differences in little particulars, to give this place to his Highness as I can be to receive it:  the King is also exceeding obliging and civil, and hath more true worth in him than I could have imagined.”  Next day Lockhart wrote a brief note to Thurloe announcing himself as actually in possession, “blessed be God for this great mercy, and the Lord continue his protection to his Highness”; and there were subsequent longer letters both to Thurloe and to Cromwell himself[3].  Dunkirk was called “The Key of Spanish Flanders”; and the conquest of this place for the Protectorate was, it is to be remembered, among the last of Cromwell’s great acts.

[Footnote 1:  This Letter is not to be found in the Printed Collection or in Phillips; but it is in the Skinner Transcript (No. 102 there), and has been printed by Mr. Hamilton in his Milton Papers, 7-8.]

[Footnote 2:  Neither is this Letter in the Printed Collection.  It stands as No. 103 in the Skinner Transcript, and has been printed by Hamilton, p. 8.]

[Footnote 3:  Thurloe, VII. 173 et seq.]

(CXXXI.) TO CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, June 1658:—­Since Cromwell’s last letter by Milton to this heroic Scandinavian (March 30), congratulating him on his generous Peace with Denmark, and urging the policy of a League of all the northern Protestant Powers for conjoint action against Austria, Poland, and Catholicism universally, the movements of the Swede had been most perplexing.  Now he had been turning against the Poles and Austrians; but again Denmark, or even the Dutch, seemed to be the object of his resentment, while there was very quarrelsome negotiation between him and the Elector Marquis of Brandenburg, and every appearance that the Elector might have to bear the next full burst of his wrath.  All this did not seem favourable to the prospects of a Protestant League, and Cromwell’s envoys, Meadows, Jephson, Bradshaw, and Downing, had been going to and fro with their wits on the stretch.  Such, in general, was the condition of affairs when Milton for Cromwell wrote as follows:—­“Most serene and potent King, most dear Friend and Ally,—­As often as we look upon the ceaseless plots and various artifices of the common enemies of Religion, so often our thought with ourselves is how necessary it is for the Christian world, and how salutary it would be, for the easier frustration of the attempts of these adversaries, that the Potentates of Protestantism should be conjoined in the strictest league among themselves, and principally your Majesty with our Commonwealth.  How much, and with what zeal, that has been furthered by Us, and how agreeable latterly it would have been to us if the affairs of Sweden and our own had been in such a condition and position that the League could have been ratified heartily by us both, and with all fit aid the one to the other, We have testified to your agents from the time when they first treated of the matter with Us.  Nor,