“No Blinde Guides:  in answer to a seditious Pamphlet of J. Milton’s entituled ‘Brief Notes on a late Sermon, &c.’  Addressed to the Author.—­’If the Blinde lead the Blinde, both shall fall into the ditch.’—­London, Printed for Henry Brome, April 20, 1660.”  This was the title of a tract, of fourteen small quarto pages, which was out on April 25.  The author does not give his name; but he was Roger L’Estrange, the Royalist pamphleteer.[1] The following specimen will represent the rest:—­

[Footnote 1:  Wood’s Ath.  III. 712.  The date of the actual appearance of the tract is from the Thamason copy.]

  “Mr. Milton,

“Although in your life and doctrine you have resolved one great question, by evidencing that devils may indue human shapes and proving yourself even to your own wife an incubus, you have yet started another; and that is whether you are not of that regiment which carried the herd of swine headlong into the sea, and moved the people to beseech Jesus to depart out of their coasts. (This may be very well imagined from your suitable practices here.) Is it possible to read your Proposals of the benefits of a Free State without reflecting upon your tutor’s ‘All this will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me’?  Come, come, Sir:  lay the Devil aside; do not proceed with so much malice and against knowledge.  Act like a man, that a good Christian may not be afraid to pray for you.  Was it not you that scribbled a justification of the murder of the King against Salmasius, and made it good too thus:  that murder was an action meritorious compared with your superior wickedness?  ’Tis there (as I remember) that you commonplace yourself into set forms of railing, two pages thick; and, lest your infamy should not extend itself enough within the course and usage of your mother-tongue, the thing is dressed up in a travelling garb and language, to blast the English nation to the universe, and give every man a horror for mankind when he considers you are of the race.  In this you are above all others; but in your Eikonoklastes you exceed yourself.  There, not content to see that sacred head divided from the body, your piercing malice enters into the private agonies of his struggling soul, with a blasphemous insolence invading the prerogative of God himself (omniscience), and by deductions most unchristian and illogical aspersing his last pieties (the almost certain inspirations of the Holy Spirit) with juggle and prevarication.  Nor are the words ill-fitted to the matter, the bold design being suited with a conform irreverence of language.  But I do not love to rake long in a puddle.  To take a view in particular of all your factious labours would cost more time than I am willing to afford them.  Wherefore I shall stride over all the rest and pass directly to your Brief Notes upon a late Sermon ...  Any man that can but read your title may understand