242 BB. Reed, 
field to oppose Monck, who, with an army of seven thousand, was 
on the point of declaring for Charles. Though ill and suffering 
intensely, Fairfax sent word to Monck that he would take the field 
in support of Charles. When he appeared, Lambert’s troops deser- 
ted and flocked to their old commander, and thus, without a shot 
being fired, the Restoration was accomplished. It was fitting that 
Lord Fairfax should head the commission sent by Parliament to 
the Hague to invite Charles to return. No honors were conferred 
on him by the Merry Monarch—he sought none—and he retired 
to Yorkshire, where he died November 12, 1671, three years be- 
fore the death of Milton. 
It is not surprising that the letters of Fairfax, and his two Short 
Memorials of the War, should have been published, but it is strange 
indeed that a manuscript of 656 pages of verse, all in his own hand- 
writing, should never have been carefully examined. This manuscript 
passed from the possession of the Fairfax family, and was owned 
successively by Ralph Thoresby, the Duke of Sussex, and Dr. Bliss 
of Oxford, from whose collection the Bodleian library, its present 
owner, purchased it in 1858. Archbishop Cotton, in his Editions of the 
Bible and Parts thereof in English from the year MDV to MDCCCL, 
Preface to the second edition, 1852, gave a table of contents of 
the manuscript, then in the possession of Dr. Bliss, and reprinted 
one of the paraphrases of the Psalms. Sir Clements Markham, in 
his Life of Fairfax, already cited, went further; for in the text of 
his work he reprinted three of Fairfax’s poems,! and in an appen- 
dix gave ten more, wholly or in part, but as a historian, interested 
in the political, and not the literary life of the times, he made no 
study of the manuscript. Since Markham, I can not find that any 
one has examined these poems or published them. 
We have no means of dating the poems, with the exception of 
the following: 
Upon the New-built House at Apleton (1650), To the Lady Cary 
upon her Verses on my deare Wife (1665), On the Fatal Day (1649), 
Upon the Horse which his Majestie Rode upon att his Coronation 

1 Life of Fairfax, p. 852: On the Fatal Day, Jan. 30, 1648; p. 365, Upon 
the New-built House at Apleton: p. 384, Upon the Horse which his Majestie 
Rode upon Att his Coronation. Appendix A, pp. 415—427 contains the follow- 
ing: Preface to the Psalms, Honny dropps (excerpts), The Solitude, The 
Christian Warfare (excerpts), Life and Death Compared together, Shortness of 
Life, Of Beauty, Upon a Patch Face, Upon an ill Husband, and two of the 
Vulgar Proverbs. 
