It is a spirited manifesto, cogent in enforcing the necessity of the campaign about to be undertaken by Cromwell.

Ireland had at the moment exactly as many factions as provinces; and never, perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter confusion.

Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be "an eagle towering in his pride of place," but he may seem to have degenerated into the "mousing owl" when he pounced upon newswriters and ferreted unlicensed pamphlets for sedition.

True, there was nothing in this occupation formally inconsistent with anything he had written in the "Areopagitica"; yet one wishes that the Council of State had provided otherwise for this particular department of the public service.
Nothing but a sense of duty can have reconciled him to a task so invidious; and there is some evidence of what might well have been believed without evidence--that he mitigated the severity of the censorship as far as in him lay.

He was not to want for better occupation, for the Council of State was about to devolve upon him the charge of answering the great Royalist manifesto, "Eikon Basilike." The controversy respecting the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" is a remarkable instance of the degree in which literary judgment may be biassed by political prepossession.