to yourself.  May God Almighty, for His own glory, the safeguard of so many innocent Christian human beings, and your true honour, dispose your Majesty to this resolution!” The letter was sent to Ambassador Lockhart, then commanding the English auxiliaries at Dunkirk, with very precise instructions to deliver it to his French Majesty, and to follow it up energetically by his own counsels.[2] It may have been delivered to Louis XIV. at or near Calais.  It had, as we have seen, full effect.  All in all, it is one of the most eloquent of the Milton series; and Milton must have exerted himself in the composition.

[Footnote 1:  The exact day of the month is not given either in the Printed Collection or in the Skinner Transcript; but it is determined by a letter of Cromwell’s to Ambassador Lockhart on the same business.  The two letters went together (see Carlyle, III. 357-365).]

[Footnote 2:  Letter of Cromwell to Lockhart of date May 25, 1658, printed by Mr. Carlyle, loc. cit., from the Ayscough MSS.]

(CXXI.) TO THE EVANGELICAL SWISS CANTONS, May 26, 1658:[1]—­On the same great business as the last.—­“Illustrious and most honourable Lords, most dear Friends:—­Concerning the Vaudois, your most afflicted neighbours, what grievous and intolerable things they have suffered from their Prince for Religion’s sake, besides that the mind almost shrinks from remembering them because of the very atrocity of the facts, we have thought it superfluous to write to you what must be much better known to yourselves.  We have also seen copies of the letters which your Envoys, who a good while since were the advisers and witnesses of the Peace of Pignerol, have written to the Duke of Savoy and the President of his Council in Turin; in which they show and prove in detail that all the conditions of the Peace have been broken, and have been rather a snare for those miserable people than a security.  Which violation of the conditions, continued from the very date of the Peace even to this day, and every day growing more grievous, unless they endure patiently, unless they prostrate themselves and lie down to be trampled on and pushed into mud, their Religion itself forsworn, there impends over them the same calamity, the same havoc, which harassed and desolated them, with their wives and children, in so miserable a manner three years ago, and which, if it is to be undergone again, will wholly extirpate them.  What can the poor people do?  They have no respite, no breathing-time, as yet no certain refuge.  They have to deal with wild beasts or with furies, to whom the recollection of the former slaughters has brought no remorse, no pity for their fellow-countrymen, no sense of humanity or satiety in shedding blood.  These things are clearly not to be borne, whether we have regard to our Vaudois brethren, cherishers of the Orthodox Religion from of old, or to the safety of that Religion itself.  We, for our part, removed though we are by too great