had not yet been resumed.  Would it ever be, or would Monk’s army and Lambert’s come into clash at last?  If so, for which ought one to wish the victory?  So far as Milton was concerned, he was bound to wish the success of Monk.  Was not Monk the champion of that little Restored Rump to which Milton had himself adhered, and the late suppression of which he had pronounced to be “illegal and scandalous”?  Was not Monk also professing and proclaiming that very principle of the proper submission of the military power to the civil on which Milton himself had dilated?  Would it not be only God’s justice if Lambert, “the secret author and fomenter of these disturbances,” should be disgraced and overthrown?  Yet, on the other hand, who could desire even that consequence, or the Restoration of the Rump, at the expense of another civil war and bloodshed?  Where would the process stop?  And, besides, was Monk, with his Presbyterian notions, learnt among the Scots, the man from whose ascendancy Milton could hope anything but farther disappointment in the Church question?  All in all, we are to imagine Milton anxious for a reconciliation.

No less interesting to Milton must have been the activity of the new Government meanwhile in their great business of inventing “such a Form of Government as may best suit and comport with a Free State and Commonwealth.”——­The Rump itself, as we know, had been busy with this problem through the last month of its sittings, having appointed on the 8th of September a great Committee on the subject, with Vane named first, but all the most eminent Rumpers included (ante p. 480).  Through this Committee there had been an inburst into the Parliamentary mind, as Ludlow informs us, of the thousand and one competing proposals or models of a Commonwealth already devised by the Harringtonians and other theorists; and, in fact, while the Committee was sitting, there had started up for its assistance, close to the doors of Parliament, the famous Harrington or Rota Club, meeting nightly in Miles’s Coffee-house, and including Neville and others of the Rumpers among its most constant members (ante pp. 484-486).  That Milton knew already about Harrington and his “models” by sufficient readings of Harrington’s books there can be no doubt.  In the address to the Rump prefixed to his Considerations touching Hirelings in August last he had distinctly referred to the kind acceptance by the Rump of “new models of a Commonwealth” daily tendered to them in Petitions, and must have had specially in view the Petition of July 6, which had been drawn up by Harrington, and which proposed a constitution of two Parliamentary Houses, one of 300 members, the other much larger, on such a system of rotation as would change each completely every third year (ante pp. 483-484).  His only criticism on the competing models then had been that, till his own notion of Church-disestablishment were carried into effect, “no model whatsoever of a Commonwealth,