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Royalist pamphleteer and journalist, the censorship may be supposed to have implied a superintending editorship. Indeed, Milton's hand is to be traced in the leading articles in the newspaper through the year 1651, and some of them may be wholly of his composition. To Milton's Secretaryship was also attached an 'inspection into" the State Paper Office in Whitehall, i.e. a kind of keepership of the Records. Nor was this all. When the Council of State had chosen Milton as their Secretary for Foreign Tongues, they had secured, as they knew, a man fit to be the literary champion of the still struggling Commonwealth. Three publications

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of Milton, accordingly, all done at the order or by the request of the Council of State, have to be especially mentioned as feats of the first three years of his Secretaryship. "Observations on Ormond's Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels and on a Representation of the Scotch Presbytery of Belfast," is the title (somewhat abbreviated) of a pamphlet of Milton's published by authority in May 1649, when Charles II. had been proclaimed in Ireland, and the Marquis of Ormond was trying to unite in his cause the native Irish Roman Catholics, the English settlers, and the Ulster Presbyterians. Of far greater importance was the Eikonoklastes (i.e. Image-Breaker), published in October 1649 in answer to the famous "Eikon Basilike (i.e. Royal Image) or Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings,” professing to be meditations and prayers written by Charles I. in his last years. The King's Book," as it was called, then all but universally believed to be really by Charles, though the evidence that it was a fabrication in his interest has long been regarded as conclusive, had appeared immediately after Charles's death, had circulated in different forms and in thousands of copies, and had become a kind of Bible with the Royalists. Milton's answer to it, in which he criticised both the book and the dead king with merciless severity, was received, therefore, as a signal service to the Commonwealth. More momentous still was his Latin Defensio pro Populo Anglicano" ("Defence for the People of England"), published in April 1651 in reply to the Defensio Regia, or defence of Charles I. and attack upon the English Commonwealth, which had been published in Holland more than a year before by the great Leyden Professor, Salmasius, at the instance and at the expense of

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Charles II. Never in the world had one human being inflicted on another a more ruthless or appalling castigation than Milton here inflicted on perhaps the most renowned scholar of his day in all Europe, the veteran whom his learned contemporaries called "The Wonderful," and for the honour of possessing whom Princes and Courts contended; and just in proportion to the celebrity of the victim so murdered, trampled on, and gashed, was the amazement over the man that had done the deed. The book had been out little more than two months when the Council of State, after offering a money reward to Milton, which he declined, passed and inserted in their Minutes (June 17, 1651) this vote of thanks to him: "The Council, taking notice of the many good services performed by Mr. John Milton, their Secretary for Foreign Tongues, to this State and Commonwealth, particularly of his book in vindication of the Parliament and People of England against the calumnies and invectives of Salmasius, have thought fit to declare their resentment and good acceptance of the same, and that the thanks of the Council be returned to Mr. Milton, and their sense represented in that behalf." But it was abroad, and among foreigners in London, that the Reply to Salmasius excited the most lively interest. From all the embassies in London Milton received formal calls or speedy messages of compliment expressly on account of the book; and in Holland, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and elsewhere, copies were in extraordinary demand, and a topic of talk among scholars for months was the mangling which the great Salmasius had received from one of "the English mastiffs." It is not too much to say that before the end of the year 1651, in consequence of this one book, Milton's name was more widely known on the Continent than that of any other Englishman then living, except Oliver Cromwell.

Though Cromwell had been, of course, a member of the Council of State from the first, his labours through the greater part of the years 1649-1651 had been elsewhere than at Whitehall. From August 1649 to June 1650, he had been in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant for the Commonwealth, crushing the Royalist confederacy there, and reconquering the country after its eight years of Rebellion. From July 1650 to August 1651 he had been in Scotland, where Charles II. had meanwhile been received as King,

The

and whence the Scots threatened to bring him into England.
The battle of Dunbar (Sept. 3. 1650) and subsequent suc-
cesses had already made Cromwell master of all the South
of Scotland, when, by a sudden movement, Charles and the
Scottish Army escaped his vigilance and burst into England,
obliging him to follow in pursuit. Having beaten them in
the great battle of Worcester (Sept. 3, 1651), he was back
at Whitehall at last, the acknowledged saviour of the
Commonwealth, and supreme chief of England.
young king was again in exile, and the Commonwealth,
now including Scotland, Ireland, and the English colonies
and dominions, was to all appearance one of the most stable,
as it was certainly one of the most powerful, of the European
States. Such foreign Princes and Governments as had
hitherto stood aloof hastened to send their embassies and
apologies, and Milton's duties in the special work of his
Secretaryship for Foreign Tongues were likely to be more
burdensome than they had been.

It is significant that the only pieces of verse known to have come from Milton's pen during the three years of his life just sketched are these :

Scrap of Verse from Seneca, inculcating Tyrannicide, translated in
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (now appended to Minor
English Poems). 1649.

In Salmasii Hundredam: Scrap of Latin parody in Defensio Prima
(now annexed to the Sylva). 1651.

PETTY FRANCE, WESTMINSTER.

1652-1660: ætat. 44-52.

In the beginning of 1652, for some reason or other, Milton removed from the official rooms in Whitehall into a house which he had taken close at hand. It was "a pretty gardenhouse in Petty France, Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. James's Park." It existed till very recently as No. 19 York Street, Westminster, though no one looking at that dingy old house, let out in apartments, in a dense and dingy street of poor houses and shops, could imagine without difficulty that it had been once the pretty garden-house, opening into St. James's Park, which Milton occupied. That was the house, however; and, as it was the

last of Milton's London houses that had been left extant, and one of the most important of them, it is a pity that it was not preserved. Jeremy Bentham, whose residence was in the neighbourhood, was its proprietor in the beginning of this century, when it was still a house of respectable appearance and surroundings; and William Hazlitt lived in it from 1811 onwards as Bentham's tenant. Milton was to inhabit it for eight years, the longest term in which we have found him in any one house yet since he left his native Bread Street. This term of eight years, however, subdivides itself biographically into three portions :

LAST FIFTEEN MONTHS OF THE COMMONWEALTH

(Jan. 1651-2-April 1653):—As the Council of State was itself elected annually by the Parliament, with changes of its members every year, Milton's Latin Secretaryship, it will be understood, had also been renewed from year to year by express appointment of each Council. In 1652 he entered on his fourth year of office. There was more to do this year, in the way of drafting foreign despatches and attending at meetings with ambassadors, than there had been previously; and, accordingly, Milton's preserved Latin despatches of the year, as given in his printed works, are about as numerous as those for the three preceding years put together. Yet it was precisely in the midst of this increase of work that Milton became incapable, as one would suppose, of secretarial work of any kind. The blindness which had been gradually coming on for some years (one eye having failed before the other), and which had been accelerated by his persistence in his book against Salmasius in spite of the warnings of his physicians, had become serious before his removal to Petty France, and was total about the middle of 1652. With such a calamity added to his almost constant ill-health otherwise, one would have expected the resignation of the Secretaryship. But the Commonwealth had no disposition to part with its literary champion; and arrangements were made for continuing him in office. Mr. Walter Frost, senior, having died in March 1652, Mr. John Thurloe had been appointed his successor in the General Secretaryship to the Council, with a salary of £600 a year (worth about £2000 a year now); a naturalised German, Mr. Weckherlin, formerly in the service of Charles I. and of Parliament, was brought

in to assist Milton in the Foreign department; and for occasional service in translating documents Mr. Thurloe found other persons as they were wanted. Milton was distinctly retained with his full rank and title as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council; and there is positive evidence that he went on performing some portion of his old duties. What one sees, in fact, from the middle of 1652 onwards, is the blind Milton led across the Park every other day, when his health permitted, from his house in Petty France to Whitehall, sitting in the Council as before when he had to catch the substance of any resolution that had to be embodied in a Latin letter, or perhaps sometimes only receiving the necessary information from Mr. Thurloe, and then either dictating the required document on the spot, or returning home to compose it more at leisure. Whatever Weckherlin and others did to help, all the more important despatches were still expected from Milton himself, and at receptions of ambassadors and other foreign agents he was still the proper official.

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Salmasius, who had been in Sweden when Milton's Answer to him appeared, had returned to Holland in no enviable state of mind. He had been vowing revenge, and was even rumoured to have a Reply ready for the press; but none was forthcoming. Meanwhile several attacks on Milton in his behalf by other persons were published abroad anonymously and in Latin. One of these, a very poor thing, attributed at the time to the Irish ex-Bishop Bramhall, but really by a refugee English preacher named Rowland, was handed over by Milton for answer to his younger nephew, John Phillips. The result was Johannis Philippi Angli Responsio ad Apologiam anonymi cujusdam tenebrionis" (1652), a pamphlet so revised and touched by Milton that it may be accounted partly his. He reserved wholly for himself the task of replying to a far more formidable and able attack made upon him by an anonymous friend of Salmasius under the title "Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Cælum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos" ("Cry of the King's Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides"). Published at the Hague late in 1652, this book was so pungent, and contained such charges against Milton's personal character, that he could not let it pass; but the Answer was deferred. For the rest, the literary relics of the last fifteen