alled
amiss _The Good Old Cause_: if it seem strange to any, it will
not seem more strange, I hope, than convincing to backsliders. Thus
much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have
spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but, with
the Prophet, _O Earth, Earth, Earth!_, to tell the very soil
itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what
I have spoken should happen (which Thou suffer not who didst create
Mankind free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants
of men!) to be the last words of our expiring Liberty. But I trust
I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and
ingenuous men,--to some perhaps whom God may raise up of these
stones to become children of reviving Liberty, and may reclaim,
though they seem now choosing them a Captain back for Egypt, to
bethink themselves a little and consider whither they are rushing;
to exhort this torrent also of the people not to be so impetuous,
but to keep their due channel; and, at length recovering and
uniting their better resolutions, now that they see already how
open and unbounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies,
to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing to
what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness
would hurry us, through the general defection of a misguided and
abused multitude."

To exhort a torrent! The very mixture and hurry of the metaphors In
Milton's mind are a reflex of the facts around him. Current, torrent,
rush, rapid, avalanche, deluge hurrying to a precipice: mix and
jumble such figures as we may, we but express more accurately the mad
haste which London and all England were making in the end of April
1660 to bring Charles over from the Continent. Of the only important
relic of opposition, the Republicanism of the Army, and how that had
been already managed by Monk, and was still being managed by him, we
have taken account. Its dying effort, as we saw, took the form of
Lambert's escape from the Tower on the 9th of April, and his thirteen
days of wild wandering and skulking on the chance of bringing the
dispersed remains of Republicanism to a rendezvous. That was over on
Easter-Sunday, April 22, when Dick Ingoldsby, with flushed face, and
pistol in hand, collared the fugitive Lambert on his horse in a field
near Daventry, and brought him back, with others, to his prison in
t