but
only for the Commissioners of the Great Seal--whether for those
under the Protectorate, or for their predecessors, does not appear,
though perhaps that might be ascertained. The scrap may be numbered
at this point, though inserted only as a note:--(CXXXIII.) "We,
Commissioners of the Great Seal of England, &c., desire that the
Supreme Court of the Parliament of Paris will, on request, take such
steps that Miles, William, and Maria Sandys, children of the lately
deceased William Sandys and his wife Elizabeth Soame, English by
birth and minors, may be able, from Paris, where they are now under
protection of the said Court, to return to us forthwith, and will
deliver the said children into the charge of the Scotchman James
Mowat, a good and honest man, to whom we have delegated this charge,
that he may receive them where they are and bring them to us; and we
engage that, on opportunity of the same sort offered, there will be a
return from this Court of the like justice and equity to any subjects
of France."]

[Footnote 2: The uniformly Miltonic style of the greater letters for
the Protector, the same style as had been used in the more
important letters for the Commonwealth, utterly precludes the idea
that Milton was only the translator of drafts furnished him. In
the smaller letters, about ships wrongfully seized and other private
injuries, the case may have been partly so, though even there
Milton must have had liberty of phraseology, and would imbed the
facts in his own expressions. But there was not a man about the
Council that could have furnished the drafts of the greater letters
as we now have them. My idea as to the way in which they were
composed is that, on each occasion, Milton learnt from Thurloe, or
even in a preappointed interview with the Council, or with Cromwell
himself, the sort of thing that was wanted, and that then, having
himself dictated and sent in an English draft, he received it back,
approved or with corrections and suggested additions, to be turned
into Latin. Special Cromwellian hints to Milton for the letter to
Louis XIV, on the alarm of a new persecution of the Piedmontese
(ante pp. 387-9) must have been, I should say, the causal reference
to a certain pass as the best military route yet into Italy from
France, and the suggestion of an exchange of territories between
Louis and the Duke of Savoy so as to make the Vaudois French
subjects. The hints may have been given to Milton beforehand