the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to.  Nay, though what I have spoken should happen (which Thou suffer not who didst create Mankind free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring Liberty.  But I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men,—­to some perhaps whom God may raise up of these stones to become children of reviving Liberty, and may reclaim, though they seem now choosing them a Captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little and consider whither they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people not to be so impetuous, but to keep their due channel; and, at length recovering and uniting their better resolutions, now that they see already how open and unbounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies, to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurry us, through the general defection of a misguided and abused multitude.”

To exhort a torrent!  The very mixture and hurry of the metaphors In Milton’s mind are a reflex of the facts around him.  Current, torrent, rush, rapid, avalanche, deluge hurrying to a precipice:  mix and jumble such figures as we may, we but express more accurately the mad haste which London and all England were making in the end of April 1660 to bring Charles over from the Continent.  Of the only important relic of opposition, the Republicanism of the Army, and how that had been already managed by Monk, and was still being managed by him, we have taken account.  Its dying effort, as we saw, took the form of Lambert’s escape from the Tower on the 9th of April, and his thirteen days of wild wandering and skulking on the chance of bringing the dispersed remains of Republicanism to a rendezvous.  That was over on Easter-Sunday, April 22, when Dick Ingoldsby, with flushed face, and pistol in hand, collared the fugitive Lambert on his horse in a field near Daventry, and brought him back, with others, to his prison in the Tower.  Strange that it should have been Lambert after all that Milton found maintaining last by arms the cause which he was himself maintaining last by the pen.  Lambert was the Republican he least liked, hardly indeed a genuine Republican at all, though driven to a desperate attempt for Republicanism as his final shift, So it had happened, however.  Milton and Lambert may be remembered together as the last opponents of the avalanche.  Lambert had fronted it with a small rapier; Milton had wrestled with it in a grand exhortation.[1]