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historically, or only hypothetically? Assuredly the latter? Does he express it as his own wish, that after death they should suffer these tortures? or as a general consequence, deduced from reason and revelation, that such will be their fate? Again, the latter only! His wish is expressly confined to a speedy stop being put by Providence to their power of inflicting misery on others! But did he name or refer to any persons, living or dead? No! But the calumniators of Milton daresay (for what will calumny not dare say?) that he had Laud and Stafford in his mind, while writing of remorseless persecution, and the enslavement of a free country, from motives of selfish ambition. Now, what if a stern anti-prelatist should daresay, that in speaking of the insolencies of traitors and the violences of rebels. Bishop Taylor must have individualized in his mind, Hamden, Hollis, Pym, Fairfax, Ireton, and Milton? And what if he should take the liberty of concluding, that in the after-description the Bishop was feeding and feasting his party-hatred, and with those individuals before the eyes of his imagination enjoying, trait by trait, horror after horror, the picture of their intolerable agonies? Yet this Bigot would have an equal right thus to criminate the one good and great man, as these men have to criminate the other, Milton has said, and I doubt not but that Taylor with equal truth could have said it, "that in his whole life he never spake against a man even that his skin should be grazed."
