them.  After all, he could call them “the authors and best patrons of religious and civil liberty that ever these Islands brought forth”; and, with this renewed conviction, and remembering also their former confidence in himself, especially in the Salmasian controversy, he could now congratulate them and the country on their return to power.  But is not the Address also a recantation of his Oliverianism?  To some extent, it must be so interpreted.  It seems utterly impossible, indeed, that the phrase “a short but scandalous night of interruption” was intended to apply to the entire six years of the Cromwellian Dictatorship and Protectorship.  That had not been a “short” interruption, for it had exceeded in length the whole duration of the Commonwealth it had interrupted; and it would be the most marvellous inconsistency on record if Milton could ever have brought himself to call it “scandalous.”  Who had written the panegyric on Cromwell and his actually established Protectorship in the Defensio Secunda? Who had been Oliver’s Latin Secretary from first to last, and penned for him his despatches on the Piedmontese massacre and all his greatest besides?  The likelihood, therefore, is that “the short but scandalous night of interruption” in Milton’s mind was the fortnight or so of Wallingford-House usurpation which broke up Richard’s Parliament and Protectorate, and from the continuance of which, with all the inconveniences of a mere military despotism, the restoration of the Rump had seemed a happy rescue.  But, though this single phrase may be thus explained, the tone of the whole address intimates far less of gratitude to Oliver dead than there had been of admiration for Oliver living.  And the reason at this point is most obvious.  Was it not precisely because Cromwell had failed to fulfil Milton’s expectation of him, in his sonnet of May 1652, that he would deliver the Commonwealth from the plague of “hireling wolves,” calling themselves a Clergy—­was it not because Cromwell from first to last had pursued a contrary policy—­that it remained for Milton now, seven years after the date of that sonnet, to have to offer, as a private thinker, and on mere printed paper, his own poor Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church? It was not in a pamphlet on that subject, wherever else, that Milton could say his best for the memory of Cromwell.

After some preliminary observations connecting the present treatise with its forerunner; Milton opens his subject thus:—­

“Hire of itself is neither a thing unlawful, nor a word of any evil note, signifying no more than a due recompense or reward, as when our Saviour saith, ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire.’  That which makes it so dangerous in the Church, and properly makes HIRELING a word always of evil signification, is either the excess thereof or the undue manner of giving and taking it.  What harm the excess thereof brought to