England was not ripe for a republic; she was returning to her idols, "choosing herself a captain back to Egypt." It took a century and a half for English liberty to recover the ground lost at the Restoration. Nevertheless that little group of republican idealists, Vane, Bradshaw, Lambert and the rest, with Milton their literary spokesman, must always interest us as Americans and republicans. Let us, however, not mistake. Milton was no democrat. His political principles were republican, or democratic if you please, but his personal feelings were intensely aristocratic. Even that free commonwealth which he thought he saw so easy and ready a way to establish, and the constitution of which he sketched on the eve of the Restoration, was no democracy, but an aristocratic, senatorial republic like Venice, a government of the _optimates_, not of the populace. For the trappings of royalty, the pomp and pageantry, the servility and flunkeyism of a court, Milton had the contempt of a plain republican: "How poor their outworn coronets Beside one leaf of that plain civic wreath!" But for the people, as a whole, he had an almost equal contempt. They were "the ungrateful multitude," "the inconsiderate multitude," the _profanum vulgus_, "the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational men." There was not a popular drop of blood in him. He had no faith in universal suffrage or majority rule. "More just it is," he wrote, "that a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty, than that a greater number compel a less to be their fellow slaves," i.e. to bring back the king by a _plebescite_. And again: "The best affected and best principled of the people stood not numbering or computing on which side were most voices in Parliament, but on which side appeared to them most reason." Milton was a Puritan; and the Puritans, though socially belonging, for the most part, among the plain people, and though made by accident the champions of popular rights against privilege, were yet a kind of spiritual aristocrats. Calvinistic doctrine made of the elect a chosen few, a congregation of saints, set apart from the world. To this feeling of religious exclusiveness Milton's pride of intellect added a personal intensity. He respects distinction and is always rather scornful of the average man, the _pecus ignavum silentum_, the herd of the obscure and unfamed. "Nor do I name of men the common rout That, wandering loose about, Grow up and perish like the summer fly, Heads without names, no more remembered."