I have, in the midst of my unfitness, to whatever may be required of me as a public duty.”  The expressions might suggest that the friend who had been talking with Milton was Vane or some one else of those Councillors of the Rump who still sat on at Whitehall consulting with the Wallingford-House Chiefs as to the form of Government to be set up instead of the Rump (ante pp. 494-495).  It may, however, have been some lesser personage, such as Meadows, back from the Baltic this very month.  In any case, the letter was meant to be shown about, if not printed.  It was, in fact, Milton’s contribution, at a friend’s request, to the deliberations going on at Whitehall.

[Footnote 1:  It was first published in the so-called Amsterdam Edition of Milton’s Prose Works (1698); and Toland, who gave it to the publishers of that edition, informs us that it had been communicated to him “by a worthy friend, who, a little after the author’s death, had it from his nephew”—­i.e. from Phillips.]

He does not conceal his strong disapprobation of Lambert’s coup d’etat.  Indeed he takes the opportunity of declaring, even more strongly than he had done two months before, how heartily he had welcomed the restoration of the Rump.  Thus:—­

“I will begin with telling you how I was overjoyed when I heard that the Army, under the working of God’s holy Spirit, as I thought, and still hope well, had been so far wrought to Christian humility and self-denial as to confess in public their backsliding from the good Old Cause, and to show the fruits of their repentance in the righteousness of their restoring the old famous Parliament which they had without just authority dissolved:  I call it the famous Parliament, though not the harmless, since none well-affected but will confess they have deserved much more of these nations than they have undeserved.  And I persuade me that God was pleased with their restitution, signing it as He did with such a signal victory when so great a part of the nation were desperately conspired to call back again their Egyptian bondage [Lambert’s victory over Sir George Booth].  So much the more it now amazes me that they whose lips were yet scarce closed from giving thanks for that great deliverance should be now relapsing, and so soon again backsliding into the same fault, which they confessed so lately and so solemnly to God and the world, and more lately punished in those Cheshire Rebels,—­that they should now dissolve that Parliament which they themselves re-established, and acknowledged for their Supreme Power in their other day’s Humble Representation:  and all this for no apparent cause of public concernment to the Church or Commonwealth, but only for discommissioning nine great officers in the Army; which had not been done, as is reported, but upon notice of their intentions against the Parliament.  I presume not to give my censure on this action,—­not knowing, as yet I do not, the bottom of it.  I speak only what it