contrary to your purpose; to which he immediately replied that it was no new thing with you to write that which is as well against as for your purpose.  After much debate, they agreed to put it to the ballot; and the young gentleman carried it without contradiction.”  Then another critic fell foul of Mr. Milton’s Divinity and Church notions,—­one of which, he said, was “that the Church of Christ ought to have no head upon earth, but the monster of many heads, the multitude,” and another “that any man may turn away his wife, and take another as oft as he pleases”:  to which last accusation is added the comment, “As you have most learnedly proved upon the fiddle [Tetrachordon], and practised in your life and conversation; for which you have achieved the honour to be styled the founder of a sect.”  The audience by this time becoming weary, “a worthy knight of this Assembly stood up and said that, if we meant to examine all the particular fallacies and flaws in your writing, we should never have done; he would therefore, with leave, deliver his judgment upon the whole:  which in brief was this:—­That it is all windy foppery from the beginning to the end, written, to the elevation of that rabble and meant to cheat the ignorant; that you fight always with the flat of your hand like a rhetorician, and never contract the logical fist; that you trade altogether in universals, the region of deceits and fallacy, but never come so near particulars as to let us know which among divers things of the same kind you would be at ...  Besides this, as all your politics reach but the outside and circumstances of things, and never touch at realities, so you are very solicitous about words, as if they were charms, or had more in them than what they signify; for no conjuror’s devil is more concerned in a spell than you are in a mere word.”  This last speaker having moved that Mr. Harrington himself, in conclusion, should deliver his opinion on Mr. Milton’s book, the result was as follows:—­

“I knew not (though unwilling) how to avoid it; and therefore I told them, as briefly as I could, that that which I disliked most in your treatise was that there is not one word of The Balance of Property, nor the Agrarian, nor Rotation, in it from the beginning to the end:  without which (together with a Lord Archon) I thought I had sufficiently demonstrated, not only in my writings but public exercises in that coffee-house, that there is no possible foundation of a free Commonwealth.  To the first and second of these,—­that is, the Balance and the Agrarian,—­you made no objection; and therefore I should not need to make any answer.  But for the third,—­I mean Rotation,—­which you implicitly reject in your design to perpetuate the present members, I shall only add this to what I have already said and written on that subject:  That a Commonwealth is like a great top, that must be kept up by being