The Parliament of the Secluded Members and Residuary Rumpers had been sitting for a few days, had confirmed Monk in the Dictatorship by formally appointing him Captain-General and Commander-in-chief (Feb. 21), and had also (Feb. 22) intimated their resolution to devolve all really constitutional questions on a new “full and free Parliament,” when Milton did send forth the pamphlet he had written.  It was a small quarto of eighteen pages with this title-page:  “The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence therof compar’d with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting kingship in this nation.  The author J.M., London, Printed by T.N., and are to be sold by Livewell Chapman at the Crown in Popes-Head Alley. 1660.”  Copies seem to have been procurable before the end of February 1659-60, but Thomason’s copy bears date “March 3."[1] That was the day of the order of Parliament for the release of the last remaining Scottish captives of Worcester Battle.

[Footnote 1:  In Wood’s Fasti (I. 485) the pamphlet is mentioned as “published in Feb.”  The publication, we learn from subsequent words of Milton himself, was very hurried, and copies got about without his press-corrections.  I find no entry of the pamphlet in the Stationers’ Registers.—­It is particularly necessary to remember that this was but the first edition of the pamphlet.  Another was to follow.  In all the editions of Milton’s collected works, from that of 1698 onwards, the reprint is from the later edition, without notice of the first; but I hardly know a case in which the distinction between two editions is more important.]

The pamphlet opens thus:—­

“Although, since the writing of this treatise, the face of things hath had some change, writs for new elections [by the late Rump] have been recalled, and the members at first chosen [for the original Long Parliament] readmitted from exclusion to sit again in Parliament, yet, not a little rejoicing to hear declared the resolutions of all those who are now in power, jointly tending to the establishment of a Free Commonwealth, and to remove, if it be possible, this unsound humour of returning to old bondage instilled of late by some cunning deceivers, and nourished from bad principles and false apprehensions among too many of the people, I thought best not to suppress what I had written, hoping it may perhaps (the Parliament now sitting more full and frequent) be now much more useful than before:  yet submitting what hath reference to the state of things as they then stood to present constitutions, and, so the same end be pursued, not insisting on this or that means to obtain it.  The treatise was thus written as follows.”

This is an attempt by Milton even yet to disguise his despondency.  He had written the pamphlet while the late Rump was still sitting, while the conjunction between them and Monk was unbroken, and when the last news was that they had issued, or were about to issue,