Too much is not to be made of certain phrases in this note.  Milton was declining, in as civil terms as possible, a request which might perhaps have been troublesome even if the Secretaryship to Mr. Downing had been vacant; and, though it would have been enough, as far as Heimbach’s present application was concerned, to tell him that Mr. Downing was already provided, the other reason may have been thrown in by way of discouragement of such applications in future.  We have had proof that Milton liked Heimbach; but we do not know what estimate he had formed of Heimbach’s abilities.  Still, any words used by Milton about himself are always to be taken as in correspondence with fact; and hence we are to suppose that, at the time he wrote, he did keep himself as much aloof as possible from the magnates of the Council, performing the pieces of work required of him in his own house, rather than making them occasions for visits and colloquies.  His old and intimate friend Fleetwood, and his friend Lord President Lawrence, with Desborough, Pickering, Strickland, Montague, and Sydenham, all of whom had been mentioned by him with more or less of personal regard in the Defensio Secunda in 1654, were still Councillors, and formed indeed more than half the Council; but his intercourse with some of these individually may have been less since his blindness.  Then, of the rest, Thurloe was the real man of influence, the real gratiosus who could carry or set aside a request like Heimbach’s; and, though Milton’s communications with Thurloe must necessarily have been more frequent than with any other person of the Council, one has an indefinable impression that Thurloe had never taken cordially to Milton or Milton to Thurloe.  At the date of Milton’s note to Heimbach, too, gratiosi were becoming plentiful all round the Council.  Cromwell’s sixty-three writs for the new Upper House had gone out, or were going out, and in a week or two many more “lords” were to be seen walking in couples in any street in Westminster.  Milton, in his quiet retreat there, may have had something of all this in his mind when he wrote to young Mr. Heimbach.

The short second session of the Parliament, with its difficult experiment of the two Houses once more, and the angry dispute of the Commons whether the name of “Lords” should be allowed to the Other House, had come and gone (Jan. 20—­Feb. 4, 1657-8), and of Milton or his thoughts and doings through that crisis we have no trace whatever.  Our next glimpse of him is just after the moment of the abrupt dissolution of the Parliament, when Cromwell was addressing himself again, single-handed, to the task of grappling with the double danger of anarchy within and a threatened invasion from without.  The glimpse is a very sad one.