25/32 Milton was one of the innumerable proofs that a man may be very much of a Republican without being anything of a Liberal. He was as firm a believer in right divine as any Cavalier, save that in his view such right was vested in the worthiest; that is, practically, the strongest. Under its influence he had successively swallowed Pride's Purge, the execution of Charles I.by a self-constituted tribunal, and Cromwell's expulsion of the scanty remnant of what had once seemed the more than Roman senate of 1641. There is great reason to believe with Professor Masson that a tract vindicating this violence was actually taken down from his lips. It is impossible to say that he was wrong. |