It was at this time that he was so often drunk or nearly so at the dinners given in the City, and that Sir John Greenville, on the part of Charles, was watching for an interview with him at St.
James's.
[Footnote 1: "_Published from the Manuscript_" is the addition in all our present reprints.

In other words, this Letter to Monk, together with the previous _Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth_, came into Toland's hands in the manner described in Note p.

617, and was also given by Toland for use in the 1698 edition of Milton's Prose Works.] Not one of Milton's pamphlets had a larger immediate circulation or provoked a more rapid fury of criticism than his _Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth_.
From the Parliament indeed the response was only indirect; but every atom of such indirect response was a dead and contemptuous negative.
Though, when Milton published the pamphlet, he was entitled to assume that the compact between Monk and the Secluded Members whom he had restored guaranteed a continuance of the Commonwealth form of Government, the entire tenor of their proceedings during the five-and-twenty days to which they confined their sittings (Feb.
2l-March 16, 1659-60) was such as to undeceive him and others on that point, and to show that, though they abstained from abolishing the Commonwealth themselves, they meant to leave the succeeding full and free Parliament they had called at perfect liberty to do so.

No other construction could be put upon their votes even in ecclesiastical matters.

Hardly was Milton's pamphlet out when he knew that they had voted the revival of the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith as the standard of doctrine in the National Church (March 2), and the revival of the Solemn League and Covenant as a document of perpetual national obligation (March 5).