that MR. STERRY do, in the absence of Mr. Philip Meadows, officiate in the employment of Mr. Meadows under Mr. Secretary [Thurloe], and that a salary of 200 merks per annum be allowed him for the same."[1] Whether this Mr. Sterry was the preacher Mr. Peter Sterry, already employed and salaried as one of the Chaplains to the Council, or only a relative of his, I have not ascertained; but it is of the less consequence because the appointment did not take effect.  The person actually appointed was MR. ANDREW MARVELL at last.  We say “at last,” for had he not been recommended for the precise post by Milton four years and a half before under the Rump Government?  Milton may have helped now to bring him in, or it may have been done by Oliver himself in recognition of Marvell’s merits in his tutorship of young Dutton and of his Latin and English Oliverian verses.  There seems to be no record of Marvell’s appointment in the Order Books; but he tells us himself it was in the year 1657.  “As to myself,” he wrote in 1672, “I never had any, not the remotest, relation to public matters, nor correspondence with the persons then predominant, until the year 1657, when indeed I entered into an employment for which I was not altogether improper.”  When Marvell wrote this, he was oblivious of some particulars; for, though it is true that he was in no public employment under the Protectorate till 1657, it can hardly be said that he had not “the remotest relation” till then to public matters, nor any “correspondence with the persons then predominant.”  Enough for us that, from the year he specifies, and precisely from September in that year, he was Milton’s colleague in the Foreign or Latin Secretaryship. “Colleague” we may call him, for his salary was to be L200 a year (not 200 merks, as had been proposed for Sterry), the same as Milton’s was, and the same as Meadows’s had been; and yet not quite “colleague,” inasmuch as Milton’s L200 a year was a life-pension, and also inasmuch as, in stepping into Meadows’s place, Marvell became one of Thurloe’s subordinates in the office, while something of the original honorary independence of the Foreign Secretaryship still encircled Milton.—­Just as Marvell had for some time been wistful after a place in the Council Office, suitable for a scholar and Latinist, so there was another person