whipt round, and held in perpetual circulation; for, if you discontinue the rotation, and suffer the Senate to settle and stand still, down it falls immediately.  And, if you had studied this point as carefully as I have done, you could not but know there is no such way under Heaven of disposing the vicissitudes of command and obedience, and of distributing equal right and liberty among all men, as this of Wheeling."...[1]

[Footnote 1:  There is a reprint of this Censure of the Rota in the Harleian Miscellany (IV. 179-186).  I take the date of publication from the Thomason copy of the original.]

How notoriously Milton had flashed forth as the chief militant Republican of the crisis, how universally he had drawn upon himself in that character the eyes of the Royalists and become the target for their bitterest shafts, may appear from yet another probing among the contemporary London pamphlets.——­Perhaps the last formal and collective appeal on behalf of the Republic to Monk and the others in power was a small tract which appeared in the end of March, with this title:—­Plain English to his Excellencie the Lord-General Monk and the Officers of his Army:  or a Word in Season, not onely to them, but to all impartial Englishmen.  To which is added a Declaration of the Parliament in the year 1647, setting forth the grounds and reasons why they resolved to make no further Address or Application to the King.  Printed at London in the year 1660.  The first part of the tract consists of eight pages addressed to Monk, in the form of a letter dated “March 22,” by some persons who do not give their names, but sign themselves “your Excellency’s most faithful friends and servants in the common cause”; after which, in smaller type, comes a reprint of the famous reasons of the Long Parliament for their total rupture with Charles I. in January 1647-8 (Vol.  III. pp. 584-585).  The letter begins thus:—­“My Lord and Gentlemen,—­It is written The prudent shall keep silence in the evil time; and ’tis like we also might hold our peace, but that we fear a knife is at the very throat not only of our and your liberties, but of our persons also.  In this condition we hope it will be no offence if we cry out to you for help,—­you that, through God’s goodness, have helped us so often, and strenuously maintained the same cause with us against the return of that family which pretends to the Government of these nations ...  We cannot yet be persuaded, though our fears and jealousies are strong and the grounds of them many, that you can so lull asleep your consciences, or forget the public interests and your own, as to be returning back with the multitude to Egypt, or that you should with them be hankering after the leeks and onions of our old bondage.”  There follows an earnest invective against the Stuarts; but the tone of respectfulness to Monk is kept up studiously throughout.  There is no sign of Milton in the language, and one guesses on the whole that