this question.

The period of England's history which comes in review, is of the most absorbing interest, and, beyond any other, important to be studied, as it was then that the great principles of Church and State were discussed and battles for freedom fought. Special attention, of late, has been paid to the men and events of that era. Macaulay's articles upon Milton and Hallam's Constitutional History, awakened new interest upon the subject, and the revival of the prelatical controversy has kept it alive. In the first of these articles, Macaulay placed the Puritans upon a moral eminence where Rector Coit's crow-peckings will not much disturb them; and in the last, he did something to unchain Cromwell from the gallows and replace him in Westminster Abbey. He says "But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, Richard, the form of the great founder of the 'new' dynasty, on horseback, as when he led the charge at Naseby, or on foot, as when he took the mace from the table of the Commons, would adorn all our squares, and overlook our public offices from Charing Cross; and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on his lucky day, the third of September, by court chaplains, guiltless of the abominations of the surplice."

We could wish Carlyle had been fuller upon the history of this period; but he has done what he undertook. Cromwell was canonized among his Heroes, and he appears there the same man as he does in the work before us. Yet here we have given us, in the letters and speeches of Cromwell, the means by which we can better form our own opinion. We heartily thank him for his labor; and as admirers of the Puritan character generally, and also as their descendants-though having, as he would tell us, little more than a sham resemblance to their characters-we

Our object is to look at this Puritan Protector in the glass here placed before us-running off occasionally into such trains of thought as the subject suggests. Cromwell's character stood a poor chance of having justice done it from the moment his lazy son Richard abdicated the Protectorship, and the son of the beheaded king, amid shouts of drunken joy, entered London; and it is principally from writers of those days, directly or indirectly, that men have gathered their knowledge of his character.

Carlyle says Heath's book-Flagellum, or the Life and Death of O. Cromwell, late Usurper, is the chief fountain of all the foolish lies about Oliver that have since circulated. By other writers than Carlyle, this Flagellum has been called "Flagitium," and Heath himself, " Carrion Heath, and a lying dolt." Carlyle, after the most thorough examination into the subject, dismisses him and others like him as false and unworthy of the least credit.

At a time when it was written of Milton: "His fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honorable repute, had he not been a notorious traitor, and most impiously and villainously belied that blessed martyr, Charles I;" at a time when this same St. Charles I. was always at the theatre, if a play specially obscene was to be acted by lewd women, and allowed little to be going on in his palace but revelry and unmentionable intrigues; at a time when every vestige of seriousness, of common morality even, was matter of ridicule; at a time when clergymen, once sequestered for scandal and now restored to their former livings, were every week picked up drunk in the street by the city watch-what kind of justice would these men, with Cromwell at their head, who had burnt the Book

of Sports, and for games and drunken frolics had substituted the Catechism and a Gospel ministry, be likely to receive from the favorites of royalty?

And it was into such hands that the keeping of Cromwell's character fell. The vulture seized its prey, now that it was dead, and, according to its nature, devoured it. Cromwell was a favorite of no great party during the Protectorate. Cavaliers and Presbyterians generally, many of the Commonwealth's men, and ultimately all the minor sects and anarchists, feared and hated him. Many of them, while they bore testimony to the justice of his administration, would take his life because he was Protector; and many who served under him, and were trusted and promoted by him, gave testimony against him, after the Restoration," on the principle that the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib." To all of every class, who, at this time or since, have written with bitterness or prejudice against Cromwell, our author applies quite uncourteous epithets; and particularly to those little men that can see in him and the great enterprise of his day nothing but ambition and hypocrisy. He found, after years of search into authentic records of this man, that most of those who have written about him, like his "friend Ludlow," were timber-headed, flunkey-souled, and merely digestive. It was Cromwell's fortune, as it has been the fortune of most men who have taken a prominent part in a great national crisis, to have enemies for his first historians. Long ago, we noticed a reaction taking place in the public sentiment of England respecting the Protector, and the prophecy is quite credible that he will yet be universally esteemed as a truly wise and good man, as he has ever been acknowledged a right valiant conqueror and able ruler.

Whoever would understand Crom

well must throw himself back into the scenes, particularly the religious scenes of that period. This will not be as difficult for a New Englander as for Englishmen. From Henry VIII, the religious element had been most prominent in all the excitement and struggles of the kingdom. The nation had made some half dozen complete religious somersets. And for those whose pliable natures favored a change of their religion with every change of the royal head of the church, it be came necessary to keep a watchful eye upon the religious weathercock at the palace. But it was next to impossible for such men as Cranmer, for men of conscience, to shape their course with safety. Elizabeth succeeded in suppressing the spirit of liberty; yet before her death those who were called Puritans were ill at ease under her semipopish ceremonials. When James came to the throne they had high hopes of "relief." They were disappointed. Submission or banishment was the stern alternative the royal pedant offered them. But authority could not stop discussion. A general canvassing of theology and church polity went briskly on throughout the kingdom-his ma jesty leading the van. Most of the middling and higher classes had Bibles, and with or without permission, were reading for themselves. In spite of imprisonment and exile, dissent was gaining ground. Puritanism, like a genuine healthy sprout in the right soil, sent its roots deep and its branches wide, and, rocked by the tempests, became a tree too strong to be uprooted. Charles and his bishops, when comparatively weak, attempted to destroy the giant tree, although Elizabeth at the hight of her power could not extirpate the tender shoot. Arbitrary and illegal measures on the part of the court threw the weight of power decidedly into the dissenting scale. The king and his bigoted

counsellors, in their madness, went their way, and England went her way. An open rupture ensued, which was not healed till civil war with its nameless crimes and cruelties, for ten years, had coursed through the kingdom: not healed indeed till the revolution of 1688, when England, hopeless of any good in the government of the Stuarts, banished the last of them from her soil.

Religion was at the bottom of this struggle. It was a desire for liberty to worship God as they believed his word required, and for the enjoyment of what they believed to be a Gospel ministry free from the garnitures of Babylon, that fired the souls of those men whom Cromwell led to victory. Questions relating to taxes, free parliament, constitutions and the like, were proximate causes of an appeal to arms. Questions of this character were doubtless the primary questions with many who sided with the Long Par. liament in the beginning of the contest. They hoped a fair show of resistance to unjust exactions would teach his majesty to keep within constitutional limits. But in the hearts of the genuine Puritans lay the strength of the struggle. When it commenced, they had an invincible determination not to lay down their arms till their "Gospel object" was realized.

Herein, as Carlyle thinks, consists the heroism of that age. He throws himself back into their circumstances, he sees through their spiritual vision, and without concealing their errors and vices, finds a deep, earnest soul in these men, and at the bottom of their enterprise. He continually warns us against the prevalent idea, that "these seventeenth-century Puritans were superstitious, crack-brained fanatics. Their enthusiasms, if well seen into, were not foolish but wise. They meant and felt what they said. They believed in God,

an Eternal Justice ruling over this world; and that man owed to him a duty of infinite import, high as heaven, deep as hell. And it became him, above all things else, to strive that God's will be done on earth as in heaven. They believed that Christ's church should be presided over not by sham-priests, but by those men whose hearts the Most High had touched and hallowed with his fire; this was the prayer of many, it was the godlike hope and effort of some. The Cromwells, Pyms, Hampdens, who were understood on the royalist side to be firebrands of the devil, have had hard measure. They really did resemble firebrands of the devil, if you looked at them through spectacles of a certain color. For fire is always fire. But only by woodeneyed spectacles can the flame-girt heaven's messenger pass for a pedant and hypocrite. Ah! we find the hypocrisy, cant, Machiavelism, in the opposite direction." There is much in this strain in the book before us. Carlyle believes these men were sincerely intent upon the establishment of truth and right. And in the contrasts he often draws between them and their opponents, in belief and practice as Christians or citizens, they always appear to advantage.

But let us advance to the narrative. Since the monkey did not let him fall from the roof, nor curate Johnson permit him to drown, and the steeple of Huntington did not crush him, Oliver Cromwell lived to do a notable work for England. Before his deeds and words in a public capacity developed his character, little need be said of him. Nothing peculiar which is now known, marked his childhood and youth. Carlyle allows that he fell into some of the dissipations common in his times, though he finds no positive evidence of the fact. But it is certain that at twenty he was reformed. He repented of his sins,

and made restitution of money taken at the gambling table. His was a genuine, gospel conversion-a change from wrong doing to right doing; "a ceasing to do evil and learning to do well." In two letters written while he was a staid Puritan farmer, little dreaming of the "births of Providence" he was to witness, we find him interested in sustaining "lecturers"-preachers of the Puritan faith, and also speaking of his religious experience; in which experience told in Bible phrase as the custom then was, and has been in many places since-historians have found evidence of enormous wickedness in his past life, and the germ of his future hypocrisy. It doubtless did sound odd to Christians of certain names, to hear him speaking of the dealings of God with his soul. In one of those letters Cromwell alludes to his former spiritual darkness and hatred of the light; confesses how great a sinner he was in the sight of God, and how great is the mercy that could save one like him. The remarks Carlyle makes upon the inferences drawn from these letters, are too characteristic and illustrative for us to omit. To Rev. Mark Noble :Yes, my reverend imbecile friend, he (Cromwell) is clearly one of those singular Christian enthusiasts, who believe they have a soul to be saved, even as you believe you have a stomach to be satisfied-and who likewise, astonishing to say, actually take some trouble about that!' "Hadst thou never any moral life, but only a sensitive and digestive? Thy soul never longed towards the serene hights, all hidden from thee; and thirsted as the hart in dry places wherein no waters be?

It was

never a sorrow for thee that the eternal pole-star had gone out, veil ed itself in dark clouds ;-a sorrow only that this or the other noble patron forgot thee when a living fell vacant? I have known Christians, Moslems, Methodists, and, alas! also

reverend irreverent Asses by the Dead Sea !"

'O modern reader, dark as this letter may seem, I will advise thee to make an attempt to understand it. It makes it certain that man once had a soul; that he once walked with God-his little life a sacred island girdled with eternities and godhoods. Was it not a time for heroes? They were then possible. Yes, there is a tone in the soul of this Oliver that holds of the perennial. He longs towards the mark of the prize of the high calling. Let the world and its tumults go its way, only let him alone! Yet he, too, will do and suffer for God's cause, if the call come.'

In 1628, we find Cromwell, now in his 29th year, a member of Parliament for Huntington. He cuts no graceful figures in Parliament. He was not of the Beau Brummell species, "who have their being in cloth," but was known rather as a man who drove direct at the root of the matter. It appears that he was somewhat awkward as a speaker in such a place, having had more practice in praying and exhorting than in turning smooth periods to the edification of dignified public bodies. Yet he must have had the essential quality of a speaker, for "he was full of fervor and much listened to." This is Warwick's testimony of him in 1641, who "professes his reverence for that great council was much lessened when he saw it give such attention to a man in a plain cloth suit." Mr. Hyde had to call him to order, and reprove him on one occasion in committee, for his passionate and offensive language. And when, as Lord Clarendon says, this Mr. Hyde became his historian, the bad blood which Cromwell at this time stirred up had not quite settled.