thousand copies of Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ in the year of
Austerlitz? One would like to know who were the purchasers of
Milton and Waller, when the cavalier families were being ruined by
confiscations and compositions, and Puritan families would turn with
pious horror from the very name of a Mask.

Milton was himself editor of his own volume, and prefixed to it, again
out of Virgil's Eclogues, the characteristic motto, "Baccare frontem
Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua _futuro_," indicating that his
poetry was all to come.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP.


The Crown having fallen on January 30, 1649, and the House of Lords by
the vote of February 6 following, the sovereign power in England was
for the moment in the hands of that fragment of the Long Parliament,
which remained after the various purges and expulsions to which it had
been subjected. Some of the excluded members were allowed to return,
and by occasional new elections in safe boroughs the number of members
was raised to one hundred and fifty, securing an average attendance of
about seventy. The future government of the nation was declared to be
by way of a republic, and the writs ran in the name of the Keepers
of the Liberty of England, by authority of Parliament. But the real
centre of power was the Council of State, a body of forty-one members,