One would like to know something of the relations between the two greatest men of the Commonwealth. But there is little or nothing to know. It is plain that in most matters they must have been in close agreement; and in a few, as in the business of the {68} Piedmont massacres, the two great hearts must have beaten as one, while the sword of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the trumpet of Milton's noble prose and nobler verse. The only surviving act of personal contact between them is to be found in Milton's sonnet; and that is a public tribute with no suggestion of private intimacy in it. Indeed, as Masson has pointed out, it may easily be taken to mean more than it really does; for it was not written because Milton could not keep silence about his admiration of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title shows, as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save the nation from parliamentary proposals for the setting up of a State Church and for limiting the toleration of dissent from it. The sonnet, then, proves less than it has sometimes been made to prove; and in any case it proves no intimacy. Perhaps after all, in the case of Milton as in that of most men who deal with public affairs, we are apt to exaggerate the importance in their daily lives of these visible official activities. The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real part of their lives. So with Milton during these years; his wife and little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or the admired Cromwell of the sonnet. The "weekly table" he is said to have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which, for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.