temporaries did not, that if a republic is to be maintained, it must be by putting society on a broad basis. The landed system of big estates was the main strength of the reaction, and Harrington proposes to go to the root of the matter by severely limiting the amount of land that any one man is allowed to hold. The Scots, he remarks, can never rise above unreasoning serfdom so long as the land is held by a few great chiefs. He further seeks to foster the republican spirit by providing for a rotation of officers.

Having fashioned his instrument, he lets us know what he proposes to do with it. Sea power is a first essential. "The sea giveth law to the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana (Utopian England) giveth law unto the sea." For the manhood of the nation he has provided by his agrarian law: "Agriculture is the bread of the nation; it is a mighty nursery of strength, the best armoury, the most assured knapsack." The book closes upon a speech in which the public orator of Oceana proposes to the "dear lords and excellent patriots. of the senate a comprehensive scheme of universal empire, such as may sometimes have haunted the dreams of the Protector. Great empires are propagated by conquest, by equal leagues, and by giving a certain measure of freedom to the conquered; the first plan is tyrannous, the second unsound, but the third, that of Imperium et libertas," is both feasible and imperative for his ideal England. Here we have, in germ, the whole idea of modern imperialism.

To ask whether such a scheme be lawful, is to ask whether it be lawful for the country to "do her duty, and to put the world in a better condition than before." As to its expediency, Harrington considers that France, Italy and Spain are “all sick, all corrupted together," but that the first of them to recover, which will probably be France, will be able to subdue the rest and reduce

England to a province. Harrington, at least, had a shrewd anticipation of the power of "le Roi Soleil.” Once we have conquered these states and given them a due measure of freedom, it will be easy enough to hold them; our experience in Scotland has shown how a few troops could effectively occupy a whole country, when forty thousand men were ready to march to their aid at any moment. Let us spread liberty and righteousness over the world, only first let us make sure of the supremacy of English arms and the English Empire.

Finally, Harrington applies to his country the passionate imagery of the ancient Hebrew. She is as the rose of Sharon, as the lily of the valley: "Arise, I say, come forth and do not tarry; ah, wherefore should mine eyes behold thee by the rivers of Babylon, hanging thine harps upon the willows, thou fairest among

Andrew Marvell voices the same desire for a strong man, who shall lead England to universal empire. This he does in his Horatian Ode to Cromwell, one of the few memorable poems of State in our language. He was a republican, but his antecedents were Royalists, and how far he was from being a bigot is shown by the sublime tribute he pays to the fallen King. But Charles had been vanquished by a mightier than he, and it became him to submit to the inevitable with a good grace:

"Though justice against Fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain,

But these do hold or break

As men are strong or weak.
Nature that hateth emptiness
Allows of penetration less,

And therefore must make room

When greater spirits come."

Soon Oliver will spread yet further the arms with which he has vanquished the Scots and Irish, over whom Marvell, like the others, scornfully exults:

"As Cæsar he, erelong to Gaul,
o Italy an Hannibal,

And to all states not free
Shall climacteric be."

His poem on Oliver's death makes us feel the majesty which still brooded over the departed hero, that powerless form, lately the terror of Europe. His soldiers, at any rate, will not fail to remember him in their songs :

"

Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse,

Shall th' English soldier, e'er he charge, rehearse,
And with the name of Cromwell armies fright."

Marvell's poem on Blake's victory at Santa Cruz breathes a strain truly Elizabethan :

"Peace, against you, was the sole strength of Spain,"

he says to England. Marvell remains a patriot to the end, and attacks the Government of the Restoration, not so much because he is a republican, as because he sees it wasteful and inefficient. One of the main counts of his indictment against Catholicism in high places is the impunity with which the French are allowed to plunder our shipping.

Another writer who was inspired to write of Oliver's death was Edmund Waller, who says:

'We must resign, Heaven his great soul doth claim,

In storms as loud as his immortal fame."

Waller is not an estimable character; his politics were those of the Vicar of Bray, but it is unjust to maintain, as Gardiner does, that there was no high inspiration in his art, in face of such passages as :

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made."

In his State poems Waller is especially the singer of the navy; one of his first efforts is a eulogy of Charles I's fleet, in face of which, he says, Frenchman and Spaniard merge their differences in a common fear. Under the

republic, he celebrates the defeat of Spain; during the Restoration, that of the Dutch.

A curious difference may be noticed between these two last poems, one which tends to show that, apart from the religious bond, the Englishman has a greater natural sympathy with the chivalrous Spaniard than with the phlegmatic Dutchman. Waller pauses in his account of Blake's victory to record the heroic end of the Marquis Admiral and his lady, and the pity it excited in brave English minds, but in the valour of the Dutchman he can see nothing better than Dutch courage:

'Brandy and wine, their wonted friends, at length
Render them useless and betray their strength."

The very triumphs of Puritanism were hurrying it to ruin. Every day the Protector's position was becoming more anomalous, more insecure. He longed, as well as Milton, to preside over a free England, but it was becoming more and more likely that the first use she would make of her freedom would be to sweep away his government. A country's nerves cannot be kept permanently at a state of extreme tension, and the excesses of the Puritans, and the gloomy moral tyranny they imposed, had begun to make men long passionately for rest. Besides, the King's execution, perpetrated in defiance of nine-tenths of the nation, had aroused a horror not easy to conceive of nowadays. King Charles became mightier after his death than he ever had been during his life. His coldness and lack of human sympathy had been a barrier between him and his subjects, now this was swept away for ever. His conduct before his judges and on the scaffold, so pathetic and yet so kindly, had atoned for the aloofness of his life. Men liked to recall little incidents like that of the tree he passed on his last walk, and of which he quietly remarked that it had been planted by his brother Henry. At last they saw not a monarch of snow, but a man with feelings like their own, cruelly persecuted for no sin, torn

from his children, and at last foully murdered. And this man was the Lord's anointed! No wonder that to old Cavaliers and to the rapidly increasing multitude who were acquiring Cavalier sympathies, the men who had done this thing were traitors, with whom no terms could be kept. It was openly proclaimed that killing was no murder. Oliver's life was not safe for a moment.

Puritanism was going to pieces of its own accord. Its most advanced exponents had launched out into wild theories, that went far beyond those of Oliver, theories untempered by his own sturdy sense of fact. With the exception of Milton, the ablest heads of the movement were being driven one by one into opposition. Not the least of Oliver's troubles was the series of interviews he had with men whom he would fain have had by his side, in his work for England. Fox called on him to lay his crown at the feet of Jesus; stern Ludlow demanded that the nation should have what it had fought for and be governed by its own consent; the virtuous Hutcheson, in response to a pathetic appeal, said that he could not be a party to the enslavement of his country. Oliver's Parliaments would not give him a fair chance to carry on the government. The Presbyterians, baulked of their own attempt to persecute, were for the most part sullen or hostile. "If this be the end of your sitting," he thundered, to his last Parliament, in one final burst of indignation," and if this be your carriage, I think it is high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this Parliament! And let God be judge between you and me !

Oliver had no choice. "I have sought the Lord night and day that He would rather slay me than put one upon the doing of this work," had been his cry of agony when he dismissed the Rump. Force, ever more naked and more resented, was all that lay between his cause and ruin. He was holding down the country by his major