[Footnote 1:  Godwin’s Lives of the Phillipses (1815), 49-57, and 139-140; Wood’s Ath. IV. 760-769.  I have not myself examined Phillips’s New World of Words; but I have looked at the Thomason copy of his Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, where the date of publication is given.  Perhaps Godwin is a little too severe in his account of it.]

During the month immediately preceding his wife’s death, and the two months following it, there is a break in the series of Milton’s State-Letters for Cromwell.  But he resumed the familiar occupation on the 30th of March, 1658; and thenceforward to the end of the Protectorate the series is again pretty continuous.  Indeed, of this period of Milton’s life we know little more than may be inferred from, or associated with, the following morsels of his continued Secretaryship:—­

(CXVIII.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, March 30, 1658:—­The occasion of this letter was the receipt of news at last of the climax of the Swedish-Danish war in a great triumph of the Swedes.  “In January 1658 Karl Gustav marches his army, horse, foot, and artillery, to the amount of twenty thousand, across the Baltic ice, and takes an island without shipping,—­Island of Fuenen, across the Little Belt; three miles of ice; and a part of the sea open, which has to be crossed on planks.  Nay, forward from Fuenen, when he is once there, he achieves ten whole miles more of ice; and takes Zealand itself—­to the wonder of mankind.”  Such, in Mr. Carlyle’s summary (History of Frederick the Great, i. 223, edit. 1869), was the feat of the Swedish warrior against his Danish enemy.  It was followed almost immediately by a Peace between the two Powers, called The Peace of Roeskilde, by which Sweden acquired certain territories from Denmark, but very generous terms on the whole were granted to the Danes.  Of all this there had been news to Cromwell, not only from his own correspondents, but also in an express letter from Charles Gustavus; and it is to this letter that Milton now replies in Cromwell’s name:—­“Most serene and potent King, most invincible Friend and Ally,—­The Letter of your Majesty, dated from the Camp in Zealand, Feb. 21, has brought Us all at once many reasons why, both privately on our own account, and on account of the whole Christian Commonwealth, we should be affected by no ordinary joy.  In the first place, because the King of Denmark (made your enemy, I believe, not by his own will or interests, but by the arts of the common foes) has been, by your sudden advent into the heart of his kingdom, and without much bloodshed, reduced to such a pass that he has at length, as was really the fact, judged peace more advantageous to him than the war undertaken against you.  Next, because, when he thought he could in no way sooner obtain such a peace than by using Our help long ago offered him for a conciliation, your Majesty, on the prayer merely of the letters