is time becoming weary, "a
worthy knight of this Assembly stood up and said that, if we meant to
examine all the particular fallacies and flaws in your writing, we
should never have done; he would therefore, with leave, deliver his
judgment upon the whole: which in brief was this:--That it is all
windy foppery from the beginning to the end, written, to the
elevation of that rabble and meant to cheat the ignorant; that you
fight always with the flat of your hand like a rhetorician, and never
contract the logical fist; that you trade altogether in universals,
the region of deceits and fallacy, but never come so near
particulars as to let us know which among divers things of the same
kind you would be at ... Besides this, as all your politics reach but
the outside and circumstances of things, and never touch at
realities, so you are very solicitous about _words_, as if they
were charms, or had more in them than what they signify; for no
conjuror's devil is more concerned in a spell than you are in a mere
word." This last speaker having moved that Mr. Harrington himself, in
conclusion, should deliver _his_ opinion on Mr. Milton's book,
the result was as follows:--

"I knew not (though unwilling) how to avoid it; and therefore I
told them, as briefly as I could, that that which I disliked most
in your treatise was that there is not one word of _The Balance
of Property_, nor the _Agrarian_, nor _Rotation_, in
it from the beginning to the end: without which (together with a
_Lord Archon_) I thought I had sufficiently demonstrated, not
only in my writings but public exercises in that coffee-house, that
there is no possible foundation of a free Commonwealth. To the
first and second of these,--that is, the _Balance_ and the
_Agrarian_,--you made no objection; and therefore I should not
need to make any answer. But for the third,--I mean
_Rotation_,--which you implicitly reject in your design to
perpetuate the present members, I shall only add this to what I
have already said and written on that subject: That a Commonwealth
is like a great top, that must be kept up by being whipt round, and
held in perpetual circulation; for, if you discontinue the
rotation, and suffer the Senate to settle and stand still, down it
falls immediately. And, if you had studied this point as carefully
as I have done, you could not but know there is no such way under
Heaven of disposing the vicissitudes of comma