The later edition is Milton about a month farther down the torrent than the first, a month nearer the falls; and the additions, omissions, and alterations, convey what had passed in his mind through that month.

The second edition of the _Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth_ is to be taken, in short, for Milton's Biography at least, as an important new publication.

Only the essential additions and omissions can be here noticed.[1] [Footnote 1: The fact that there are two editions of the _Ready and Easy Way_, though Milton calls express attention to it in the second, seems to have escaped all the bibliographers.

There is no note of it in Lowndes.

What is most curious, however, is that, while it is the second or enlarged edition alone that is now accessible to everybody in the collective editions of Milton's Prose Works, from the so-called Amsterdam edition of 1898 to Pickering's and Bonn's, yet original copies of this second edition seem, to have wholly disappeared.