Milton’s tract is also interesting for its pen-portraits of some of the worthies of the Commonwealth, and its indications of his own views on the politics of his troubled times.  Bradshaw is eulogized with great elegance and equal truth for his manly courage and strict consistency.  “Always equal to himself, and like a consul re-elected for another year, so that you would say he not only judged the King from his tribunal, but is judging him all his life.”  This was matter of notoriety:  one may hope that Milton had equal reason for his praise of Bradshaw’s affability, munificence, and placability.  The comparison of Fairfax to the elder Scipio Africanus is more accurate than is always or often the case with historical parallels, and by a dexterous turn, surprising if we have forgotten the scholar in the controversialist, Fairfax’s failure in statesmanship, as Milton deemed it, is not only extenuated, but is made to usher in the more commanding personality of Cromwell.  Caesar, says Johnson, had not more elegant flattery than Cromwell received from Milton:  nor Augustus, he might have added, encomiums more heartfelt and sincere.  Milton was one of the innumerable proofs that a man may be very much of a Republican without being anything of a Liberal.  He was as firm a believer in right divine as any Cavalier, save that in his view such right was vested in the worthiest; that is, practically, the strongest.  An admirable doctrine for 1653,—­how unfit for 1660 remained to be discovered by him.  Under its influence he had successively swallowed Pride’s Purge, the execution of Charles I. by a self-constituted tribunal, and Cromwell’s expulsion of the scanty remnant of what had once seemed the more than Roman senate of 1641.  There is great reason to believe with Professor Masson that a tract vindicating this violence was actually taken down from his lips.  It is impossible to say that he was wrong.  Cromwell really was standing between England and anarchy.  But Milton might have been expected to manifest some compunction at the disappointment of his own brilliant hopes, and some alarm at the condition of the vessel of the State reduced to her last plank.  Authority actually had come into the hands of the kingliest man in England, valiant and prudent, magnanimous and merciful.  But Cromwell’s life was precarious, and what after Cromwell?  Was the ancient constitution, with its halo of antiquity, its settled methods, and its substantial safeguards, wisely exchanged for one life, already the mark for a thousand bullets?  Milton did not reflect, or he kept his reflections to himself.  The one point on which he does seem nervous is lest his hero should call himself what he is.  The name of Protector even is a stumbling-block, though one can get over it.  “You have, by assuming a title likest that of Father of your Country, allowed yourself to be, one cannot say elevated, but rather brought down so many stages from your real sublimity, and as it were forced into rank for the public convenience.”  But there must be no question of a higher title:—­