e of Disestablishment should
have to be postponed. To keep out the Stuarts, to rouse dread and
disgust even yet at the idea that the Stuarts should return, was the
single all-including possibility, or impossibility, for which he was
now striving. To this end it is that again and again in the course of
the pamphlet he inserts new passages heightening the contrast between
the glories and advantages of free Republican Government and the
miseries and degradation of subjection to a Monarchy. Near the
beginning there is an enlargement of this kind, to the extent of
three pages, in which he reviews, in greater detail than before, the
steps that had led to the establishment of the English Commonwealth;
and appeals to his countrymen whether their experience of
Commonwealth government had not been on the whole satisfactory. Had
not the very speeches and writings of that period, he had asked in
his first edition, "testified a spirit in this nation no less noble
and well-fitted to the liberty of a Commonwealth than in the ancient
Greeks or Romans"? In returning to that topic now, he cannot refrain
from breaking out once more, though it should be the last time, in
his characteristic vein of self-appreciation. "Nor was the heroic
cause," he adds, "unsuccessfully defended to all Christendom against
the tongue of a famous and thought invincible adversary, nor the
constancy and fortitude that so nobly vindicated our liberty, our
victory at once against two the most prevailing usurpers over
mankind, Superstition and Tyranny, unpraised or uncelebrated in a
written monument likely to outlive detraction, as it hath hitherto
convinced or silenced not a few detractors, especially in parts
abroad." Readers who may think that we are already too familiar with
this strain may be reminded that Milton was here taking account of
the contemptuous notices of his Defences of the Commonwealth in some
of the recent Royalist pamphlets, and also that, as he dictated, the
thought must have been passing in his mind that very probably his
days were numbered, and those Defences of the Commonwealth would have
to remain, after all, his last important bequest to the world.

There is proof that Milton had read the burlesque Censure of the Rota
on the first edition. Not only are two or three sentences omitted or
modified in consequence of remarks there made; but, in the
considerable enlargements he thinks necessary for the support of his
main notion of PERPETUITY