Still, any words used by Milton about himself are always to be taken as in correspondence with fact; and hence we are to suppose that, at the time he wrote, he did keep himself as much aloof as possible from the magnates of the Council, performing the pieces of work required of him in his own house, rather than making them occasions for visits and colloquies.

His old and intimate friend Fleetwood, and his friend Lord President Lawrence, with Desborough, Pickering, Strickland, Montague, and Sydenham, all of whom had been mentioned by him with more or less of personal regard in the _Defensio Secunda_ in 1654, were still Councillors, and formed indeed more than half the Council; but his intercourse with some of these individually may have been less since his blindness.

Then, of the rest, Thurloe was the real man of influence, the real _gratiosus_ who could carry or set aside a request like Heimbach's; and, though Milton's communications with Thurloe must necessarily have been more frequent than with any other person of the Council, one has an indefinable impression that Thurloe had never taken cordially to Milton or Milton to Thurloe.

At the date of Milton's note to Heimbach, too, _gratiosi_ were becoming plentiful all round the Council.
Cromwell's sixty-three writs for the new Upper House had gone out, or were going out, and in a week or two many more "lords" were to be seen walking in couples in any street in Westminster.

Milton, in _his_ quiet retreat there, may have had something of all this in his mind when he wrote to young Mr.Heimbach.
The short second session of the Parliament, with its difficult experiment of the two Houses once more, and the angry dispute of the Commons whether the name of "Lords" _should_ be allowed to the Other House, had come and gone (Jan.