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'the people from their depraved institutions to better conduct and discipline, to send forth into remotest regions your anxious spirit and incessant thoughts, to watch, to foresee, to shrink from no labor, to spurn every allurement of pleasure, to avoid the ostentation of opulence and power, these are arduous duties, in comparison of which war itself is mere sport; these will search and prove you; they require, indeed, a man supported by the assistance of heaven, and almost admonished and instructed by immediate intercourse with God. These and more I doubt not but you diligently revolve in your mind, and this in particular, by what methods you may be most able to accomplish things of highest moment, and secure to us our liberty not only safe but enlarged."

If a private individual thus speaking to a man of unbounded influence, whom a powerful nation had idolized and courted to assume the reins of government, can be called a flatterer, we have only to wish that all the flatterers of earthly power may be of

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the same complexion. The admoni the people, with which Milton co his second defence, is by no means in dignity and spirit to the advice stowed on the protector. The gre fortune of the monitor, was, that parties to whom he addressed his e and patriotic exhortation, were ne them so worthy of his counsel as he them to be, and endeavoured to mak For Cromwell, as his subsequent sufficiently proved, was a political i with an arbitrary soul; and as to the they were alternately the dishon struments and victims of licentious fanaticism. The protector, his ad and his enemies, to speak of them ral, were as little able to reach th terested purity of Milton's princi they were to attain, and even to the sublimity of his poetical geniu Milton, who passionately loved his though he saw and lamented the corruptions of his contemporaries, s tinued to hope, with the native ard

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sanguine spirit, that the mass of the English people would be enlightend and improved. His real sentiments of Cromwell, I am persuaded, were these: he long regarded him as a person not only possessed of wonderful influence and ability, but disposed to attempt, and likely to accomplish, the purest and noblest purposes of policy and religion; yet often thwarted and embarrassed in his best designs, not only by the power and machinations of the enemies with whom he had to contend, but by the want of faith, morality, and sense in the motley multitude, whom he attempted to guide and govern. As religious enthusiasm was the predominant characteristic of Milton, it is most probable that his fervid imagination beheld in Cromwell a person destined by heaven to reduce, if not to annihilate, what he considered the most enormous grievance of earth, the prevalence of popery and superstition. The several humane and spirited letters which he wrote, in the name of Cromwell, to redress the injuries of the persecuted protestants, who suffered in Piedmont, were

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highly calculated to promote, in equal degrees, his zeal for the purity of religion, and his attachment to the protector.

Yet great as the powers of Cromwell were to dazzle and delude, and willing as the liberal mind of Milton was to give credit to others for that pure public spirit, which he possessed himself, there is great reason to apprehend, that his veneration and esteem for the protector were entirely destroyed by the treacherous despotism of his latter days. But however his opinion of Oliver might change, he was far from betraying liberty, according to Johnson's ungenerous accusation, by continuing to exercise his office; on the contrary, it ought to be esteemed a proof of his fidelity to freedom, that he condescended to remain in an office, which he had received from no individual, and in which he justly considered himself as the servant of the state. From one of his familiar letters, written in the year preceding the death of Cromwell, it is evident that he had no secret intimacy or influence with the protector; and that instead of engaging in am

bitious machinations, he confined himself as much as possible to the privacy of domestic life. Finally on a full and fair review of all the intercourse between Milton and Cromwell, there is not the smallest ground to suspect, that Milton ever spoke or acted as a sycophant or a slave; he bestowed indeed, the most liberal eulogy, both in prose and rhyme, upon the protector; but at a period when it was the general opinion, that the utmost efforts of panegyric could hardly equal the magnitude and the variety of the services rendered to his country by the acknowledged hero and the fancied patriot; at a period when the eulogist who understood the frailty of human nature, and foresaw the temptations of recent power, might hope that praise so magnificent, united to the noblest advice, would prove to the ardent spirit of the protector the best preservative against the delirium of tyranny. These generous hopes were disappointed; the despotic proceedings of Cromwell convinced his independent monitor, that he deserved not the continued applause of a free spirit;

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