[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals, May 19, 1659.]

This representation of Milton’s position at the time of the restoration of the Rump is confirmed by a private letter then addressed to him.  The writer was a certain Moses Wall, of Causham or Caversham in Oxfordshire, a scholar and Republican opinionist of whom there are traces in Hartlib’s correspondence and elsewhere.[1] Milton had recently written to him, sending him perhaps a copy of his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; and this is Wall’s reply—­written, it will be observed, the very day after Richard’s abdication:—­

[Footnote 1:  Worthington’s Diary and Correspondence, by Crossley, I. 355 and 365.]

  “Sir,

“I received yours the day after you wrote, and do humbly thank you that you are pleased to honour me with your letters.  I confess I have (even in my privacy in the country) oft had thoughts about you, and that with much respect for your friendliness to truth in your early years and in bad times.  But I was uncertain whether your relation to the Court (though I think that a Commonwealth was more friendly to you than a Court) had not clouded your former light; but your last book resolved that doubt.

“You complain of the non-progressency of the nation, and of its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths.  It is much to be bewailed; but, yet, let us pity human frailty.  When those who had made deep protestations of their zeal for our liberty, both spiritual and civil, and made the fairest offers to be the asserters thereof, and whom we thereupon trusted,—­when these, being instated in power, shall betray the good thing committed to them, and lead us back to Egypt, and by that force which we gave them to win us liberty hold us fast in chains,—­what can poor people do?  You know who they were that watched our Saviour’s sepulchre to keep him from rising [soldiers! see Matthew XXVII. and XXVIII.].  Besides, whilst people are not free, but straitened in accommodations for life, their spirits will be dejected and servile; and, conducing to that end [of rousing them], there should be an improving of our native commodities, as our manufactures, our fishery, our fens, forests, and commons, and our trade at sea, &c.:  which would give the body of the nation a comfortable subsistence.  And the breaking that cursed yoke of Tithes would much help thereto.  Also another thing I cannot but mention; which is that the Norman Conquest and Tyranny is continued upon the nation without any thought of removing it:  I mean the tenure of land by copyhold, and holding for life under a lord, or rather tyrant, of a manor; whereby people care not to improve their land by cost upon it, not knowing how soon themselves or theirs may be outed it, nor what the house is in which they live, for the same reason; and they are far more enslaved to the lord of the manor than the rest of the nation is to a king or supreme