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fect: I have wielded my weapons for liberty not only in our domestic scene, but on a far more extensive theatre; that the justice and the principle of our extraordinary actions, explained and vindicated both at home and abroad and confirmed in the general approbation of the good, might be unquestionably established, as well for the honour of my compatriots as for precedents to posterity. That the conclusion prove not unworthy of such a commencement, be it my countrymen's to provide:-it has been mine to deliver a testimony, I had almost said to erect a monument which will not soon decay, to deeds of greatness and of glory almost transcending human panegyric; and, if I have accomplished nothing further, I have assuredly discharged the whole of my engagement. As the bard however who is denominated Epic, if he confine his work a little within certain canons of composition, proposes to himself for a subject of poetical embellishment not the whole life of his hero, but some single action, (such as the wrath of Achilles, the return of Ulysses, or the arrival in Italy of Æneas,) and takes no notice of the rest of his conduct; so will it suffice, either to form my vindication or to satisfy my duty, that I have

recorded in heroic narrative one only of my fellow-citizen's achievements. The rest I omit; for who can declare all the great actions of a whole people? If, after such valiant exploits, you fall into gross delinquency, and perpetrate any thing unworthy of yourselves, posterity will not fail to discuss and to pronounce sentence on the disgraceful deed. The foundation they will allow indeed to have been firmly laid, and the first (nay more than the first) parts of the superstructure to have been erected with success; but with anguish they will regret that there were none found to carry it forward to completion; that such an enter prise and such virtues were not crowned by perseverance; that a rich harvest of glory and abundant materials for heroic achievement were prepared; but that men were wanting to the illustrious opportunity-while there wanted not a man to instruct, to urge, to sti mulate to action,-a man who could call fame as well upon the acts as the actors, and could spread their celebrity and their names over lands and seas to the admiration of all future ages."

This work, with a compliment from its author, was presented to the Protector by Andrew Marvell; whose letter to his friend on

the occasion was first published by Doctor Birch, and will be found in the note.

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• HONOURED SIR,

"I DID not satisfy myself in the account I gave you of presenting your book to my lord, although it seemed to me that I wrote to you all, which the messenger's speedy return the same night from Eton would permit me and I perceive that by reason of that haste I did not give you satisfaction neither, concerning the delivery of your letter at the same time. Be pleased therefore to pardon me, and know that I tendered them both together. But my lord read not the letter while I was with him; which I attributed to our dispatch, and some other business tending thereto, which I therefore wished ill to, so far as it hindered an affair much better and of greater importance, I mean that of reading your letter. And to tell you truly mine own imagination, I thought that he would not open it while I was there, because he might suspect that I, delivering it just upon my departure, might have brought in it some second proposition, like to that which you had before made to him by your letter to my advantage. However, I assure myself that he has since read it, and you that he did then witness all respect to your person, and as much satisfaction concerning your work as could be expected from so cursory a review, and so sudden an account as he could then have of it from me.

Mr. Oxenbridge, at his return from London, will, I know, give you thanks for his book, as I do with all acknowledgment and humility for that you have sent me. I shall now study it even to the getting it by heart, esteeming it, according to my poor judgment (which yet I wish were so right in all things else) as the most compendious scale, for so much, to the height of the Roman eloquence. When I consider how equally it turns, and rises with so many figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose winding ascent we see embossed the several monuments of your learned victories: and Salmasius and Morus make up as great a triumph as that of Decebalus, whom too, for ought I

Colonel Overton, of whom the writer speaks with so much interest, was one of those steady republicans whom Cromwell, unable to conciliate, was under the necessity of securing. After a previous imprisonment in the tower, Overton was confined during the Protector's life in the island of Jersey; and obtained his liberty from the Parliament, a short time only before the Restoration. Whether any further notice was taken by Cromwell of Milton's present we are not informed: but we may be assured that he was not on the list of the Protector's peculiar friends, and that the Secretary would easily be reconciled to the consequences of exclusion from his employer's favour by the consciousness of commanding his respect.

With the "Second Defence of the People

know, you shall have forced, as Trajan the other, to make themselves away out of a just desperation.

1 have an affectionate curiosity to know what becomes of colonel Overton's business, and am exceeding glad to think that Mr. Skinner has got near you; the happiness which I at the same time congratulate to him, and envy, there being none who doth, if I may so say, more jealously honour you than,

Honoured Sir,

Your most affectionate humble servant,

Eton, June 2, 1654,

ANDREW MARVELL.

For my most honoured friend, John Milton, Esq. Secretary for the
Foreign Affairs, at his House in Petty France, Westminster.

of England" and the two subsequent replies to Morus, Milton closed his great controversial labours; and endeavoured among his studies to retire from the mortification and disappointment, which he necessarily must have felt in consequence of the fuller exhibition of his hero's perfidy and despotism. He continued indeed to serve his country, in the character of her Latin secretary, on the same principle, as we may fairly con clude, which induced Blake to extend her dominion upon the ocean, and Sir Matthew Hale to be the interpreter of her laws at the head of the Common Pleas: but his disapprobation of the present state of things is evident from more than one of his familiar letters; and he seems to have acquiesced under the existing evil only as it was irremediable, or as it was temporary, or as it appeared to be inferior in degree to that of the return of the royalists into power with their exiled and exasperated monarch.

He was now engaged in the prosecution of three great works, a history of England, a thesaurus of the Latin language on the plan of that by Stephens, and an epic poem. Of the first of these literary labours we have already said so much, that little is now left

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