“Peace, for the Lord’s sake, Thomas! lest Monk take us,
    And drag us out, as Hercules did Cacus.

“But John Milton is their goose-quill champion; who had need of a help-meet to establish anything, for he has a ram’s head and is good only at batteries,—­an old heretic both in religion and manners, that by his will would shake off his governors as he doth his wives, four in a fortnight.  The sunbeams of his scandalous papers against the late King’s Book is [sic] the parent that begot his late New Commonwealth; and, because he, like a parasite as he is, by flattering the then tyrannical power, hath run himself into the briars, the man will be angry if the rest of the nation will not bear him company, and suffer themselves to be decoyed into the same condition.  He is so much an enemy to usual practices that I believe, when he is condemned to travel to Tyburn in a cart, he will petition for the favour to be the first man that ever was driven thither in a wheelbarrow.  And now, John, you must stand close and draw in your elbows [the fancy is of Milton standing on the scaffold pinioned], that Needham, the Commonwealth didapper, may have room to stand beside you ...  He [Needham] was one of the spokes of Harrington’s Rota, till he was turned out for cracking.  As for Harrington, he’s but a demi-semi in the Rump’s music, and should be good at the cymbal; for he is all for wheeling instruments, and, having a good invention, may in time find out the way to make a concert of grindstones."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Pamphlet, of title and date given, in the Thomason Collection.  I have mended the pointing, but nothing else.]

Such was the popular verdict, in March 1660, on Milton and his last pamphlet, and all his deserts and accomplishments in the world he had lived in for one-and-fifty years.  More of the like may be found on search; but I will pass to one retort on his Ready and Easy Way, of somewhat higher literary quality than the last, and which retains a certain celebrity yet.

It appeared on March 30, as a small quarto of sixteen pages, with this title:  “The Censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton’s Book, entituled ’The Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.’” On the title-page is the imprint, “London, Printed by Paul Giddy, Printer to the Rota, at the sign of the Windmill in Turne-againe Lane. 1660,” and also a professed extract from the minutes of the Rota Club, “Die Luna 26 Martii 1660,” certified by “Trundle Wheeler, Clerk to the Rota,” authorizing and ordering Mr. Harrington, as Chairman of the Club, to draw up and publish a narrative of that day’s debate of the Club over Mr. Milton’s pamphlet, and to transmit a copy of the same to Mr. Milton.  The thing, though it has been mistaken by careless people as actually a production of Harrington’s, is in reality a clever burlesque by some Royalist, in which, under the guise of an imaginary debate in the Rota over Milton’s pamphlet, Milton and the Rota-men are turned into ridicule together.  The mock-names on the title-page (Paul Giddy, Trundle Wheeler, &c.) are part of the burlesque; and it is well kept up in the tract itself, which takes the form of a letter gravely addressed to Milton and signed with Harrington’s initials, “J.  H."[1]