dent. The soap-boilers were incorporated; by these he received £10,000. Then the starchmakers, for their incorporation, paid the king, the first year £1,500, the next year, £2,500, and £3,500 yearly. The king then raised £30,000 by commissions appointed to inquire into the state of the land-fining very heavily those persons who encroached, or could by any pretext be said to have encroached upon the common or forest lands. Lord Salisbury was fined £20,000, Lord Westmorland £19,000, Sir C. Hutton £12,000; and all this, in order that he might evade law, and do without his Commons House of Parliament. He levied a tax called ship-money, of tonnage and poundage, in contravention of all equity and Alderman Chambers, because he said that merchants were more screwed up and wronged in England than in Turkey, was prosecuted by the Star Chamber, and fined £3,000.

:

We spoke of the profits of some of the monopolies; but monopoly and taxation fenced and fettered everything-no matter how insignificant.

"Nothing," says Forster, "that contributed unincumbered by monopoly to the comfort of the people, was permitted to continue."

For the atrocious instances of detestable civic

tyranny we must content ourselves with referring to the chronicles of the time.* Milton lived in the times when Dr. Leighton, for writing a book against prelacy, was twice publicly whipped, stood two hours in the pillory, and had his ears cut off, his nose slit, and a cheek branded with the letters "S. S." (sower of sedition); was imprisoned for ten years, and released by the Long Parliament, but not before he had lost his sight, his hearing, and the use of his limbs. Can we wonder that Milton was

severe upon the bishops?

Those were the days when Prynne, Burton, and Bostwick stood in the pillory, and had their ears cut off for their criticisms upon the bishops.

They were the palmy days of despotism, when Sir Robert Berkley, for giving his opinion legally, as one of the judges of the Court of King's Bench, upon the subject of ship-money, was taken into custody on the bench, and borne away to prison !

Those were the days of the cruel bigot Laud, the archbishop, who may be best described as

But if our readers would refer to documentary evidence acceptable to all, they will find abundant quotations in Foster's "Statesmen of the Commonwealth." Vol. I., pp. 64, 67, 68.

a Bonner sanctified by a Dominican inquisitorial fierceness—a dreamer, whose religion was made up of mummeries and shows, and who was disposed to persecute to death all who would not Anglicise a Papacy, and make the History of the Church of England the same detestable record of blood and crime, which had marked Rome. Is the severity of Milton to be wondered at? Is it to be wondered at that Milton is severe upon the actions of the king, when Bishop Warburton declares, what all contemporary writers confirm,* that "his best friends dreaded his ending the war by conquest, as knowing his despotic disposition?" Is it wonderful that Milton should deal severely with the queen, the beautiful Henrietta Maria, whom the king so unroyally and uxoriously loved the woman who was in no slight degree the cause of all his miseries-who was, perhaps, the cause of his death, for "she dissuaded him from his attempt to escape from Carisbook Castle, in order that she might carry on her adulterous intrigue with Jermyn." Charles I. is usually sheltered from the remarks of those who impeach his character, by eulogies

* See Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, VIII., 624 -627; and especially Warburton's notes.

upon his private virtues; but there is evidence enough that he, too, shared the character of Charles II., for licentiousness of conversation, if not of life. Milton; however, only glances at his social life, but he does spare his public and kingly.

"Yet here he asks, whose innocent blood hath he shed, or what widows' or orphans' tears can witness against him? After the suspected poisoning of his father, not inquired into but smothered up, and him protected and advanced to the very half of his kingdom, who was accused in parliament to be the author of the fact; (with much more evidence than Duke Dudley, that false protector, is accused upon record to have poisoned Edward the Sixth ;) after all his cruel rage and persecution-after so many years of cruel war on his people in three kingdoms! Whence the author of Truths Manifest,' a Scotsman, not unacquainted with affairs, affirms, that there hath been more Christian blood shed by the commission, approbation, and connivance of King Charles, and his father, James, in the latter end of their reign, than in the ten Roman persecutions. Not to speak of those whippings, pillories, and other corporal inflictions, wherewith his reign also before this war was

not unbloody-some have died in prison, under cruel restraint; others in banishment, whose lives were shortened by the rigour of that persecution wherewith so many years he infested the true church.”

From the exhibitions given in Milton's day, either of the deeds of bishops or kings, it is not wonderful that any breadth of severity should be used to denounce, and to hold them up to scorn and ridicule. It is not to be denied that the language of Milton is frequently very severe; his language, when it falls, blasts and burns like a sulphurous bolt. But then there was reason for this, whether the bolt fell upon the cause of bishop or king, Of bishops what did he see? The pious Juxon, elevated by the king to the post of lord treasurer, in the course of a few years wrung from the people, and lodged in the exchequer, principally by illegal means, £900,000; and when the civil sword had struck down the father, whose character was no secret to him, what did he behold?— Charles, the son, in Paris, the companion of harlots-entering into the plots of murderers. Who does not know the proclamation issued from Paris, giving liberty to any man whomsoever, within the three kingdoms, by pistol, sword, or poison, or any other ways or means