blind Milton himself, whose _Eikonoklastes_ and _Pro Populo Defensio_ were by order of the House—issued within a week or two after the Restoration—to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman? Hangings, drawings and quarterings were not extraordinary events in those days; but it would be interesting to know how the sentence pronounced on Major-General Harrison—first sentenced of the Regicides—affected so humane and sensitive a man as Robert Boyle. His sister Ranelagh, woman as she was, had more of the old soldier-earl in her composition, and perhaps, like her Elizabethan father, looked upon such a death as an inevitable “cloudy end.” “... The Court doth award that you ... be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and, being alive, shall be cut down and ... your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty; and the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”[253] Was Boyle weighing the air with his Eolipile on October 13 when Pepys set off to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered? “Which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.”[254] But in that hungry crowd Pepys could scarcely have been near enough to hear Harrison’s last words, which sometimes seem to echo in Charing Cross to this day: “He hath covered my head many times in the day of battle. By God I have leaped over a wall; by God I have run through a troop; and by my God I will go through this death, and He will make it easy to me.... Now unto thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my Spirit....” Nor could Mr. Pepys have seen Harrison strike out at the hangman half-way through the horrible, bloody work. Mr. Evelyn did not go out purposely to see any of the executions of the Regicides;[255] but on the 17th he chanced to meet “their quarters, mangl’d and cutt and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. O the miraculous Providence of God!”[256] But what of Milton all this time—the blind Republican, to whom Lady Ranelagh had been more than all kith and kin? Had Boyle and Hartlib ever got from Mr. Milton that prescription they so much wanted?