his speech to the Parliament in Sep-| his troops paid to property, their at tember, 1656, which contains, we think, tachment to the laws and religion of simple and rude as the diction is, their country, their submission to the stronger indications of a legislative mind, than are to be found in the whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.

civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the established government, an established government which had no means of enforcing obedience, fifty thousand soldiers whose backs no enemy had ever seen, either in domestic or in continental war, laid down their arms, and retired into the mass of the people, thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved.

"There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law. I think, I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had, or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but that would trouble you. But the truth of it is, there are wicked and abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what, to hang for a trifle, and pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing of it. I In the general spirit and character have known in my experience abomi- of his administration, we think Cromnable murders quitted; and to see men well far superior to Napoleon. "In civil lo se their lives for petty matters! government," says Mr. Hallam, "there This is a thing that God will reckon can be no adequate parallel between for; and I wish it may not lie upon one who had sucked only the dregs of this nation a day longer than you have a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom an opportunity to give a remedy; and I the stores of reason and philosophy hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it." were open." These expressions, it Mr. Hallam truly says that, though seems to us, convey the highest eulogiit is impossible to rank Cromwell with um on our great countryman. Reason Napoleon as a general, yet "his ex- and philosophy did not teach the conploits were as much above the level of queror of Europe to command his pashis contemporaries, and more the effects sions, or to pursue, as a first object, the of an original uneducated capacity." happiness of his people. They did not Bonaparte was trained in the best prevent him from risking his fame and military schools; the army which he his power in a frantic contest against led to Italy was one of the finest that the principles of human nature and the ever existed. Cromwell passed his laws of the physical world, against the youth and the prime of his manhood in rage of the winter and the liberty of the a civil situation. He never looked on sea. They did not exempt him from war till he was more than forty years the influence of that most pernicious of old. He had first to form himself, and superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. then to form his troops. Out of raw They did not preserve him from the levies he created an army, the bravest inebriation of prosperity, or restrain and the best disciplined, the most him from indecent querulousness in adorderly in peace, and the most terrible versity. On the other hand, the fanatiin war, that Europe had seen. He cism of Cromwell never urged him on called this body into existence. He led impracticable undertakings, or confused it to conquest. He never fought a battle his perception of the public good. Our without gaining it. He never gained a countryman, inferior to Bonaparte in battle without annihilating the force invention, was far superior to him in opposed to him. Yet his victories wisdom. The French Emperor is were not the highest glory of his among conquerors what Voltaire is military system. The respect which | among writers, a miraculous child. His

He

splendid genius was frequently clouded | throne so large a portion of the best by fits of humour as absurdly perverse qualities of the middling orders, so as those of the pet of the nursery, who strong a sympathy with the feelings quarrels with his food, and dashes his and interests of his people. He was playthings to pieces. Cromwell was sometimes driven to arbitrary measures; emphatically a man. He possessed, in but he had a high, stout, honest, Enan eminent degree, that masculine and glish heart. Hence it was that he full-grown robustness of mind, that loved to surround his throne with such equally diffused intellectual health, men as Hale and Blake. Hence it was which, if our national partiality does that he allowed so large a share of ponot mislead us, has peculiarly character-litical liberty to his subjects, and that, ised the great men of England. Never even when an opposition dangerous to was any ruler so conspicuously born his power and to his person almost for sovereignty. The cup which has compelled him to govern by the sword, intoxicated almost all others sobered he was still anxious to leave a germ him. His spirit, restless from its own from which, at a more favourable season, buoyancy in a lower sphere, reposed in free institutions might spring. We majestic placidity as soon as it had firmly believe that, if his first Parreached the level congenial to it. He liament had not commenced its debates had nothing in common with that large by disputing his title, his government class of men who distinguish them- would have been as mild at home as it selves in subordinate posts, and whose was energetic and able abroad. incapacity becomes obvious as soon as was a soldier; he had risen by war. the public voice summons them to take Had his ambition been of an impure or the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, selfish kind, it would have been easy his mind expanded more rapidly still. for him to plunge his country into conInsignificant as a private citizen, he tinental hostilities on a large scale, and was a great general; he was a still to dazzle the restless factions which he greater prince. Napoleon had a the- ruled, by the splendour of his victories. atrical manner, in which the coarseness Some of his enemies have sneeringly of a revolutionary guard-room was remarked, that in the successes obtained blended with the ceremony of the old under his administration he had no Court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the personal share; as if a man who had confession even of his enemies, exhibit- raised himself from obscurity to empire ed in his demeanour the simple and solely by his military talents could natural nobleness of a man neither have any unworthy reason for shrinking ashamed of his origin nor vain of his from military enterprise. This reproach elevation, of a man who had found his is his highest glory. In the success of proper place in society, and who felt the English navy he could have no secure that he was competent to fill it. selfish interest. Its triumphs added Easy, even to familiarity, where his nothing to his fame; its increase added own dignity was concerned, he was nothing to his means of overawing his punctilious only for his country. His enemies; its great leader was not his own character he left to take care of friend. Yet he took a peculiar pleaitself; he left it to be defended by his sure in encouraging that noble service victories in war, and his reforms in which, of all the instruments employed peace. But he was a jealous and im- by an English government, is the most placable guardian of the public honour. impotent for mischief, and the most He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult powerful for good. His administration him in the gallery of Whitehall, and was glorious, but with no vulgar glory. revenged himself only by liberating him It was not one of those periods of overand giving him a dinner. But he was strained and convulsive exertion which prepared to risk the chances of war to necessarily produce debility and lanavenge the blood of a private English-guor. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed England at No sovereign ever carried to the the head of the Protestant interest, and

man.

in the first rank of Christian powers. | long have been a punishable crime, He taught every nation to value her truth and merit at last prevail. Cowards friendship and to dread her enmity. who had trembled at the very sound of But he did not squander her resources in a vain attempt to invest her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain.

his name, tools of office who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets might transfer to the King the same eulogies, little the worse for

This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the ban-wear, which they had bestowed on the ners of the Commonwealth in triumph Protector. A fickle multitude might to distant capitals, if he did not adorn crowd to shout and scoff round the gibWhitehall with the spoils of the Stadt- beted remains of the greatest Prince and house and the Louvre, if he did not Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch portion out Flanders and Germany into cannon started an effeminate tyrant in his principalities for his kinsmen and his own palace, when the conquests which generals, he did not, on the other hand, had been won by the armies of Cromsee his country overrun by the armies well were sold to pamper the harlots of of nations which his ambition had pro- Charles, when Englishmen were sent voked. He did not drag out the last to fight under foreign banners, against years of his life an exile and a prisoner, the independence of Europe and the in an unhealthy climate and under an Protestant religion, many honest hearts ungenerous gaoler, raging with the swelled in secret at the thought of one impotent desire of vengeance, and who had never suffered his country to brooding over visions of departed glory. be ill used by any but himself. It must He went down to his grave in the ful- indeed have been difficult for any ness of power and fame; and he left Englishman to see the salaried Viceroy to his son an authority which any man of France, at the most important crisis of ordinary firmness and prudence of his fate, sauntering through his would have retained. haram, yawning and talking nonsense over a dispatch, or beslobbering his brother and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without a respectful and tender remembrance of him before whose genius the young pride of Louis and the veteran craft of Mazarine had stood rebuked, who had humbled Spain on the land and Holland on the sca, and whose imperial voice had arrested the sails of the Libyan pirates and the persecuting fires of Rome. Even to the present day his character, though constantly attacked, and scarcely ever defended, is popular with the great

But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which we have been expressing would, we believe, now have formed the orthodox creed of good Englishmen. We might now be writing under the government of his Highness Oliver the Fifth or Richard | the Fourth, Protector, by the grace of God, of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging. The form of the great founder of the 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 Com-body of our countrymen. mons, would adorn our squares and The most blameable act of his life overlook our public offices from Charing-was the execution of Charles. We have Cross; and sermons in his praise would already strongly condemned that probe duly preached on his lucky day, the third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of the abomination of the surplice.

ceeding; but we by no means consider it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure. It had all those

But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any party. though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise him would | features which distinguish the errors of

magnanimous and intrepid spirits from | stances, whose presaging instinct no base and malignant crimes.

sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career at such a time, can form no permanent connections, can make no accurate observations on the higher parts of political science. Before he can attach himself to a party, it is scattered. Before he can study the nature of a government, it is overturned. The oath of abjuration comes close on the oath of allegiance. The association which was subscribed yesterday is burned by the hangman today. In the midst of the constant eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object of the adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep itself from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of the question. A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be eminent or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous ; and the whole nation looks coolly on instances of apostasy which would startle the foulest turncoat of more settled times.

From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The times which followed the Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality which is his most distinguishing virtue. No part of our history, during the last three centuries, presents a spectacle of such general dreariness. The whole breed of our statesmen seems to have degenerated; and their moral and intellectual littleness strikes us with the more disgust, because we see it placed in immediate contrast with the high and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the great civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed. Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of faction succeeded to the love of liberty. Loyalty died away into servility. We look in vain among the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle, The history of France since the or even for that vulgar fidelity to party Revolution affords some striking illuswhich, in our time, it is esteemed in-trations of these remarks. The same famous to violate. The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness, which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible. In the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as much astonishment.

man was a servant of the Republic, of Bonaparte, of Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again after his return from Elba, of Lewis again after his return from Ghent. Yet all these manifold treasons by no means seemed to destroy his influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his character. We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his countrymen did not Man, however, is always the same. seem to be shocked; and in truth they And when so marked a difference ap- had little right to be shocked: for there pears between two generations, it is was scarcely one Frenchman distincertain that the solution may be found guished in the state or in the army, in their respective circumstances. The who had not, according to the best of principal statesmen of the reign of his talents and opportunities, emulated Charles the Second were trained during the example. It was natural, too, that the civil war and the revolutions which this should be the case. The rapidity followed it. Such a period is eminently and violence with which change folfavourable to the growth of quick and lowed change in the affairs of France active talents. It forms a class of men, towards the close of the last century shrewd, vigilant, inventive; of men had taken away the reproach of inconwhose dexterity triumphs over the most sistency, unfixed the principles of pubperplexing combinations of circum-lic men, and produced in many minds

a general scepticism and indifference | the reign of Charles the Second can about principles of government. only be explained by supposing an No Englishman who has studied at- utter want of principle in the political tentively the reign of Charles the world. On neither side was there fiSecond, will think himself entitled to delity enough to face a reverse. Those indulge in any feelings of national honourable retreats from power which, superiority over the Dictionnaire des in later days, parties have often made, Girouettes. Shaftesbury was surely a with loss, but still in good order, in far less respectable man than Talley- firm union, with unbroken spirit and rand; and it would be injustice even to formidable means of annoyance, were Fouché to compare him with Lauder- utterly unknown. As soon as a check dale. Nothing, indeed, can more clearly took place a total rout followed: arms show how low the standard of political and colours were thrown away. The morality had fallen in this country than vanquished troops, like the Italian merthe fortunes of the two British states-cenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth men whom we have named. The government wanted a ruffian to carry on the most atrocious system of misgovernment with which any nation was ever cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the drowning of women, by the frightful torture of the boot. And they found him among the chiefs of the rebellion and the subscribers of the Covenant. The opposition looked for a chief to head them in the most desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on any English administration: and they selected the minister who had the deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of Kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural flux and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked

centuries, enlisted on the very field of battle, in the service of the conquerors. In a nation proud of its sturdy justice and plain good sense, no party could be found to take a firm middle stand between the worst of oppositions and the worst of courts. When, on charges as wild as Mother Goose's tales, on the testimony of wretches who proclaimed themselves to be spies and traitors, and whom everybody now believes to have been also liars and murderers, the offal of gaols and brothels, the leavings of the hangman's whip and shears, Catholics guilty of nothing but their religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where were the loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when the time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed to destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when Jefferies and Kirke were making Somersetshire what Lauderdale and Graham had made Scotland, where were the ten thousand brisk boys of Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus juries, the wearers of the Polish medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable to save themselves, the members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed, murdered and were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between the frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.

To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which had preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to be attributed. Other causes had also