would prove successful or undisturbed.”  At that time, accordingly, Milton was so engrossed with his Church-disestablishment notion as to be comparatively careless about the general question of the Form of Government.  But, two months later, as we have seen, in his Letter on the Ruptures of the Commonwealth occasioned by Lambert’s assault on the Rump, he had abandoned this indifference, and had proposed a model Constitution of his own, adapted to the immediate exigencies.  From that time, we may now report, though Church-disestablishment was never lost sight of, the question of the Form of Government had fastened itself on Milton’s mind as after all the main one.  From that time he never ceased to ruminate it himself, and he attended more to the speculations and theories of others on the same subject.  If, once or twice in the winter months of 1659, Cyriack Skinner, the occasional chairman of the Rota Club, did not persuade Milton to leave his house in Petty France late in the evening, and be piloted through the streets to the Coffee-house in New Palace Yard to hear one of the great debates of the Club, and become acquainted with their method of closing the debate by a ballot, it would really be a wonder.——­Not in the Rota Club, however, but in the Committee of Safety at Whitehall and in the Wallingford-House Council, was the real and practical debate in progress.  On the 1st of November the Committee had appointed their sub-committee of six to deliberate on the new Constitution; and through the rest of the month, both in the sub-committee and in the general committee, there had been that intricate discussion in which Vane led the extreme party, or party of radical changes, while Whitlocke stood for lawyerly use and wont in all things, and Johnstone of Warriston threw in suggestions from his peculiar Scottish point of view.  So far as Milton was cognisant of the discussion, his hopes must have been in the efforts of his friend Vane.  If any one could succeed in inducing his colleagues to insert articles for Church-disestablishment and full Liberty of Conscience into the new Constitution, who so likely as he who had held those articles as tenets of his private creed so much earlier and so much more tenaciously than any other public man?  Seven years ago Milton had described him on this account as Religion’s “eldest son,” on whose firm hand she could lean in peace.  Now that he was again in power, and that not merely as one of a miscellaneous Parliamentary body, but as one of a small committee of leaders drafting a Constitution de novo, what might he not accomplish?  That Vane did battle in Committee for the notions he held in common with Milton, and for others besides, we already know; but we know also that the massive resistance of Whitlocke, backed outside by the lawyers and the Savoy clique of the clergy, was too much for Vane, and that the draft Constitution as it emerged ultimately was substantially Whitlocke’s.  It was on the 6th of December that this draft Constitution