, may be more successful.

These thirteen State Letters, were there nothing else, would prove
that in and after the winter of 1655-6 Milton's services were again
in request for ordinary office-work. But they do not represent the
whole of his renewed industry in that employment.

The tremendous Swedish ambassador, Count Bundt, whose energy in his
master's interests had swept through Whitehall like a storm,
searching out flaws, waking up Thurloe and the Council, and obliging
Cromwell himself to be more circumspect, had made his influence felt,
it seems, even in the house of the blind Secretary-Extraordinary. It
was on the 8th of April, 1656, as we have just learnt from Whitlocke,
that the Ambassador, in one of his conferences with Whitlocke,
Fiennes, and Strickland, in Dorset House, M. Coyet also being
present, had rather objected to the fact that the new Articles of the
Treaty, drafted for his consideration by the Council, and brought to
the conference by Mr. Jessop, had been brought in English, and not in
Latin, as would have been business-like. Latin or English, as the
Commissioners knew, it would have been all the same to Count Bundt,
inasmuch as it was the matter of the Articles that displeased him;
but they had promised that he should have them in Latin, and
Whitlocke had judiciously taken the opportunity of speaking in Latin,
in reply to some of M. Coyet's observations in the same tongue, as if
to show the Ambassador that Latin was by no means so scarce a
commodity as he seemed to suppose about the Protector's Court. There
had been delay, however, in furnishing the promised Latin
translation; and Count Bundt, glad of that new occasion for
fault-finding, did not let it escape him. "The Swedish Ambassador,"
relates Whitlocke under date May 6, 1656, "again complained of the
delays in his business, and that, when he had desired to have the
Articles of this Treaty put into Latin, according to the custom in
Treaties, it was fourteen days they made him stay for that
translation, and sent it to one MR. MILTON, a blind man, to put them
into Latin, who, he said, must use an amanuensis to read it to him,
and that amanuensis might publish the matter of the Articles as he
pleased; and that it seemed strange to him there should be none but a
blind man capable of putting a few Articles into Latin: that the
Chancellor [the late Oxenstiern] with his own hand penned the
Articles made at Upsal [in Whitlocke's Treaty], and so he hea