ampion of that
little Restored Rump to which Milton had himself adhered, and the
late suppression of which he had pronounced to be "illegal and
scandalous"? Was not Monk also professing and proclaiming that very
principle of the proper submission of the military power to the civil
on which Milton himself had dilated? Would it not be only God's
justice if Lambert, "the secret author and fomenter of these
disturbances," should be disgraced and overthrown? Yet, on the other
hand, who could desire even that consequence, or the Restoration of
the Rump, at the expense of another civil war and bloodshed? Where
would the process stop? And, besides, was Monk, with his Presbyterian
notions, learnt among the Scots, the man from whose ascendancy Milton
could hope anything but farther disappointment in the Church
question? All in all, we are to imagine Milton anxious for a
reconciliation.

No less interesting to Milton must have been the activity of the new
Government meanwhile in their great business of inventing "such a
Form of Government as may best suit and comport with a Free State and
Commonwealth."----The Rump itself, as we know, had been busy with
this problem through the last month of its sittings, having appointed
on the 8th of September a great Committee on the subject, with Vane
named first, but all the most eminent Rumpers included (ante p. 480).
Through this Committee there had been an inburst into the
Parliamentary mind, as Ludlow informs us, of the thousand and one
competing proposals or models of a Commonwealth already devised by
the Harringtonians and other theorists; and, in fact, while the
Committee was sitting, there had started up for its assistance, close
to the doors of Parliament, the famous Harrington or Rota Club,
meeting nightly in Miles's Coffee-house, and including Neville and
others of the Rumpers among its most constant members (ante pp.
484-486). That Milton knew already about Harrington and his "models"
by sufficient readings of Harrington's books there can be no doubt.
In the address to the Rump prefixed to his _Considerations touching
Hirelings_ in August last he had distinctly referred to the kind
acceptance by the Rump of "new models of a Commonwealth" daily
tendered to them in Petitions, and must have had specially in view
the Petition of July 6, which had been drawn up by Harrington, and
which proposed a constitution of two Parliamentary Houses, one of 300
members, the other much larger, on