Notes to Chapter 1123 Page 302. He notes the availability of English Bible translations with plenty of notes,
and thinks that “som where” may be found a handbook of divinity without obfuscat-
ing metaphysical notions (304). He may refer to his own De Doctrina Christiana, then
in preparation; it is in Latin, but he may have hoped to produce an English version in
some future, more tolerant era.
124 For a similar proposal from William Dell, see p. 366 and note 44.
125 CPW VII, 463. Laura L. Knoppers, “Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the Eng-
lish Jeremiad,” in Loewenstein and Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics, 213–
25.
126 Corns, Development of Milton’s Prose Style, 65.
127 In the Digression to the History of Britain; see chapter 7, pp. 220–1.
128 The first edition terms monarchy “burdensom, expensive, useless and dangerous” (355);
this one terms it “unnecessarie, burdensom and dangerous” (409), exactly reproducing
the language of the Act of March 17, 1649 proclaiming a commonwealth.
129 Page 456. In this edition, with its necessary address to Presbyterians, Milton omits the
long passage from the first edition in which he warns the Rump and then the Long
Parliament that to impose religious orthodoxy by repression is unchristian, irreligious,
inhuman, and also destabilizing to the state. (CPW VII, 380–2).
130 See Stanley Stewart, “Milton Revises the Readie and Easie Way,” 205–24.
131 In these additions he seems to be responding to L’Estrange’s Be Merry and Wise and to
The Censure of the Rota. See pp. 377–8.
132 This would be, he insists, a much-needed improvement on the common practice of
committing all to the “noise and shouting” of the body of freeholders lustily bawling
out names of their candidates. See J. E. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons
(New Haven, Conn., 1950), 86–7.
133 He now makes a point of distinguishing such county government sharply from the
massively unpopular county committees imposed by the Stuarts and Cromwell. When
he began considering local elites in A Letter to a Friend he blurred that point.
134 Pages 422, 463. The first edition reads “strange degenerate corruption” (357).
Chapter 12 “In Darknes, and with Dangers Compast Round” 1660–16651 Cyriack Skinner says he went into hiding “at the first return of the Court,” which in
strictly literal terms would mean the very end of May; Edward Phillips implies that
Milton’s “abscondance” took place soon after the Restoration (EL 32, 74). Milton was
still trying to make financial arrangements in early May; see chapter 11, pp. 381–2.
2 Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty Charles
the Second (London, 1660, c. June 19). A year later Dryden wrote To His Sacred Maiesty,
A Panegyrick on his Coronation (London, 1661).
3 Masson, VI, 170–8, points to Milton’s vulnerability for the thesis of Tenure.
4 Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason, eds. William Cobbett
and T. S. Howell, 33 vols (London, 1809), V, col. 1,034.
5 Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 76–7.
6 Godfrey Davies, “Milton in 1660,” Huntington Library Quarterly 18 (1955), 356.
7 EL 271–3. A letter now in the Pierpont Morgan Library from Jacob Tonson to anNotes to Chapter 11–12