Though it is announced distinctly and emphatically in the opening paragraph that this edition is a “revised and enlarged” one, not till after a careful comparison with the former edition is it seen how much the announcement implies.  There are large additions; there are omissions; there are changes of phraseology in every page.  The new pamphlet, were it nothing else, would be an interesting study of Milton’s art in authorcraft, of the expertness he had acquired in recasting a composition of his, ingeniously dove-tailing passages into it without spoiling the connexion, and ejecting phrases that had ceased to be relevant or vital, all under the difficulties of his blindness, when his ear listening to some mouth beside him and his own mouth interrupting and replying were his sole instruments.  But there is much more than this.  The later edition is Milton about a month farther down the torrent than the first, a month nearer the falls; and the additions, omissions, and alterations, convey what had passed in his mind through that month.  The second edition of the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth is to be taken, in short, for Milton’s Biography at least, as an important new publication.  Only the essential additions and omissions can be here noticed.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The fact that there are two editions of the Ready and Easy Way, though Milton calls express attention to it in the second, seems to have escaped all the bibliographers.  There is no note of it in Lowndes.  What is most curious, however, is that, while it is the second or enlarged edition alone that is now accessible to everybody in the collective editions of Milton’s Prose Works, from the so-called Amsterdam edition of 1898 to Pickering’s and Bonn’s, yet original copies of this second edition seem, to have wholly disappeared.  There are several original copies of the Ready and Easy Way in the British Museum, but all of the first edition, not one of the second; the Bodleian has no copy of the second; every original copy of the tract that I have been able to see or hear of anywhere else has always turned out to be one of the first edition.  In my perplexity, I began to ask myself whether this was to be explained by supposing that Milton, after he had prepared the second edition for the press, did not succeed in getting it published, and so that it was not till 1698 that it saw the light, and then by the accident that his enlarged press-copy had survived, and come (through Toland or otherwise) into the hands of the printers of the Amsterdam edition of the Prose Works.  But, though several pieces in that edition are expressly noted as “never before published” (see notes ante, p. 617 and p. 656), there is no such editorial note respecting The Ready and Easy Way, but every appearance of mere reprinting from a previously published copy of 1660.  On the whole, therefore, I conclude that Milton did publish his second and enlarged edition some time in April 1660; and I account for