not only my own
country, for which I have already done my utmost, but also the men
of all nations whatever, and especially all of the Christian name,
that the accomplishment of yet greater things, if I have the
power--and I _shall_ have the power, if God be gracious,--is
meanwhile for their sakes my desire and meditation."

Perhaps one begins to be a little tired of this high-strained
exultation for ever and ever on the subject of his success in the
Salmasian controversy. The recurrence at this point, however, is not
uninstructive. At the beginning of Richard's Protectorate, we can see
Milton's defences of the English Republic were still regarded as the
unparalleled literary achievements of the age, and Milton's European
celebrity on account of them had not waned in the least. It was
something for the blind man, seated by himself in his small home in
Westminster, and sending his thoughts out over the world from which
for six years now he had been so helplessly shut in, to know this
fact, and to be able to imagine the continued recollection of him as
still alive among the myriads moving in that vast darkness. This
fruit of his past labours, he says, he would "gratefully enjoy," but
with no vulgar satisfaction. He would not confess it even to be with
any lingering in him now of the last infirmity of a noble mind. In
his fiftieth year, and in his present state, he could feel himself
superior to that, and could describe his consciousness as something
higher. If he had done a great work already, as he himself believed,
and as the voice of all the best of mankind acknowledged, had it not
been because God had chosen and inspired him for the same, and might
he not in that faith send out a message to the world that perhaps God
had not yet done with him, and they might expect from him, blind and
desolate though he was, something greater and better still? The
closing sentence is exactly such a message, and one can suppose that
Milton was there thinking of his progress in _Paradise Lost_.

Whatever was the amount of Marvell's exertion in the secretaryship,
Milton was not wholly exempted from the duty of writing even the more
ordinary letters for Richard and his Council. There is a vacant
interval of three months, indeed, after the five last registered and
the next; but in January 1658-9 the series is resumed, and there are
six more letters of Milton for Richard between the end of that month
and the end of February. Rich