[Footnote 1:  Copy in Thomason Collection, with date “Aug.” marked on title-page—­month only, no day.]

The Address to the Parliament deserves particular notice.  The following is the main portion of it, with two phrases Italicised:—­

“Owing to your protection, Supreme Senate, this liberty of writing which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of Church and State, and so far approved as to have been trusted with the representment and defence of your actions to all Christendom against an adversary of no mean repute, to whom should I address what I still publish on the same argument but to you, whose magnanimous counsels first opened and unbound the age from a double bondage under Prelatical and Regal tyranny, above our own hopes heartening us to look up at last like Men and Christians from the slavish dejection wherein from father to son we were bred up and taught, and thereby deserving of these nations, if they be not barbarously ingrateful, to be acknowledged, next under God, the authors and best patrons of Religious and Civil Liberty that ever these Islands brought forth? The care and tuition of whose peace and safety, after a short but scandalous night of interruption, is now again, by a new dawning of God’s miraculous Providence among us, revolved upon your shoulders.  And to whom more appertain these Considerations which I propound than to yourselves, and the debate before you, though I trust of no difficulty, yet at present of great expectation, not whether ye will gratify, were it no more than so, but whether ye will hearken to the just petition of many thousands best affected both to Religion and to this your return, or whether ye will satisfy (which you never can) the covetous pretences and demands of insatiable Hirelings, whose disaffection ye well know hath to yourselves and your resolutions?  That I, though among many others in this common concernment, interpose to your deliberations what my thoughts also are, your own judgment and the success thereof hath given me the confidence:  which requests but this—­that, if I have prosperously, God so favouring me, defended the public cause of this Commonwealth to foreigners, ye would not think the reason and ability whereon ye trusted once (and repent not) your whole reputation to the world either grown less by more maturity and longer study or less available in English than in another tongue:  but that, if it sufficed, some years past, to convince and satisfy the unengaged of other nations in the justice of your doings, though then held paradoxal, it may as well suffice now against weaker opposition in matters (except here in England, with a spirituality of men devoted to their temporal gain) of no controversy else among Protestants.”

This is, unmistakeably, a public testimony of Milton’s re-adhesion to the Rumpers, with something like an expression of regret that he had ever parted from