llows an earnest invective against the Stuarts; but the tone
of respectfulness to Monk is kept up studiously throughout. There is
no sign of Milton in the language, and one guesses on the whole that
the tract was a concoction of a few of the City Republicans, with
Barebone among them, meeting privately perhaps in the back-parlour of
the Republican bookseller who ventured the publication anonymously;
but it is possible that Milton may have been consulted, or at least
have been cognisant of the affair. The reprinting of the reasons of
the Long Parliament for their No-Address Resolutions of January
1647-8 was an excellent idea, inasmuch as it reminded people of that
disgust with Charles I., that impossibility of dealing with him even
in his captive condition, which had driven the Parliamentarians to
the theory of a Republic a year before the Republic had been actually
founded; and this feature of the tract may have seemed good to
Milton.----The Tract must have annoyed Monk and the other
authorities, for it was immediately suppressed. This we learn from a
reply to it, which appeared on the 3rd of April, with the title
_Treason Arraigned, in answer to Plain English, being a Trayterous
and Phanatique Pamphlet which was condemned by the Counsel of State,
suppressed by Authority, and the Printer declared against by
Proclamation ... London, Printed in the year_ 1660. The reply
takes the very curious form of a reproduction of the condemned tract
almost textually, paragraph by paragraph, with a running comment of
vituperation upon the author or authors. The following sentences,
culled from the vituperative comment, will show that the writer
suspected Milton as the person chiefly responsible, and will
sufficiently represent the entire performance:--

"Some two days since came to my view a bold sharp pamphlet, called
_Plain English_, directed to the General and his Officers....
It is a piece drawn by no fool, and it deserves a serious answer.
By the design, the subject, malice, and the style, I should suspect
it for a blot of the same pen that wrote _Eikonoklastes_. It
runs foul, tends to tumult; and, not content barely to applaud the
murder of the King, the execrable author of it vomits upon his
ashes with a pedantic and envenomed scorn, pursuing still his
sacred memory. Betwixt him [Milton] and his brother Rabshakeh
[Needham?] I think a man may venture to divide the glory of it. It
relishes the mixture of th