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Their hydra heads, and the false North displays
Her broken league to imp their serpent-wings.1
O, yet a nobler task awaits thy hand,

(For what can war but endless war still breed?)
Till truth and right from violence be freed,
And publick faith clear'd from the shameful brand
Of public fraud.. In vain doth Valour bleed,
While Avarice and Rapine share the land.

XVI.

TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL.k

CROMWELL, our chief of men, who through a cloud,
Not of war only,' but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,

To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough'd,
And on the neck of crowned Fortune" proud

Hast rear'd God's trophies, and his work pursued;
While Darwen stream," with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud,

And Worcester's laureat wreath. Yet much remains
To conquer still; Peace hath her victories

No less renown'd than War: new foes arise

h Her broken league.

Because the English parliament held, that the Scotch had broken their covenant, by Hamilton's march into England.-HURD.

i To imp their serpent-wings.

In falconry, to imp a feather in a hawk's wing, is to add a new piece to a mutilated stump. From the Saxon impan, to ingraft.-T. WARTON.

iOf public fraud.

The presbyterian committees and sub-committees. The grievance so much complained of by Milton in his "History of England." "Publick fraud” is opposed to "publick faith," the security given by the parliament to the city contributions for carying on the war.-WARBURTON.

k Written in 1652. The prostitution of Milton's Muse to the celebration of Cromwell, was as inconsistent and unworthy, as that this enemy to kings, to ancient magnificence, and to all that is venerable and majestic, should have been buried in the chapel of Henry VII.; but there is great dignity both of sentiment and expression in this Sonnet: and, unfortunately, the close is an anticlimax to both. After a long flow of perspicuous and nervous language, the unexpected pause at "Worcester's laureat wreath," is very emphatical and has a striking effect.-T. WARTON.

1 Not of war only.

A "cloud of war" is a classical expression: "Nubem belli," Virg. "En." x. 809.NEWTON. m Crowned Fortune.

His malignity to kings aided his imagination in the expression of this sublime sentiment.-HURD.

n While Darwen stream.

The Darwen, or Derwen, is a small river near Preston in Lancashire; and there Cromwell routed the Scotch army under Duke Hamilton in August 1648. The battles of Dunbar and Worcester are too well known to be particularized; both fought on the memorable third of September, the one in 1650, and the other in 1651.-NEWTON.

• And Worcester's laureat wreath.

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This seems pretty, but is inexact in this place. However, the expression alludes to what Cromwell said of his success at Worcester, that it was his "crowning mercy HURD.

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.P
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.

XVII.

TO SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER.

VANE, young in years, but in sage counsel old,

Than whom a better senator ne'er held

The helm of Rome, when gowns, not arms, repell'd

The fierce Epirot and the African bold :

This hemistich originally stood, "And twenty battles more." Such are often our first thoughts in a fine passage. I take it, that one of the essential beauties of the Sonnet is often to carry the pauses into the middle of the lines. Of this our author has given many striking examples, and here we discern the writer whose ear was tuned to blank verse.-T. WARTON.

P Secular chains.

The ministers moved Cromwell to lend the secular arms to suppress sectaries.-WAR

BURTON.

a Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their mano.

Hence it appears that this Sonnet was written about May 1652. By "hireling wolves," he means the presbyterian clergy, who possessed the revenues of the parochial benefices on the old constitution, and whose conformity he supposes to be founded altogether on motives of emolument. There was now no end of innovation and reformation. In 1649, it was proposed in parliament to abolish tithes, as Jewish and antichristian, and as they were authorized only by the ceremonial law of Moses, which was abrogated by the gospel: but as the proposal tended to endanger lay-impropriations, the notion of their divine right was allowed to have some weight, and the business was postponed. This was an argument in which Selden had abused his great learning. Milton's party were of opinion, that as every parish should elect, so it should respectively sustain, its own minister by public contribution: others proposed to throw the tithes of the whole kingdom into one common stock, and to distribute them according to the size of the parishes: some of the independents urged, that Christ's ministers should have no settled property at all, but be like the apostles, who were sent out to preach without staff or scrip, without common necessaries; to whom Christ said, "Lacked ye anything?" A succession of miracles was therefore to be worked, to prevent the saints from starving. Milton's praise of Cromwell may be thought inconsistent with that zeal which he professed for liberty; for Cromwell's assumption of the protectorate, even if we allow the lawfulness of the rebellion, was palpably a violent usurpation of power over the rights of the nation, and was reprobated even by the republican party. Milton, however, in various parts of the "Defensio Secunda," gives excellent admonitions to Cromwell, and with great spirit, freedom, and eloquence, not to abuse his new authority; yet not without an intermixture of the grossest adulation. -T. WARTON.

Perhaps written about the time of the last, having the same tendency. Sir Henry Vane the younger was the chief of the independents, and therefore Milton's friend: he was the contriver of the solemn league and covenant: he was an eccentric character, in an age of eccentric characters. In religion the most fantastic of all enthusiasts, and a weak writer, he was a judicious and sagacious politician: the warmth of his zeal never misled his public measures: he was a knight-errant in everything but affairs of state. The sagacious bishop Burnet in vain attempted to penetrate the darkness of his creed. He held, that the devils and the damned would be saved: he believed himself the person delegated by God to reign over the saints upon earth for a thousand years. His principles founded a sect called the Vanists. On the whole, no single man ever exhibited such a medley of fanaticism and dissimulation, solid abilities and visionary delusions, good sense and madness. In the pamphlets of that age he is called Sir Humorous Vanity. He was beheaded 1662. On the scaffold, he compared Tower Hill to Mount Pisgah, where Moses went to die, in full assurance of being immediately placed at the right hand of Christ. Milton alludes to the execution of Vane and other regicides, after the Restoration, and in general to the sufferings of his friends on that event, in a speech of the Chorus on Samson's degradation, "Sams. Agon." v. 687. This Sonnet seems to have been written in behalf of the independents against the presbyterian hierarchy.-T. WARTON.

Whether to settle peace or to unfold

The drift of hollow states hard to be spell'd;
Then to advise how War may, best upheld,
Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold,
In all her equipage: besides to know

Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,

What severs each, thou hast learn'd, which few have done :
The bounds of either sword to thee we owe :

Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans
In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son.

XVIII.

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEMONT.

AVENGE, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worship'd stocks and stones,"

Forget not in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

s Hollow states.

Peace with the hollow states of Holland.-WARBURTON.

t In 1655, the Duke of Savoy determined to compel his reformed subjects in the valleys of Piedmont, to embrace popery, or quit their country; all who remained and refused to be converted, with their wives and children, suffered a most barbarous massacre: those who escaped fled into the mountains, from whence they sent agents into England to Cromwell for relief. He instantly commanded a general fast, and promoted a national contribution, in which near £40,000 were collected. The persecution was suspended, the duke recalled his army, and the surviving inhabitants of the Piedmontese valleys were reinstated in their cottages, and the peaceable exercise of their religion. On this business there are several state-letters in Cromwell's name written by Milton. One of them is to the Duke of Savoy, and is published in his "Prose Works." Milton's mind, busied with this affecting subject, here broke forth in a strain of poetry, where his feelings were not fettered by ceremony or formality. The protestants availed themselves of an opportunity of exposing the horrors of popery, by publishing many sets of prints of this unparalleled scene of religious butchery, which operated like Fox's "Book of Martyrs." Sir William Moreland, Cromwell's agent for the valleys of Piedmont, at Geneva, published a minute account of this whole transaction, in "The History of the Valleys of Piemont, &c. Lond. 1658," fol., with numerous cuts. Milton, among many other atrocious examples of the papal spirit, appeals to this massacre, in Cromwell's letter to king Charles Gustavus, dat. 1656. "Testes Alpinæ valles miserorum cæde ac sanguine redundantes," &c.-T. WARTON.

u Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worship'd stocks and stones.

It is pretended that, when the church of Rome became corrupt, they preserved the primitive apostolical Christianity; and that they have manuscripts against the papal antichrist and purgatory, as old as 1120. See their history by Paul Perrin, Genev. 1619. Their poverty and seclusion from the rest of the world for so many ages, contributed in great measure to this simplicity of worship. In his pamphlet, "The likeliest Means to remove Hirelings out of Churches," against endowing churches with tithes, our author frequently refers to the happy poverty and purity of the Waldenses. -T. WARTON.

▾ That roll'd

Mother with infant down the rocks.

There is a print of this piece of cruelty in Moreland. He relates that "a mother was hurled down a mighty rock, with a little infant in her arms; and three days after, was found dead with the little childe alive, but fast clasped between the arms of the

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