for its head, a permanent Council of State round Cromwell, and Parliaments on occasion.  But, underneath this general adhesion to the Protectorate, there had been even then certain Miltonic reserves, and especially the reserve of a protest against the continuance of a State Church.  Now, had Milton been in a condition to act the part of a practical statesman through Oliver’s Protectorate, might not some extraordinary development have been given to those reserves?  With his boundless courage and the non-conforming habits of his genius, would he ever have been the Parliamentary servant of a Government from which he differed at all,—­from which he differed so vitally on the question of Church Establishment?  Probably in nothing else had Cromwell wholly disappointed him.  Through the Protectorate there had been all the toleration of religious differences that could be desired, or what shortcoming there had been had hardly been by Cromwell’s own fault; the other interferences with liberty had hardly perhaps, in Milton’s estimation, gone beyond the necessities of police; and in Cromwell’s foreign policy, with its magnificent championship of Protestantism abroad, what man in England was more ardently at one with him than the draftsman of his great foreign despatches?  At the time of the proposal of Cromwell’s Kingship, and generally at the time of the transition out of his first Protectorate into his second, with the resuscitation then of so many aristocratic forms and the attempt to reinstitute a house of peers, there may have been, as we have already hinted, an uprising in Milton’s mind of democratic objections, and the effect may have been that Milton before the end of Oliver’s Protectorate was less of an Oliverian than he had been at the beginning.  Still, precluded from any active concern in those constitutional changes, he may have reconciled himself to them easily enough, and also to the transmission of the Protectorship from Oliver to Richard.  The one insuperable stumbling-block, I believe, had been and was Cromwell’s Established Church.  Even in his blindness he could theorize on that, and stiffen himself more and more in his intense Religious Voluntaryism, Conscious of his irreconcileable dissent from Cromwell’s policy in this great matter, and knowing that Cromwell was aware of the fact, it may have been a satisfaction to him that he was not called upon to act a Parliamentary part, in which proclamation of the dissent and consequent rupture with Cromwell on the ecclesiastical question would have been inevitable.  It may have been some satisfaction to him that he could go on faithfully and honestly as a servant of Cromwell in the special business of the Latin Secretaryship, and for the rest be a lonely thinker and take refuge in silence.  It is worth observing, indeed, that nothing of a political kind had come from Milton’s pen during the last three or four years of Oliver’s Protectorate,—­nothing even indirectly bearing on the internal politics of