Read the following from a scurrilous pamphlet, of six pages in shabby print, called _The Character of the Rump_, which was out in London on Saturday the 17th of March, the day after the dissolution of the Parliament:-- "An ingenious person hath observed that Scott is the Rump's man Thomas; and they might have said to him, when he was so busy with the General, "Peace, for the Lord's sake, Thomas! lest Monk take us, And drag us out, as Hercules did Cacus.
"But John Milton is their goose-quill champion; who had need of a help-meet to establish anything, for he has a ram's head and is good only at batteries,--an old heretic both in religion and manners, that by his will would shake off his governors as he doth his wives, four in a fortnight.

The sunbeams of his scandalous papers against the late King's Book is [sic] the parent that begot his late _New Commonwealth_; and, because he, like a parasite as he is, by flattering the then tyrannical power, hath run himself into the briars, the man will be angry if the rest of the nation will not bear him company, and suffer themselves to be decoyed into the same condition.

He is so much an enemy to usual practices that I believe, when he is condemned to travel to Tyburn in a cart, he will petition for the favour to be the first man that ever was driven thither in a wheelbarrow.

And now, John, _you_ must stand close and draw in your elbows [the fancy is of Milton standing on the scaffold pinioned], that Needham, the Commonwealth didapper, may have room to stand beside you ...

He [Needham] was one of the spokes of Harrington's Rota, till he was turned out for cracking.