former brothers of the Commonwealth; Needham was extinguished; most of the Cromwellians had gone over to the enemy, or were hastening to surrender.  Blind Milton alone remained, the Samson Agonistes, On him, in the absence of others, the eyes of the Philistine mob, the worshippers of Dagon, had been turned from time to time of late as the Hebrew that could make them most efficient sport; and now it was as if they had all met, by common consent, to be amused by this single Hebrew’s last exertions, and had sent to bring him on the stage.  They laughed, they shouted, they shrieked, the gathered Philistine thousands: 

  “He, patient, but undaunted, where they led him
  Came to the place.”

The first of the feats of strength of Milton, thus alone on the stage, and knowing himself to be confronted and surrounded by a jeering multitude, was a somewhat puny and unnecessary one.  It was an onslaught on Dr. Matthew Griffith for his Royalist sermon.  He wanted some object of attack, and the very notoriety given to Dr. Griffith’s performance by the rebuke of the Council of State recommended it for the purpose despite its intrinsic wretchedness.  Accordingly, having had Dr. Griffith’s Sermon and its accompaniments read over to him, he dictated what appeared some time in April with this title:  “Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, titled ‘The Fear of God and the King’; Preach’d, and since published, by Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King.  Wherin many notorious wrestings of Scripture, and other falsities are observed."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Original copies of this pamphlet of Milton must be very scarce.  I could not find one in the British Museum, and I have looked in vain elsewhere.  Probably, at the date when it was published, the Council of State had become very alert in suppressing such things.  I take the title and extracts from Pickering’s (1851) collective edition of Milton’s Works, “printed from the original editions.”]

The tract, which is very short, opens thus:—­

“I affirmed, in the Preface of a late Discourse, entitled The Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Dangers of readmitting Kingship in this Nation, that ’the humour of returning to our old bondage was instilled of late by some deceivers’:  and, to make good that what I then affirmed was not without just ground, one of those deceivers I present here to the people, and, if I prove him not such, refuse not to be so accounted in his stead.”

The greater part of the pamphlet consists of an examination of the sermon itself, with minute remarks on its wrestings or misinterpretations of Scripture texts, and on the poverty of the preacher’s theology and scholarship generally.  There is no actual disguise of the fact that Milton has the lowest opinion of the intellectual calibre of his antagonist, whom he once names “a pulpit-mountebank,” and of whom he once says that “the rest of his preachment is mere groundless chat,” Yet, on the other hand, he would evidently have Dr. Griffith taken as a fair enough specimen of the average Church-of-England clergyman.  “O people of an implicit faith, no better than Romish if these be your prime teachers!” he once exclaims, as if Dr. Griffith were a man of some distinction.