Vision of Oliver Cromwell-from the 'Discourse.'

I was interrupted by a strange and terrible apparition; for there appeared to me (arising out of the earth, as I conceived) the figure of a man taller than a giant, or indeed, than the shadow of any giant in the evening. His body was naked; but that nakedness adorned or rather deformed all over with several figures, after the manner of the Britons, painted upon it: and I perceived that most of them were the representations of the late battles in our civil wars, and, if I be not much mistaken, it was the battle of Naseby that was drawn upon his breast. His eyes were like burning brass, and there were three crowns of the same metal (as I guessed), and that looked as red-hot too, upon his head. He held in his right-hand a sword that was yet bloody, and nevertheless the motto of it was, Pax quæritur bello ['We war for peace']; and in his left-hand a thick book, upon the back of which was written in letters of gold, 'Acts, ordinances, protestations, covenants, engagements, declarations, remonstrances,' &c. Though this sudden, unusual, and dreadful object might have quelled a greater courage than mine; yet so it pleased God (for there is nothing bolder than a man in a vision) that I was not at all daunted, but asked him resolutely and briefly, 'What art thou?' And he said, 'I am called the North-west Principality, His Highness the Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions belonging thereunto; for I am that angel to whom the Almighty has committed the government of those three kingdoms, which thou seest from this place.' And I answered and said, 'If it be so, sir, it seems to me that for almost these twenty years past Your Highness has been absent from your charge: for not only if any angel, but if any wise and honest man had, since that time, been our governor, we should not have wandered thus long in these laborious and endless labyrinths of confusion; but either not have entered at all into them, or at least have returned back before we had absolutely lost our way but instead of Your Highness we have had since such a protector as was his predecessor Richard the Third to the king his nephew; for he presently slew the commonwealth, which he pretended to protect, and set up himself in the place of it: a little less guilty indeed in one respect, because the other slew the innocent, and this man did but murder a murderer. Such a protector we have had as we would have been glad to have changed for an enemy, and rather received a constant Turk than this every-month's apostate; such a protector as man is to his flocks, which he sheers, and sells, or devours himself; and I would fain know what the wolf, which he protects him from, could do more. Such a protector - and, as I was proceeding, methought His Highness began to put on a displeased and threatening countenance (as men use to do when their dearest friends happen to be traduced in their company), which gave me the first rise of jealousy against him; for I did not believe that Cromwell, amongst all his foreign correspondences, had ever held any with angels. However, I was not hardened enough yet to venture a quarrel with him then and therefore, as I had spoken to the Protector himself in Whitehall, 'I desired him that His Highness would please to pardon me, if I had unwittingly spoken any thing to the disparagement of a person whose relations to His Highness I had not the honour to know.' At which he told me, that he had no other concernment for His late Highness, than as he took him to

be the greatest man that ever was of the English nation, if not (said he) of the whole world; which gives me a just title to the defence of his reputation, since I now account myself, as it were, a naturalized English angel, by having had so long the management of the affairs of that country. And pray, countryman (said he very kindly and very flatteringly), for I would not have you fall into the general error of the world, that detests and decries so extraordinary a virtue; what can be more extraordinary than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body (which have sometimes) or of mind (which have often, raised men to the highest dignities), should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to succeed in so improbable a design, as the destruction of one of the most ancient, and in all appearance most solidly founded monarchies upon earth? That he should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an open and infamous death: to banish that numerous and strongly allied family: to do all this under the name and wages of a parliament; to trample upon them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he grew weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them victoriously at last; to overrun each corner of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth; to call together parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned to that he would please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master of those who had hired him before to be their servant: to have the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal as was the little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the spending of them; and lastly (for there is no end of all the particulars of his glory), to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity; to die with peace at home, and triumph abroad; to be buried among kings, and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name behind him, not to be extinguished but with the whole world; which, as it is now too little for his praises, so might have been too for his conquests, if the short line of his human life could have been stretched out to the extent of his immortal designs?'

Even those who do not read Cowley now are familiar indirectly through Cowper-with

God the first garden made, and the first city Cain: which is no doubt the original of Cowper's

God made the country and man made the town.
Other pregnant lines from Cowley are-
Hope, fortune's cheating lottery!
Where for one prize an hundred blanks there be.
The world's a scene of changes, and to be
Constant in Nature were inconstancy.

Plenty as well as want can separate friends.

The first collection of Cowley's works (folio, 1668) contained the Discourses by way of Essays in Prose and Verse. Ten editions of Cowley's works appeared before 1721, another by Aikin in 1802, and one by Grosart in 1881 (2 vols.).

Lord Clarendon.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, was born 18th February 1608 at Dinton, near Salisbury, third son of a Wiltshire squire. Destined for the Church, he went up to Magdalen Hall in 1622; but the death of his elder brothers having left him the heir, he quitted Oxford for the Middle Temple in 1625. Though he rose in his profession, he loved letters better than law; for his friends he chose such brilliant spirits as Falkland, Ben Jonson, Selden, Hales, and Chillingworth, and, in his own words,

6

was never so proud, or thought himself so good a man, as when he was the worst in the company.' He married twice-in 1629, Ann, daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, whose death six months afterwards 'shook all the frame of his resolutions;' next, in 1632, Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of Requests and of the Mint. She bore him four sons and two daughters; and with her, till her death in 1667, he 'lived very comfortably in the most uncomfortable times, and very joyfully in those times when matter of joy was administered.'

In 1640 he was returned for Wootton-Bassett to the Short Parliament, for Saltash to the Long; and up to the summer of 1641 he acted heartily with the popular party. Then he drew back. Enough, he deemed, had been done; a victorious oligarchy might prove more formidable than a humbled king; nor could he conceive a religion without bishops.' Charles's answer to the Grand Remonstrance was of Hyde's composing, as were most of the subsequent able manifestoes; and though in a midnight interview with the king he declined to take St John's post of Solicitor-General, thenceforward he and Falkland and Colepeper formed a veritable privy council. Unhappily they were not allowed to know everything; unfortunately for the king, their advice was not always followed; thus the attempted arrest of the five members had neither their privity nor their approval. Still Hyde headed the royalist opposition in the Commons, till in May 1642 he slipped away and followed Charles into Yorkshire. He witnessed Edgehill, in 1643 was knighted and made Chancellor of the Exchequer, in March 1645 attended the Prince of Wales to the west of England, and with him a twelvemonth later passed on to Scilly and Jersey. In Scilly, on 18th May 1646, he commenced his History; in Jersey he tarried two whole years. From November 1649 till March 1651 he was engaged in a fruitless embassy to Spain; next for nine years he filled the office of a 'Caleb Balderstone' in the needy, greedy, factious little court of Charles II., sometimes with neither clothes nor fire to preserve him from the sharpness of the season, and with not three sous in the world to buy a fagot.'

Charles had made him High Chancellor in 1658, and at the Restoration he was confirmed in that dignity, in November 1660 being created Baron Hyde, and in the following April Earl of Clarendon.

To this period belongs the strangest episode in all his Autobiography. In November 1659 his daughter Anne (1638-71), then lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Orange, had entered into a secret marriage-contract with the king's brother, James. Duke of York; and nine months later they were privately married at her father's house. On learning the news, if news indeed it was, he burst into a passion of the coarsest invective against her; yet people fancied that in Catherine of Braganza he purposely selected a barren bride for the kin that so his own daughter might some day come to the throne. Nor as chief Minister was he otherwise popular. A bigoted Churchman, a thorougi. Conservative, and always a lawyer, he would fair have restored things to the status quo ante bellum He loved a Papist little better than a sectary. and accordingly would have nothing to do with Charles's toleration. He looked sourly on Charles's vices, yet stooped to impose Charles's mistress or Charles's queen. He could not satisfy the Cataliers, who contrasted his opulence with their our broken fortunes; he did more than enough to irritate the Puritans. The sale of Dunkirk, the Dutch war, the very Plague and Great Fire, al. heightened his unpopularity; and in 1667 he fell an easy unlamented victim to a court cab... The great seal was taken from him; impeachment for high-treason followed; and quitting the kingdom at Charles's bidding, the old man settled a: Montpellier. There and at Moulins he spent nearly six tranquil years; and afterwards from Rouen he sent a last piteous entreaty that Charles would permit him to 'die in his own country and ames, his own children.' His petition was disregarded, and at Rouen he died 9th December 1674 No monument marks his grave in Westminster Abbey

Men's estimates of Clarendon have varied widely. Southey calls him 'the wisest, most upright of statesmen ;' the Scottish Whig historian, George Brodie, a miserable sycophant and canting hypocrite.' The truth lies somewhere between the two verdicts, but Southey's is much the truer of the two. The failings and merits of the statesman are mirrored in his great History of the Rebellion in England (3 vols. 1704-7), with its supplement and continuation, more faulty and less valuable, the History of the Civil War in Ireland (1721, and the Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon (3 vols 1759). The publication of the History of t. Rebellion in the reign of Queen Anne was an event of some importance in English politics as well as in English letters, since the glowing picture which it unfolded of the Cavalier cause and party is believed to have been one cause of the Tory and Jacobite reaction which brought Harley and St John into power. The original editors of the work were Bishop Smalridge, Dean Aldrich, and Bishop Atterbury, the last of whom successfully defended himself and his colleagues (1731) against Oldmixon's accusation that they had falsified the text An apology more than a history, a vindication of

the author and of Charles I., the History is not, does not profess to be, impartial; it suppresses the truth where the truth seemed unfavourable; and it is grossly inaccurate-the result of a fallible memory. But, Mr Green notwithstanding, it does not 'by deliberate and malignant falsehood' pervert the whole action of Clarendon's adversaries; careless and ungenerous he might be, wilfully dishonest he was not. And though his style is prolix and redundant, though it suffocates us by the length of its periods,' his splendid stateliness, his narrative skill, his development of motives, and, above all, his marvellous skill in portraiture (shown best in the character of Falkland), have rendered the History an imperishable classic.

Reception of the Liturgy at Edinburgh in 1637. On the Sunday morning appointed for the work, the Chancellor of Scotland and others of the Council being present in the cathedral church, the dean began to read the Liturgy, which he had no sooner entered upon but a noise and clamour was raised throughout the church, that no voice could be heard distinctly, and then a shower of stones and sticks and cudgels were thrown at the dean's head. The bishop went up into the pulpit, and from thence put them in mind of the sacredness of the place, of their duty to God and the King; but he found no more reverence, nor was the clamour or disorder less than before. The Chancellor, from his seat, commanded the provost and magistrates of the city to descend from the gallery in which they sat, and by their authority to suppress the riot; which at last with great difficulty they did, by driving the rudest of those who made the disturbance out of the church, and shutting the doors, which gave the dean opportunity to proceed in the reading of the Liturgy, which was not at all intended or hearkened to by those who remained within the church; and if it had, they who were turned out continued their barbarous noise, brake the windows, and endeavoured to break down the doors; so that it was not possible for any to follow their devotions.

When all was done that at that time could be done there, and the Council and magistrates went out of the church to their houses, the rabble followed the bishops with all the opprobrious language they could invent, of bringing in superstition and Popery into the kingdom, and making the people slaves; and were not content to use their tongues, but employed their hands too in throwing dirt and stones at them, and treated the Bishop of Edinburgh (whom they looked upon as most active that way) so rudely that with great difficulty he got into a house after they had torn his habit, and was from thence removed to his own with great hazard of his life. As this was the reception it had in the cathedral, so it fared not better in the other churches in the city, but was entertained with the same hollowing and outcries, and threatening the men whose office it was to read it with the same bitter execrations against bishops and Popery.

Hitherto no person of condition or name appeared, or seemed to countenance this seditious confusion; it was the rabble, of which nobody was named, and, which is more strange, not one apprehended and it seems the bishops thought it not of moment enough to desire

or require any help or protection from the Council; but, without conferring with them or applying themselves to them, they despatched away an express to the King with a full and particular information of all that had passed, and a desire that he would take that course he thought best for the carrying on his service.

Until this advertisement arrived from Scotland, there were very few in England who had heard of any disorders there, or of anything done there which might produce any. The King himself had been always so jealous of the privileges of that his native kingdom (as hath been touched before), and that it might not be dishonoured by a suspicion of having any dependence upon England, that he never suffered any thing relating to that to be debated or so much as communicated to his Privy Council in this (though many of that nation were, without distinction, Councillors of England), but handled all those affairs himself with two or three Scotchmen who always attended in the Court for the business of that kingdom, which was upon the matter still despatched by the sole advice and direction of the Marquis of Hambleton [Hamilton].

And the truth is, there was so little curiosity either in the Court or the country to know any thing of Scotland, or what was done there, that when the whole nation was solicitous to know what passed weekly in Germany and Poland and all other parts of Europe, no man ever inquired what was doing in Scotland, nor had that kingdom a place or mention in one page of any gazette, so little the world heard or thought of that people; and even after the advertisement of this preamble to rebellion, no mention was made of it at the Council-board, but such a despatch made into Scotland upon it as expressed the King's dislike and displeasure, and obliged the lords of the Council there to appear more vigorously in the vindication of his authority, and suppression of those tumults. But all was too little. That people, after they had once begun, pursued the business vigorously, and with all imaginable contempt of the government; and though in the hubbub of the first day there appeared nobody of name or reckoning, but the actors were really of the dregs of the people, yet they discovered by the countenance of that day that few men of rank were forward to engage themselves in the quarrel on the behalf of the bishops; whereupon more considerable persons every day appeared against them, and, as heretofore in the case of St Paul (Acts xiii. 50), the Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, the women and ladies of the best quality declared themselves of the party, and with all the reproaches imaginable made war upon the bishops, as introducers of Popery and superstition, against which they avowed themselves to be irreconcilable enemies : and their husbands did not long defer the owning the same spirit; insomuch as within few days the bishops durst not appear in the streets nor in any courts or houses, but were in danger of their lives; and such of the lords as durst be in their company, or seemed to desire to rescue them from violence, had their coaches torn in pieces, and their persons assaulted, insomuch as they were glad to send for some of those great men who did indeed govern the rabble though they appeared not in it, who readily came and redeemed them out of their hands. So that by the time new orders came from England, there was scarce a bishop left in Edinburgh, and not a minister who durst read the Liturgy in any church.

Character of Hampden.

Mr Hampden was a man of much greater cunning, and it may be of the most discerning spirit, and of the greatest address and insinuation to bring any thing to pass which he desired of any man of that time, and who laid the design deepest. He was a gentleman of a good extrac tion and a fair fortune, who from a life of great pleasure and license had on a sudden retired to extraordinary sobriety and strictness, and yet retained his usual cheerfulness and affability; which, together with the opinion of his wisdom and justice and the courage he had shewed in opposing the ship-money, raised his reputation to a very great height, not only in Buckinghamshire where he lived, but generally throughout the kingdom. He was not a man of many words, and rarely began the discourse, or made the first entrance upon any business that was assumed; but a very weighty speaker, and after he had heard a full debate, and observed how the House was like to be inclined, took up the argument, and shortly and clearly and craftily so stated it that he commonly conducted it to the conclusion he desired; and if he found he could not do that, he was never without the dexterity to divert the debate to another time, and to prevent the determining any thing in the negative which might prove inconvenient in the future. He made so great a show of civility and modesty and humility, and always of mistrusting his own judgment and of esteeming his with whom he conferred for the present, that he seemed to have no opinions or resolutions but such as he contracted from the information and instruction he received upon the discourses of others, whom he had a wonderful art of governing and leading into his principles and inclinations whilst they believed that he wholly depended upon their counsel and advice. No man had ever a greater power over himself or was less the man that he seemed to be, which shortly after appeared to every body when he cared less to keep on the mask.

Character of Lord Falkland.

In this unhappy battle [the first of Newbury] was slain the Lord Viscount Falkland: a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war than that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to all posterity.

'Turpe mori post te solo non posse dolore.' Before this Parliament his condition of life was so happy that it was hardly capable of improvement. Before he came to twenty years of age he was master of a noble fortune, which descended to him by the gift of a grandfather, without passing through his father or mother, who were then both alive, and not well enough contented to find themselves passed by in the descent. His education for some years had been in Ireland, where his father was Lord Deputy; so that when he returned into England to the possession of his fortune, he was unentangled with any acquaintance or friends, which usually grow up by the custom of conversation, and therefore was to make a pure election of his company, which he chose by other rules than were prescribed to the young nobility of that time. And it cannot be denied, though he admitted some few to his friendship for the agreeableness of their

natures and their undoubted affection to him, that his familiarity and friendship for the most part was with men of the most eminent and sublime parts, and of untouched reputation in point of integrity; and such men had a title to his bosom.

He was a great cherisher of wit and fancy and good parts in any man, and, if he found them clouded with poverty or want, a most liberal and bountiful patron towards them, even above his fortune; of which in these administrations he was such a dispenser as if he had been trusted with it to such uses, and if there had been the least of vice in his expense, he might have been thought too prodigal. He was constant and pertinacions in whatsoever he resolved to do, and not to be wearied by any pains that were necessary to that end. And therefore, having once resolved not to see London (which he loved above all places) till he had perfectly learned the Greek tongue, he went to his own house in the country, and pursued it with that indefatigable industry that it will not be believed in how short a time he was master of it, and accurately read all the Greek historians. In this time, his house being within ten miles of Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship wrth the most polite and accurate men of that university, who found such an immenseness of wit, and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in any thing, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university bound in a lesser volume, whither they came not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation.

Many attempts were made upon him by the instigvion of his mother (who was a lady of another persuasion in religion, and of a most masculine understanding, allayed with the passion and infirmities of her own sex) to pervert him in his piety to the Church of England, and to recon cile him to that of Rome; which they prosecuted with the more confidence, because he declined no opportunity or occasion of conference with those of that religion, whether priests or laics, having diligently studied the controversies, and exactly read all or the choicest of the Greek and Latin Fathers, and having a memory so stupendous that he remembered on all occasions whatsoever he read. And he was so great an enemy to that passion and uncharitableness which he saw produced by difference of opinion in matters of religion, that in all those disputations with priests and others of the Roman Church he affected to manifest all possible civility to their persons, and estimation of their parts; which made them retain still some hope of his reduction, even when they had given over offering farther reasons to him to that purpose. But this charity towards them was much lessened, and any correspondence with them quite declined, when by sinister arts they had corrupted his two younger brothers, being both children, and stolen them from his house and transported them beyond seas, and perverted his sisters: upon which occasion he writ two large discourses against the principal positions of that religion, with that sharpness of style and full weight of reason that the Church is deprived of great jewels in the concealment of them, and that they are not published to the world.

He was superior to all those passions and affections which attend vulgar minds, and was guilty of no other ambition than of knowledge, and to be reputed a lover of all good men ; and that made him too much a contemner of those arts which must be indulged in the transactions of human affairs. In the last short Parliament he was a burgess in the House of Commons; and from the debates, which were there managed with all imaginable gravity and sobriety, he contracted such a reverence to parliaments that he thought it really impossible that they could

ever produce mischieve or inconvenience to the kingdom, or that the kingdom could be tolerably happy in the intermission of them.

He had a courage of the most clear and keen temper, and so far from fear that he was not without appetite of danger; and therefore upon any occasion of action he always engaged his person in those

troops which he thought by the forwardness of the commanders to be most like to be farthest engaged; and in all such encounters he had about him a strange cheerfulness and companiable ness, without at all affecting the execution that attended them; in which he took no delight, but took pains to prevent it where it was not by resist

mand of a troop of horse, of which he had a promise, he went a volunteer with the Earl of Essex.

From the entrance into this unnatural war, his natural cheerfulness and vivacity grew clouded, and a kind of sadness and dejection of spirit stole upon him which he had never been used to; yet being one of those who believed that one battle would end all differences, and that there would be so great a victory on one side that the other would be compelled to submit to any conditions from the victor (which supposition and conclusion, gener

ance necessary: insomuch that at Edgehill, when the enemy was routed, he was like to have incurred great peril by interposing to save those who had thrown away their arms, and against whom it may be others were more fierce for their having thrown them away: insomuch as a man might think he came into the field only out of curiosity to see the face of danger, and charity to prevent the shedding of blood. Yet in his natural inclination he acknowledged he was addicted to the profession of a soldier; and shortly after he came to his fortune, and before he came to age, he went into the Low Countries, with a resolution of procuring command, and to give himself up to it; from which he was converted by the complete inactivity of that summer: and so he returned into England, and shortly after entered upon that vehement course of study we mentioned before, till the first alarum from the north; and then again he made ready for the field, and though he received some repulse in the com

ally sunk into the minds of most men, prevented the looking after many advantages which might then have been laid hold of) he resisted those indispositions, et in luctu bellum inter remedia erat. But after the King's return from Brainford, and the furious resolution of the two Houses not to admit any treaty for peace, those indispositions which had before touched him grew into a perfect habit of uncheerfulness; and he who had been so exactly unreserved and affable to all men that his face and countenance was always present and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less pleasantness of the visage a kind of rudeness or incivility, became on a sudden less communicable, and

thence very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit, which he had intended before always with more neatness and industry and expense than is usual to so great a mind, he was not now only incurious but too negligent; and in his reception of suitors, and the necessary or casual addresses to his place, so quick and sharp and severe, that there wanted not some men (who were strangers to his nature and disposition) who believed him proud and imperious; from which no mortal man was ever more free. . . .

When there was any overture or hope of peace he would be more erect and vigorous, and exceedingly solicitous to press any thing which he thought might promote it; and sitting amongst his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs, would, with a shrill and sad accent, ingeminate the word Peace, Peace, and would passionately profess that the very agony of the war, and the view of the calamities and desolation