. Such are they for
whom more generous spirits, imprudently forward in revolutions, usually
find that they have laboured. "Great things," said Edward Gibbon
Wakefield, "are begun by men with great souls and little
breeches-pockets, and ended by men with great breeches-pockets and
little souls."

Milton would not have been Milton if he could have acquiesced in an ever
so needful Henry Cromwell or Charles Stuart. Never quick to detect the
course of public opinion, he was now still further disabled by his
blindness. There is great pathos in the thought of the sightless patriot
hungering for tidings, "as the Red Sea for ghosts," and swayed hither
and thither by the narratives and comments of passionate or interested
reporters. At last something occurred which none could misunderstand or
misrepresent. On February 11th, about ten at night, Mr. Samuel Pepys,
being in Cheapside, heard "all the bells in all the churches a-ringing.
But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen! The number of
bonfires, there being fourteen between St. Dunstan's and Temple Bar, and
at Strand Bridge I could at one view tell thirty-one fires. In King
Street, seven or eight; and all around burning, roasting, and drinking
for rumps. There being rumps tied upon sticks and carried up and down.
The butchers at the May Pole in the Strand rang a merry peal with their
knives when they were going to sacrifice their rump. On Ludgate Hill
there was one turning of the spit that had a rump tied upon it, and
another basting of it. Indeed, it was past imagination, both the
greatness and the suddenness of it. At one end of the street you would
think there was a whole lane of fire, and so hot that we were fain to
keep on the further side." This burning of the Rump meant that the
attempt of a miserable minority to pose as King, Lords, and Commons, had
broken down, and that the restoration of Charles, for good or ill, was
the decree of the people. A modern Republican might without disgrace
have bowed to the gale, for such an one, unless hopelessly fanatical,
denies the divine right of republics equally with that of kings, and
allows no other title than that of the consent of the majority of
citizens. But Milton had never admitted the rights of the majority: and
in his supreme effort for the Republic, "The Ready and Easy Way to
establish a free Commonwealth," he ignores the Royalist plurality, and
assumes that the virtuous part of the nation, to whom alone he allows