Note 1 — Chapter II

: The fact that there are two editions of the Ready and Easy Way, though Milton calls express attention to it in the second, seems to have escaped all the bibliographers. There is no note of it in Lowndes. What is most curious, however, is that, while it is the second or enlarged edition alone that is now accessible to everybody in the collective editions of Milton's Prose Works, from the so-called Amsterdam edition of 1898 to Pickering's and Bonn's, yet original copies of this second edition seem, to have wholly disappeared. There are several original copies of the Ready and Easy Way in the British Museum, but all of the first edition, not one of the second; the Bodleian has no copy of the second; every original copy of the tract that I have been able to see or hear of anywhere else has always turned out to be one of the first edition. In my perplexity, I began to ask myself whether this was to be explained by supposing that Milton, after he had prepared the second edition for the press, did not succeed in getting it published, and so that it was not till 1698 that it saw the light, and then by the accident that his enlarged press-copy had survived, and come (through Toland or otherwise) into the hands of the printers of the Amsterdam edition of the Prose Works. But, though several pieces in that edition are expressly noted as "never before published" (see notes ante, p. 617 and p. 656), there is no such editorial note respecting The Ready and Easy Way, but every appearance of mere reprinting from a previously published copy of 1660. On the whole, therefore, I conclude that Milton did publish his second and enlarged edition some time in April 1660; and I account for the rarity of original copies of this second edition by supposing that either the impression was seized before many copies had got about, or the Restoration itself came so rapidly after the publication as to make it all but abortive. Original copies of Milton's contemporary Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon seem, as I have mentioned (ante p. 675, note), to be equally scarce with original copies of the second edition of the Ready and Easy Way. They were the two last utterances of Milton before the Restoration, and so close to that event as perhaps to be sucked down in the whirlpool. Yet, as we know for certain that the Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon did appear, there is no need for a contrary supposition respecting the other. Very possibly original copies of both have survived somewhere; and I should be glad to hear of the fact. As it is, I have had to take my descriptions of both from the copies in the collective Prose Works. By the bye, it is an error in bibliographers and editors to give only the titles of old books from the original title-pages, without adding the imprints of the publishers. Much historical and biographical information lies in such imprints. In the present instance, for example, I should have liked very much to know whether Livewell Chapman was nominally the publisher of the second edition as well as of the first, or whether Milton was obliged to put forth the second edition without any publisher's name.