the rarity of original copies of this second edition by supposing that either the impression was seized before many copies had got about, or the Restoration itself came so rapidly after the publication as to make it all but abortive.  Original copies of Milton’s contemporary Notes on Dr. Griffith’s Sermon seem, as I have mentioned (ante p. 675, note), to be equally scarce with original copies of the second edition of the Ready and Easy Way.  They were the two last utterances of Milton before the Restoration, and so close to that event as perhaps to be sucked down in the whirlpool.  Yet, as we know for certain that the Notes on Dr. Griffith’s Sermon did appear, there is no need for a contrary supposition respecting the other.  Very possibly original copies of both have survived somewhere; and I should be glad to hear of the fact.  As it is, I have had to take my descriptions of both from the copies in the collective Prose Works.  By the bye, it is an error in bibliographers and editors to give only the titles of old books from the original title-pages, without adding the imprints of the publishers.  Much historical and biographical information lies in such imprints.  In the present instance, for example, I should have liked very much to know whether Livewell Chapman was nominally the publisher of the second edition as well as of the first, or whether Milton was obliged to put forth the second edition without any publisher’s name.]

Among the additions the most prominent is this motto (an extension of Juvenal I. 15, 16) prefixed to the whole:—­

  “Et nos
  Consilium dedimus Syllae:  demus Populo nunc”;

which may be translated:—­

  “We have advised
  Sulla himself:  advise we now the People.”

Had this been prefixed to the first edition, the inevitable conclusion would have been that Sulla stood for Oliver Cromwell, and that Milton meant that, having taken the liberty in his Defensio Secunda of tendering wholesome advices even to the great Protector in the height of his power, it might be allowed to him now to advise the general body of his countrymen.  Much would have depended then on Milton’s estimate of the character of the real or Roman Sulla.  That seems to have been the ordinary and traditional one, for in one of the smaller insertions in the text of the present edition he speaks of the Roman People as having been brought, by their own infatuation, “under the tyranny of Sulla.”  Now, though we have seen that Milton had modified his opinion of the worth of Cromwell’s Government all in all, we should have been shocked by an epithet of posthumous opprobrium applied to the man he had so panegyrized while living.  Fortunately, we are spared the shock.  Monk, not Cromwell, is the military dictator that Milton has in view in the metonymy Sulla.  He is thinking of his Letter to Monk only the other day, containing that specific