a Free
Commonwealth; if we will needs condemn ourselves to be of the
latter, despairing of our own virtue, industry, and the number of
our able men, we may then, conscious of our own unworthiness to be
governed better, sadly betake us to our befitting thraldom: yet,
choosing out of our own number one who hath best aided the people
and best merited against tyranny, the space of a reign or two we
may chance to live happily enough, or tolerably. But that a
victorious people should give up themselves again to the vanquished
was never yet heard of, seems rather void of all reason and good
policy, and will in all probability subject the subduers to the
subdued,--will expose to revenge, to beggary, to ruin and
perpetual bondage, the victors, under the vanquished: than which
what can be more unworthy?"

Of far more moment than the _Brief Notes on Dr. Griffith's
Sermon_ was a second and enlarged edition of the _Ready and Easy
Way to establish a Free Commonwealth_.

Though it is announced distinctly and emphatically in the opening
paragraph that this edition is a "revised and enlarged" one, not till
after a careful comparison with the former edition is it seen how
much the announcement implies. There are large additions; there are
omissions; there are changes of phraseology in every page. The new
pamphlet, were it nothing else, would be an interesting study of
Milton's art in authorcraft, of the expertness he had acquired in
recasting a composition of his, ingeniously dove-tailing passages
into it without spoiling the connexion, and ejecting phrases that had
ceased to be relevant or vital, all under the difficulties of his
blindness, when his ear listening to some mouth beside him and his
own mouth interrupting and replying were his sole instruments. But
there is much more than this. The later edition is Milton about a
month farther down the torrent than the first, a month nearer the
falls; and the additions, omissions, and alterations, convey what had
passed in his mind through that month. The second edition of the
_Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth_ is to be
taken, in short, for Milton's Biography at least, as an important new
publication. Only the essential additions and omissions can be here
noticed.[1]

[Footnote 1: The fact that there are two editions of the _Ready and
Easy Way_, though Milton calls express attention to it in the
second, seems to have escaped all the bibliog