[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals of dates.  As only the Intelligencer is named in the orders, one infers that Needham retained the editorship of the Mercurius during his three months of suspension.  He may have had more of a proprietary hold on that paper.]

[Footnote 2:  Thomason Catalogue:  large quartos.]

[Footnote 3:  Didapper:  a duck that dives and reappears.]

[Footnote 4:  Wood’s Ath.  III. 1180-1190; Whitlocke as cited; Pepys, under date Jan. 9, 1659-60; Evelyn’s Diary, Feb. 17, 1659-60 et seq.; Baker’s Chronicle continued by Edward Phillips (ed. 1679), pp. 699-700.—­It is curious to read Phillips’s remarks on the “several seditious pamphlets” put forth by the Republican fanatics “to deprave the minds of the people” and prevent the Restoration.  Though he must have remembered well that his uncle’s were the chief of these, he avoids naming him.  He mentions, however, the News from Brussels, and dilates on the great service done by Evelyn in replying to it.  Phillips had meanwhile (1663-1665) been in Evelyn’s employment as tutor to his son.]

If they turned Needham out of his editorship, they could hardly do less than turn Milton out of his Latin Secretaryship.  About this time, accordingly, he did cease to hold the office which he had held for eleven years.  Phillips’s words are that he was “sequestered from his office of Latin Secretary and the salary thereunto belonging”; but, unfortunately, though he gives us to understand that this was shortly before the Restoration, he leaves the exact date uncertain.

Though the last of Milton’s state-letters now preserved and known as his are the two, dated May 15, 1659, written for the Rump immediately after the subversion of Richard’s Protectorate, we have seen him holding his office in sinecure, and drawing his salary of L200 a year, to as late at least as the beginning of the Wallingford-House Interruption in October 1659; and there is no reason for thinking that the Council or Committee of Safety of the Wallingford-House Government, his dissent from their usurpation notwithstanding, thought it necessary to dismiss him.  Far less likely is it that the Republican Rumpers, when restored the second time in December 1659, would have parted with a man so thoroughly Republican and so respectful to themselves, even while they dared not adopt his Church-disestablishment suggestions.  We may fairly assume, then, that Milton remained Marvell’s nominal colleague till Monk’s final termination of the tenure of the Rump by re-admitting the secluded members, i.e. till Feb. 21, 1659-60.  Had he been then at once dismissed, it would have been no wonder.  How could he, the Independent of Independents, the denouncer of every form of State-Church, the enemy and satirist of the Presbyterians, and moreover the author of the Divorce heresy and the founder of a sect of Divorcers, be retained in the service of a re-Presbyterianized