country in their heads for a public Declaration on the 21st of January 1659-60?  “Due liberty to tender consciences” was promised; but that was a mere phrase of custom, implying little or nothing, and it was utterly engulphed, in Milton’s estimate, by the accompanying engagement to “uphold a learned and pious ministry of the nation and their maintenance by Tithes.”  On the Church-disestablishment question the House had actually receded from its former self by announcing that it was not even to prosecute the inquiry as to a possible substitute for Tithes.  Altogether, before the twice-restored Rump had sat a month, Milton must have seen that his ideal Commonwealth was just as far off as ever.  All he could hope was that the wretched little Parliament would not prove positively treacherous.

With others, however, he must have been thinking more of Monk’s proceedings and intentions than of those of the Parliament.  Monk’s march from Coldstream southwards on the 2nd of January; the vanishing of the residue of Lambert’s forces before him; the addresses to him in the English counties all along his route; his answers or supposed answers to these addresses; his wary behaviour to the two Parliamentary Commissioners that had been sent to attach themselves to him and find out his disposition in the matter of the Abjuration Oath; his arrival at St. Alban’s on the 28th of January; his message thence to the Parliament to clear all Fleetwood’s regiments out of London and Westminster before his own entry; that entry itself on the 3rd of February, when he and his battered columns streamed in through Gray’s Inn Lane; finally his first appearance in the House and speech, there:—­of all this Milton had exact cognisance through the newspapers of his friend Needham and otherwise.  It was very puzzling and by no means reassuring.  If he had ever thought of Monk as by possibility such a saviour of the Commonwealth as he had been longing for, the study of the actually approaching physiognomy of Old George all the way from Scotland, and still more Old George’s first deliverance of himself in the Parliament, must have undeceived him.  The Abjuration Oath, it appeared, was not at all to Monk’s mind.  He would not take it himself in order to be qualified for the seat voted him in the Council of State, and he plainly intimated his opinion that the day for such oaths and engagements was past.  Milton cannot have liked that rejection by the General of one of the tests on which he had himself placed so much reliance.  But, further, what meant Monk’s very ambiguous utterance respecting the three immediate courses one of which must be chosen?  He had distinctly mentioned in the House that the drift of public opinion, as he could ascertain it from the addresses made to him along his march, was towards either an enlargement of the present House by the re-admission of the Secluded Members or a full and free Parliament by a new general election; and, though he had seemed to