584-585).
The letter begins thus:--"My Lord and Gentlemen,--It is written _The prudent shall keep silence in the evil time_; and 'tis like we also might hold our peace, but that we fear a knife is at the very throat not only of our and your liberties, but of our persons also.
In this condition we hope it will be no offence if we cry out to you for help,--you that, through God's goodness, have helped us so often, and strenuously maintained the same cause with us against the return of that family which pretends to the Government of these nations ...
We cannot yet be persuaded, though our fears and jealousies are strong and the grounds of them many, that you can so lull asleep your consciences, or forget the public interests and your own, as to be returning back with the multitude to Egypt, or that you should with them be hankering after the leeks and onions of our old bondage." There follows an earnest invective against the Stuarts; but the tone of respectfulness to Monk is kept up studiously throughout.

There is no sign of Milton in the language, and one guesses on the whole that the tract was a concoction of a few of the City Republicans, with Barebone among them, meeting privately perhaps in the back-parlour of the Republican bookseller who ventured the publication anonymously; but it is possible that Milton may have been consulted, or at least have been cognisant of the affair.

The reprinting of the reasons of the Long Parliament for their No-Address Resolutions of January 1647-8 was an excellent idea, inasmuch as it reminded people of that disgust with Charles I., that impossibility of dealing with him even in his captive condition, which had driven the Parliamentarians to the theory of a Republic a year before the Republic had been actually founded; and this feature of the tract may have seemed good to Milton .-- --The Tract must have annoyed Monk and the other authorities, for it was immediately suppressed.

This we learn from a reply to it, which appeared on the 3rd of April, with the title _Treason Arraigned, in answer to Plain English, being a Trayterous and Phanatique Pamphlet which was condemned by the Counsel of State, suppressed by Authority, and the Printer declared against by Proclamation ...

London, Printed in the year_ 1660.