would have been willing to have the character of Andrew Jackson or of Henry Clay go down to posterity as described by the most bitter and unscrupulous members of the opposite party. Yet the wrong which would thus have been done, falls far short of the injustice to which the good name of Cromwell has been exposed. Nevertheless, all the abuse heaped upon his memory has been insufficient to hide entirely his great and noble qualities from the view of his countrymen. His illustrious actions could not be wholly concealed or misrepresented, nor the splendid days of his Protectorate-coming as they did between two ages of deep national infamy-be altogether forgotten. "Driveling fanatic""base hypocrite"-" barbarous usurper"- -were phrases which could not but lose much of their significance when applied to the man with whom those days came and with whom they passed away. "His character," says a most intelligent and candid British writer, "though constantly attacked and hardly ever defended, is popular with the great body of our countrymen. I do not wish to render to Cromwell anything more than truth and candor require. A character which shines in spite of two centuries of dark calumny, surely needs nothing more. Could the great man now come up from the grave and occupy one of these seats and direct in regard to the portraiture of his life and character, he would doubtless say, "Describe me as I was:" he would exhibit the same noble spirit which he displayed when, as Lord Protector, he sat to young Lely for his picture "Paint me as I am." Said he, "If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling."

The account which may be given of Cromwell, in a single lecture, must of course be exceedingly brief and meagre. With the promi nent events of his life, and especially the views ordinarily taken of his character by the class of writers already mentioned, I must suppose you all to be more or less familiar. I shall confine my attention to the more important and characteristic facts of his history.

Oliver Cromwell was born at Huntingdon, in St. John's Parish, a few miles north of Cambridge, on the 25th of April, 1599. His father was Robert Cromwell, youngest son of Sir Henry Cromwel! and brother of Sir Oliver Cromwell; both of whom, we are told, dwelt successively, in rather sumptuous style, near by at the mansion of Hinchinbrook. His mother was Elizabeth Steward, daughter of William Steward, Esq., of Ely, a man of wealth and a kind of hereditary farmer of the Cathedral tithes and Church lands round that city. The genealogists affirm that she was descended from the royal Stewart family of Scotland, and "they explain in intricate tables how she the mother of Oliver Cromwell was indubitably either the ninth or tenth or some other fractional part of half a cousin to Charles Stewart, King of England." I mention this circumstance not because it is to be deemed any great honor to Cromwell, but because I think it but fair to state any and every fact which may, even remotely, reflect credit upon the Stewart family. They certainly stand in need even of small favors. Cromwell himself never, even in the days of his grandeur-when his enemies were misrepre

senting and denouncing him as of low origin-showed the least desire to have his parentage thought more respectable than it was. In this respect he exhibited a more uniformly healthy tone of mind even than Napoleon, who, when his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, proposed to employ certain genealogists to trace his lineage to some decayed branch of Italian royalty, nobly discouraged the attempt, saying, "I am the Rodolph of Hapsburg of my family."

Cromwell's mother is described as a woman of ardent piety and excellent sense. She was an intelligent, large-hearted and zealous Christian-just the mother to train a son for usefulness and honor. Towards her, Oliver ever manifested a profound respect-reminding us of Washington's reverence for his mother. A sister of Oliver Cromwell's father was Mrs. Hampden, mother of the illustrious John Hampden. "In short," says Carlyle, "the stories of Oliver's 'poverty,' if they were otherwise of any moment, are all false, and should be mentioned here, if still here, for the last time. The family was of the rank of substantial gentry and duly connected with such in the counties round for three generations back."

Of Oliver's childhood, the writer just quoted speaks thus: "His biographers, or rather Carrion Heath, his first biographer, * whom the others have copied, introduce various tales into these early years of Oliver of his being run away with by an ape along the leads of Hinchinbrook, and England being all but delivered from him, had the fates so ordered it; of his seeing prophetic spectres; of his robbing orchards and fighting tyrannously with boys; of his acting school plays; of his &c. &c. The whole of which grounded on human stupidity' and Carrion Heath alone, begs us to give it Christian burial once for all. Oliver attended the public school of Huntingdon, which was then conducted by a Dr. Beard." "He learned, to appearance moderately well, what the sons of other gentlemen were taught in such places; went through the universal destinies which conduct all men from childhood to youth in a way not particularized in any one point by an authentic record. Readers of lively imagination can follow him on his bird-nesting expeditions,"" social sports and labors manifold; vacation visits to his uncles, to aunt Hampden and cousin John among others all these things must have been; but how they specially were, is forever hidden from all men. He had kindred of the sort above specified; parents of the sort above specified; rigorous yet affectionate persons and very religious, as all rational persons

*James Heath, called "Carrion" Heath, from the character of the book he wrote, entitled "Flagellum or the life and death of O. Cromwell the late usurper." The circumstances and the spirit in which he describes or rather misrepresents Cromwell, may be guessed from the following remarks of Carlyle. "When restored potentates and high dignitaries had dug up above a hundred buried corpses and flung them in a heap in St. Margaret's Church-yard,' the corpse of Admiral Blake among them and Oliver's old mother's corpse; and were hanging on Tyburn gallows, as some small satisfaction to themselves, the dead clay of Oliver, of Ireton and Bradshaw; when high dignitaries and potentates were in such a humor, what could be expected of poor pamphleteers and garreteers? Heath's poor brown, lying Flagellum is described by one of the moderns as 'a Flagitium,' and Heath himself is called Carrion Heath,' as being an unfortunate, blasphemous dullard and scandal to humanity;-blasphemous; who, when the image of God is shining through a man, reckons it, in his sordid soul, to be the image of the Devil and acts accordingly; who in fact has no soul except what saves him the expense of salt; who intrinsically is Carrion and not Humanity." Which seems hard measure to poor James Heath. "He was the son of the King's cutler," says Wood, "and wrote pamphlets, the best he was able, poor man."

then were.

He had two sisters elder, and gradually five younger; the only boy among seven. Readers must fancy his growth there in the north end of Huntingdon, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, as they can."

When he was seventeen years of age, he entered the University of Cambridge. Here he pursued his studies a little more than one year, and then discontinued his connection with the University in consequence of his father's death. Providence now called him to take his father's place at Huntingdon, and it was befitting his circumstances that he should, as soon as possible, qualify himself for the duties of a county magistrate and the responsibilities of a gentlemancitizen. The universal and very credible tradition is, that he soon after went to London to attain some knowledge of the law. "The stories of his wild living while in town, of his gambling, &c., rest," says Carlyle, "exclusively on the authority of Carrion Heath, and solicit oblivion and Christian burial from all men." "Of evidence that he ever lived a wild life about town or elsewhere, there exists no particle."

Whilst at London, he became acquainted with Elizabeth, a daughter of Sir James Bourchier. To her he was married in Aug. 1620. He was now twenty-one years of age. His law-studies as such, gave place henceforth to the duties and cares of active life. Having returned to Huntingdon, he continued there for almost ten years, farming lands and discharging "the civic, industrial, and social duties in the common way: living as his father before him had done." Whatever may have been his habits while he was reading law at London, it is certain that very soon after his return to Huntingdon, he became a zealous and exceedingly active professor of religion. He spent much time in studying the word of God, which, in the present authorized English version, had then been published only about ten years. He was intimate with the Puritan preachers; he made his house their home; and sought by their labors and by every means in his power, to diffuse among the people a knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. He prayed, he exhorted, and he expounded. Even those who credit the stories of his irregular deportment at London, admit that after his return to his home and his making a profession of piety, he thoroughly reformed his habits and even refunded the money which he had won by gambling.

Here let the date of his profession of religion, according to the faith of the Puritans, be carefully marked. Let those who affirm that he put on religion as a cloak to his ambition, observe that his piety dates back twenty years prior to the opening of the civil warthat he became a zealous Puritan at a time when Puritanism, instead of looking up with ambitious aspirations to the high places of power and honor in England, was sighing rather for an asylum in this western world. Men then knew not what we know. The morning of a brighter day was, indeed, about to dawn, but to mortal eyes it was now the darkest hour of night. The day-spring of English liberty was still hid behind a fearful cloud. When no eye but the All-seeing could discern the changes which thirty years were to bring, the plain,

unassuming gentleman-farmer of Huntingdon, allied himself to a despised and persecuted cause. The Pilgrims, only a year or two before, had taken up their abode on the bleak shore of Plymouth. And eight or nine years after he began to pray and to exhort men to embrace Christ as their Saviour and to take the word of God, instead of bewildering traditions, for their life-lamp, another colony of his Puritan brethren-among whom bloomed the noble, the beautiful, the devoted Arbella Johnson-went almost from his very neighborhood and laid the foundation of Boston. Do any say, "Cromwell was a keen, far-sighted observer, and he may have seen coming events even through the gloomy shadows going before, which hid them from the ken of ordinary mortals ?" I answer, that to suppose him to have descried even the table of contents of the wonderful chapter in the book of Providence, which was to be held up to the view of Christendom, during the next third of a century, is to invest him with the attributes of a prophet. The fact is undeniable that, in respect to evangelical Protestantism and to the cause of civil liberty, the state of things not only in England but throughout Europe, was at that time exceedingly unpromising.

It is indeed true, that one hundred years anterior to this date, Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin had lifted up their voices, preaching justification by faith, individual responsibility directly to God, and the consequent right of private judgment; and had awakened millions to a consciousness of what they owed to their Creator and to themselves. It is true too that the revival of literature-closely connected with the religious revival of the Reformation—had brought light to multitudes who before were sitting in great darkness, and that the mass of European mind, like an ocean moving under the breath of the Almighty, had been heaving to and fro with an agitation which shook thrones and hierarchies, and at one time gave signs of a readiness to "make all things new." It should be conceded, moreover, that for a long period-in England extending back at least to the wars of the Roses-a new power in the state had been gradually coming into notice-the Middling Class. And commerce, aided by manufactures, and, of late, stimulated with the unwonted energy infused by the discovery of the new World and of the passage to the East Indies by the cape of Good Hope, was multiplying the sinews of power and the sources of political importance in the hands of this class. But since the death of Luther, the Reformation had, in general, either stood still or retrograded. The Protestants, instead of continuing to preach the doctrine of justification by faith,-in which their whole power lay-had been wasting their strength in pernicious controversies. And Rome, having called into being the society of the Jesuits, had multiplied her schools and colleges, and incited the potentates subject to her sway, to draw the sword and kindle the fires of persecution, and had won back half of all that she lost during the life-time of the great reformer. Meanwhile, even in Protestant countries, kings, nobles, and hierarchs, fond of power and alarmed at the spirit of revolution, before which thrones were tottering and traditions falling into contempt, had begun, many years since, to regard and to

treat with bitter hostility those who were laboring to perfect the work of religious reform and to diffuse the love and hope of liberty among the people. Not only so: after the quickening breath of the Father of Lights, which constituted the life of the Reformation, ceased in a great degree to be breathed upon the agitated mass of European mind, a cold, selfish scepticism, rendering multitudes distrustful of a righteous, overruling Providence, and cowardly, grovelling and frivolous, had, far and wide, taken the place of faith and hope; and of that courage too which owes its energy to thoughts awakened in the soul, by the celestial splendors descending upon it from the face of the Sun of Righteousness. And the mighty Middling Class, dreading the many-headed tyranny of a feudal aristocracy, had been rushing into the jaws of absolute monarchy. In Spain and Portugal, in France and many of the States of Germany, in Denmark and Sweden, the tendency was to despotism. The republic of Holland stood like the unconsumed, burning bush-strangely, gloriously preserved, because the strength and life of God were yet in the hearts of her citizens. In England, the open battle between freedom and despotism had hardly begun. Heretofore there had been suffering, petitioning, and sometimes a remonstrance on the side of those who sighed for freedom; on the other, there had been insolence, cruelty, and a manifest determination to keep whatever power it possessed and to gain as much more as it could.

No man could tell how the struggle would end. James I. was still on the throne; and how his son Charles would rule, or whether he would live to rule at all, was known to no mortal. And who could predict who were to be his chosen advisers or what they would advise ? Who could foretell what would be the temper of the people of England, or whom a revolution, should it occur, would exalt and whom it would put down? What angel was permitted to hold up to the view of that obscure country gentleman, a bold Parliament resuming and exercising lost and dormant rights, demanding justice against delinquents, and finally appealing to arms against a king proved false, cruel, and unworthy of trust; and then enabled him to gaze upon the triumphs of Marston Moor and Naseby, the fall of the monarchy, the infliction of the, death-penalty upon the king; the victories of Dunbar and Worcester, and the glories of the Protectorate?

pene

But we have more direct proof that Cromwell did not thus trate the future. A fact related by Neal, Hume, Keightley, Guizot, and many others, is conclusive. In the year 1637, not only Hampden, Pym, and Haslerig, but Cromwell had actually prepared to leave their country and were on board a vessel engaged to take them to New England, when a proclamation, emanating from the short-sighted bigotry of Archbishop Laud, prevented their leaving. He had now been a praying man for fifteen years; and rather than throw off what some imagine to have been a mere cloak, assumed for the sake of promotion in England, he was willing to forsake his country and retire to a wilderness!

As shedding light upon the question of Cromwell's sincerity, his