right.  And there will want at no time who are good at circumstances; but men who set their minds on main matters and sufficiently urge them in these most difficult times I find not many.  What I have spoken is the language of the Good Old Cause:  if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than convincing to backsliders.  Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but, with the Prophet, O Earth, Earth, Earth, to tell the very soil itself what God hath determined of Coniah and his seed for ever.  But I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men,—­to some perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become Children of Liberty, and may enable and unite in their noble resolutions to give a stay to these our ruinous proceedings and to this general defection of the misguided and abused multitude.”

To understand fully the tremendous daring of this peroration, one must turn to the passage of Hebrew prophecy which it cites and applies to Charles Stuart.  It is Jeremiah XXII. 24-30, where woe is denounced upon Coniah, Jeconiah, or Jehoiachin, the worthless King of Judah, no better than his father Jehoiakim:—­“As I live, saith the Lord, though Coniah, the son of Jehoiakim, King of Judah, were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence.  And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life, and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans.  And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die.  But to the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall they not return.  Is this man Coniah a despised broken idol? is he a vessel wherein is no pleasure?  Wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not?  O Earth, Earth, Earth, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus saith the Lord:  Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days; for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah.”

A curious supplement to Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth exists in the shape of a private letter which he addressed to General Monk.  It was not published at the time, and bears no date, but must have been written immediately after the publication of the pamphlet, while the Parliament of the Secluded Members and Residuary Rumpers was still sitting.  Milton, it would seem, had sent Monk a copy of the pamphlet; and this private letter is nothing but a brief summary of the suggestions of the pamphlet for the General’s easier reading, should he think fit.  It is entitled, in our present copies, “The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in practice