The only portions of the Notes of interest now are those that bear on the historical situation at the moment.  Thus, in the notice of the Dedicatory Epistle to Monk prefixed to Dr. Griffith’s sermon, there is an evident struggle on Milton’s part to speak as if one might still have faith in the General.  It is possible that the censure of Dr. Griffith by the Council of State, intended as it was “to please and blind the fanatical party,” may have had some such temporary effect on Milton.  At all events, he refers to Monk as one “who hath so eminently borne his part in the whole action,” and he characterizes one portion of the Dedicatory Epistle, where Monk is prayed “to carry on what he had so happily begun,” as nothing less than “an impudent calumny and affront to his Excellence.”  It charges him, says Milton, “most audaciously and falsely, with the renouncing of his own public promises and declarations both to the Parliament and the Army; and we trust his actions ere long will deter such insinuating slanderers from thus approaching him for the future.”  Throughout the Notes, however, one sees that even this small lingering of confidence in Monk is forced, and that Milton is too sadly convinced of the probable predetermination of all now in power to fulfil the general expectation and bring in Charles.  In the following passage there is a half-veiled intimation that, rather than see that ignominious conclusion, Milton would reconcile himself to Monk’s own assumption of the Crown:—­

“Free Commonwealths have been ever counted fittest and properest for civil, virtuous, and industrious nations, abounding with prudent men worthy to govern; Monarchy fittest to curb degenerate, corrupt, idle, proud, luxurious people.  If we desire to be of the former, nothing better for us, nothing nobler, than a Free Commonwealth; if we will needs condemn ourselves to be of the latter, despairing of our own virtue, industry, and the number of our able men, we may then, conscious of our own unworthiness to be governed better, sadly betake us to our befitting thraldom:  yet, choosing out of our own number one who hath best aided the people and best merited against tyranny, the space of a reign or two we may chance to live happily enough, or tolerably.  But that a victorious people should give up themselves again to the vanquished was never yet heard of, seems rather void of all reason and good policy, and will in all probability subject the subduers to the subdued,—­will expose to revenge, to beggary, to ruin and perpetual bondage, the victors, under the vanquished:  than which what can be more unworthy?”

Of far more moment than the Brief Notes on Dr. Griffith’s Sermon was a second and enlarged edition of the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.