year, and in his present state, he could feel himself superior to that, and could describe his consciousness as something higher.  If he had done a great work already, as he himself believed, and as the voice of all the best of mankind acknowledged, had it not been because God had chosen and inspired him for the same, and might he not in that faith send out a message to the world that perhaps God had not yet done with him, and they might expect from him, blind and desolate though he was, something greater and better still?  The closing sentence is exactly such a message, and one can suppose that Milton was there thinking of his progress in Paradise Lost.

Whatever was the amount of Marvell’s exertion in the secretaryship, Milton was not wholly exempted from the duty of writing even the more ordinary letters for Richard and his Council.  There is a vacant interval of three months, indeed, after the five last registered and the next; but in January 1658-9 the series is resumed, and there are six more letters of Milton for Richard between the end of that month and the end of February.  Richard’s Parliament, it is to be remembered, met on the 27th of January.

(CXXXVIII.) To CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, Jan. 27, 1658-9 (i.e. the day of the meeting of the Parliament):—­Samuel Piggott, merchant of London, has complained to the Protector that two ships of his—­the Post, Tiddy Jacob master, and the Water-dog, Garbrand Peters master—­are detained somewhere in the Baltic by his Majesty’s forces.  They had sailed from London to France; thence to Amsterdam, where one had taken in ballast only, but the other a cargo of herrings, belonging in part to one Peter Heinsberg, a Dutchman; and, so laden, they had been bound for his Majesty’s port of Stettin.  Probably the Dutch ownership of part of the herring cargo was the cause of the detention of the ships; but Piggott was the lawful owner of the ships themselves and of the rest of the goods.  His Majesty is prayed to restore them, and so save the poor man from ruin.

(CXXXIX.) To THE HIGH AND MIGHTY, THE STATES OF WEST FRIESLAND, Jan. 27, 1658-9:—­A widow, named Mary Grinder, complains that Thomas Killigrew, a commander in the service of the States, has for eighteen years owed her a considerable sum of money, the compulsory payment of which he is trying now to evade by petitioning their Highnesses not to allow any suit against him in their Courts for debts due in England.  “If I only mention to your Highnesses that she, whom this man tries to deprive of nearly all her fortunes, is a widow, that she is poor, the mother of many little children, I will not do you the injustice of supposing that with you, to whom I am confident the divine commandments, and especially those about not oppressing widows and the fatherless, are well known, any more serious argument will be needed against your granting this privilege of fraud to the man’s petition.”—­The