These may sink into oblivion, while we may be grateful for the occasion which led Milton to express himself with such fortitude and dignity on his affliction and its alleviations:--"Let the calumniators of God's judgments cease to revile me, and to forge their superstitious dreams about me.

Let them be assured that I neither regret my lot nor am ashamed of it, that I remain unmoved and fixed in my opinion, that I neither believe nor feel myself an object of God's anger, but actually experience and acknowledge His fatherly mercy and kindness to me in all matters of greatest moment--especially in that I am able, through His consolation and His strengthening of my spirit, to acquiesce in His divine will, thinking oftener of what He has bestowed upon me than of what He has withheld: finally, that I would not exchange the consciousness of what I have done with that of any deed of theirs, however righteous, or part with my always pleasant and tranquil recollection of the same." He adds that his friends cherish him, study his wants, favour him with their society more assiduously even than before, and that the Commonwealth treats him with as much honour as if, according to the customs of the Athenians of old, it had decreed him public support for his life in the Prytaneum.
Milton's tract is also interesting for its pen-portraits of some of the worthies of the Commonwealth, and its indications of his own views on the politics of his troubled times.

Bradshaw is eulogized with great elegance and equal truth for his manly courage and strict consistency.
"Always equal to himself, and like a consul re-elected for another year, so that you would say he not only judged the King from his tribunal, but is judging him all his life." This was matter of notoriety: one may hope that Milton had equal reason for his praise of Bradshaw's affability, munificence, and placability.

The comparison of Fairfax to the elder Scipio Africanus is more accurate than is always or often the case with historical parallels, and by a dexterous turn, surprising if we have forgotten the scholar in the controversialist, Fairfax's failure in statesmanship, as Milton deemed it, is not only extenuated, but is made to usher in the more commanding personality of Cromwell.

Caesar, says Johnson, had not more elegant flattery than Cromwell received from Milton: nor Augustus, he might have added, encomiums more heartfelt and sincere.