qualify and refine Elections:  not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualified to nominate as many as they will; and out of that number others of a better breeding to choose a less number more judiciously; till, after a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactest choice, they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices the worthiest....  But, to prevent all mistrust, the People then will have their several Ordinary Assemblies (which will henceforth quite annihilate the odious power and name of Committees) in the chief towns of every County,—­without the trouble, charge, or time lost, of summoning and assembling from so far, in so great a number, and so long residing from their own houses, or removing of their families,—­to do as much at home in their several shires, entire or subdivided, towards the securing of their liberty, as a numerous Assembly of them all formed and convened on purpose with the wariest rotation.”

Glance at some of Harrington’s other notions:—­“The way propounded [Milton’s] is plain, easy, and open before us:  without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—­ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and frustrating of Christian Liberty.”

As if the very closeness of the vision of returning Royalty had rendered Milton’s defiance of it more desperate and reckless, he inserts, wherever he can, some new expression of his contempt for Charles and all his family, and of his prophetic horror of the state of society they will bring in.  Thus:—­

“There will be a Queen of no less charge, in most likelihood outlandish and a Papist, besides a Queen-Mother, such already, together with both their Courts and numerous Train:  then a Royal issue, and ere long severally their sumptuous Courts, to the multiplying of a servile crew, not of servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court offices, to be Stewards, Chamberlains, Ushers, Grooms.”

But the most terrific new passage in prediction of the Restoration and its revenges is the following:  in which the reader will observe also the recognition, as in one spurn of boundless scorn, of the Royalist scurrilities against himself:—­

“Admit that Monarchy of itself may be convenient to some nations; yet to us who have thrown it out, received back again, it cannot but prove pernicious.  For Kings to come, never forgetting their former ejection, will be sure to fortify and arm themselves sufficiently for the future against all such attempts hereafter from the People; who shall be then so narrowly watched and kept so low that, though they would never so fain, and at the same