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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOLUME 61, NO. 378, APRIL, 1847 ***




Produced by Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram, Josephine
Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
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BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXVIII. APRIL, 1847. VOL. LXI




CROMWELL.


Mr Carlyle's services to history in collecting and editing these
letters[1] and speeches of Cromwell, all men will readily and gratefully
acknowledge. A work more valuable as a guide to the study of the
singular and complex character of our pious revolutionist, our religious
demagogue, our preaching and praying warrior and usurper, has not been
produced. There is another portion of Mr Carlyle's labours which will
not meet so unanimous an approbation. As _editor_, Mr Carlyle has given
us a valuable work; as _commentator_, the view which he would teach us
to take of English Puritanism is, to our thinking, simply the most
paradoxical, absurd, unintelligible, mad business we ever encountered in
our lives.

Our Hero-worshipper, it must be allowed, has been more fortunate this
time in the selection of his object of devotion than when he shouted to
the skies his Mirabeaus and Dantons. But he makes an unfortunate species
of compensation. In proportion as his hero is more within the bounds of
humanity has his worship become more extravagant and outrageous. He
out-puritans the Puritans; he is more fanatic than his idol; he has
chosen to express himself with such a righteous truculence, such a
sanguinary zeal, such a pious contempt for human virtue and human
sympathies, as would have startled Old Noll himself. It is a bad
religion this hero-worship--at least as practised by Mr Carlyle. Here is
our amiable countryman rendered by it, in turn, a terrorist and a
fanatic. All his own intellectual culture he throws down and abandons.
Such dire transformation ensues as reminds us of a certain hero-worship
which Milton has celebrated:

                    "Horror on him falls,
    _And horrid sympathy_; for what he sees
    He feels himself, now changing; down his arms,
    Down falls the spear and shield; down he as fast;
    And the dire hiss renews, and the dire form,
    Catched by contagion."

But to our task--which is no light one; for in our survey of this book
we have to keep in view both hero and hero-worshipper, Cromwell and
Carlyle, both somewhat slippery personages, abnormal, enigmatical.

The speeches of Oliver Cromwell have a formidable reputation for
prolixity, confusion, and excessive tediousness; yet we have not, for
our own part, found these volumes to be of the dry and scarce readable
description which their title foreboded; and we would caution others not
to be deterred by any fears of this nature from their perusal. They will
find an interest grow upon them as they proceed, and the last volume to
be more attractive than the first. As the work advances, the letters and
speeches of Cromwell become more intimately connected with the great
transactions of the period, and the editor himself more frequently
favours us with some specimen of his happier manner, where concentration
of style, a spirit of humour and reflection, and a power of vivid
portraiture, have _not_ degenerated into mere quaintness, into a species
of slang, into _Carlylisms_, into vague generalities about infinitudes
and eternities. At all times the interspersed commentary--written in
that peculiar, fantastic, jingling manner which, illegitimate as it is,
disorderly and scandalous to all lovers of propriety in style and
diction, is at all events the very opposite to dulness--forms perhaps
the most fortunate contrast that could have been devised with the
Cromwellian period, so arid and colourless, so lengthy and so tortuous,
tinged often with such a dismal obscurity, and valuable in fact only as
showing _the man_, utterly valueless as an exposition of thought.
Perhaps, as models of style, a critic would be as little disposed to
applaud the writing of Mr Carlyle as the compositions of Cromwell, but
they form here all admirable relief the one to the other; taken
together, one can consume a considerable quantity of both. Your dry
bread is weary mastication, and your potted anchovies have a somewhat
too stinging flavour; but taken together, sandwich-fashion, as they are
here, the consumption may go on rapidly enough.

But, whether dry or not, the letters and speeches of Cromwell should be
read by every one desirous of obtaining an insight into the character of
not the least extraordinary, nor the least misrepresented personage in
history. If there is any one who still believes that Cromwell was a
thorough hypocrite, that his religion was a systematic feint to cover
his ambitious designs, the perusal of these volumes will entirely
undeceive him. We look upon this hypothesis, this Machiavelian
explanation of Cromwell's character, as henceforth entirely dismissed
from all candid and intelligent minds. It was quite natural that such a
view should be taken of their terrible enemy by the royalists of the
Restoration, hating his memory with a most cordial hatred, and
accustomed, in their blinding licentiousness, to look upon _all_
religion as little better than cant and hypocrisy. It was quite natural
that such a portrait of him should be drawn by the men who unearthed his
bones, and vented their rage upon a senseless corpse. We see it was
quite inevitable that some such coarse caricature should be thus limned
and transmitted to us. But it has lasted long enough. We believe,
indeed, that by most persons it has already been dismissed and disowned.
It may now be torn into shreds, and cast aside as utterly faithless.

Cromwell was a _genuine Puritan_. There is no doubt of that. He was no
youth when the war broke out, nor a man who had yet to seek his
religious party or principles. As the farmer of St Ives, we see him, as
distinctly as if he still lived upon the earth, the man of fierce
sectarian piety, in natural temper not unamiable, somewhat gloomy and
hypochondriacal, but, above all, distinguished by whatsoever of good or
ill the sort of Calvinistic divinity prevalent at the time could infuse
into its professors. Such the war found him, and such he continued to
be; throughout his whole career we never for a moment lose sight of "the
saint," the title which, then as now, the profane world gave to this
class of men.

Was Cromwell, then, always sincere in his utterances? was there no cant,
_no_ hypocrisy? Did he never conceal the ambition and domineering spirit
of the soldier under the humility of the saint? Another matter quite.
Because a man is religious in the main, it follows not that he is
incapable of occasionally practising hypocrisy: he may lapse as well
into this, as into any crime of the decalogue. Although we might find it
difficult to put our finger exactly upon the spot, and say, Here speaks
the hypocrite, we are not without suspicion that Cromwell was at times
practising dissimulation. But if he dissembled, if he used with artifice
the language of religion, it was no new and foreign disguise that he
put on. He had but to draw the folds a little higher over his face of a
robe that he had long worn in all times and seasons, and which was
verily his own.

In common with almost all men who in times of civil broil have risen
from a lowly station to great power, Cromwell had occasion, no doubt, at
times for dissimulation. His religion, genuine as it was, would no more
prevent him from the practice of this necessary craft than from the
sanguinary deeds not more necessary to the triumph of his cause. Nay, it
was precisely of that enthusiastic order which, in the most liberal
manner, justifies the means for the end. Now, at a period when the
saints were in the ascendant, dissimulation would unavoidably take a
religious form, and when most deceiving men, or most faithfully
addressing them, he would still colour all his language with the same
hue of piety. As, in an age of chivalry, the dissembler would have the
boast of honour and the parade of knightly courtesy for ever on his
lips, so in these times of saintship he would lull the suspicions of men
by a gross emblazonry of religion. It might well happen, therefore, that
such a man as Cromwell, working his way upward to the highest post of
authority, would deal in much insincerity of phrase, and yet have "the
root of the matter" in him. Indeed, nothing is more common in the world
than this combination of genuine feelings of piety with a great
abundance of cant, habitual or designed. It would betray a very slender
knowledge of mankind, and none at all of what is called the religious
world, to conclude that a man is destitute of sincere piety because he
sometimes makes use of the language of religion for ulterior purposes
not peculiarly pious.

It is to be observed, moreover, that to readers unfamiliar with the
peculiarities of _professing_ Christians, whether Puritans or of other
denomination, the expressions of humility and self-abasement which
Cromwell frequently makes use of have appeared to be plain symptoms of
hypocrisy. They are nothing but the habits of the sect. Such expressions
are supposed to have been employed to blind men to his ambitious
projects, to shelter him from the jealous scrutiny of rivals and
superiors. Such a purpose they may have sometimes answered, and been
intended to answer; but in the main they are nothing more nor less than
the dialect of the tribe. Because is a Christian virtue, certain
religious people have thought fit to indulge in a false vituperation of
themselves. Striving avariciously after _all_ virtues, however
incompatible the one with the other, they counterfeit vice and meanness,
that, good men as they are, they may have abundance of contrition. How
far there can be Christianity or piety in an abuse and degradation of
ourselves, when that abuse and degradation must be felt all along to be
untrue--if any reflection whatever accompanies such language--we leave
such people to settle amongst themselves. Certain it is that the
Puritans excelled in this as in every other kindred extravagance. The
elect of the Lord were fond of describing themselves as the most
contemptible of sinners; the salt of the earth as being rottenness and
corruption. It is to this habit of unmeaning self-disparagement that we
are to attribute many of those phrases which have been thought in
Cromwell to be studied artifices to cloak ambitious designs.

They are rife on all occasions, and their frequency and energy bear no
relation to the supposed exigencies of his political career. Take the
following instance. No man surely knew better than he, that at the
conclusion of the civil war the army had become paramount. He could
sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with
the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on
him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in
the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle.
As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:--"I
had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of
England, Scotland, and Ireland. I say of the officers: I had that by
their express remonstrances, and under signature. But there went along
with that express consent of theirs, an implied consent also of a body
of persons who had had somewhat to do in the world; who had been
instrumental, by God, to fight down the enemies of God, and his people,
in the three nations. And truly, until my hands were bound, and I was
limited, (to my own great satisfaction, as many can bear me witness,)
while I had in my hands so great a power and arbitrariness--the soldiery
were a very considerable part of these nations, especially all
government being dissolved. I say, when all government was thus
dissolved, and nothing to keep things in order but the sword!" There can
be no doubt of it--the soldiery were a very considerable part of the
nation. But the Lord High Protector, in a speech he makes to his second
parliament, referring to the very same period, narrating the very same
events, can talk of this army as "a company of poor men," "your poor
army," "those poor contemptible men." To attempt to detect any political
motive for this absurd phraseology, would be a very idle speculation,
mere waste of ingenuity: he was simply more in the puritanic vein in the
one case than the other.

In his letters to the parliament, giving an account of his successes in
the war, he generally concludes with some expression of this strained
evangelical modesty, and seems very much afraid lest Speaker Lenthall
and other honourable members should attribute the victories he
announces, in any measure to the army and the general who won them. He
might be very sure, however, that, notwithstanding these
self-renunciations, the parliament knew very well who was fighting their
battles. Such a mode of speech would not endanger his reputation, nor
diminish from his claims; might perhaps--though we will not say this was
present to his thoughts--induce the parliament to presume that _he_
would not insist on any very egregious reward for services he was so
anxious to disclaim. We will quote one instance of this self-denying
style; and perhaps the following passage contains altogether as much of
a certain fanatical mode of reasoning as could be well found in so short
a compass. Prince Rupert, then at Worcester, had sent two thousand men
across the country, to his majesty at Oxford, to convoy his majesty's
person and the artillery over to him at Worcester. Cromwell attacked and
routed this convoy; he also took Bletchington House. After giving an
account of the transaction, he continues:--"This was the mercy of God;
and nothing is more due than a real acknowledgment. And though I have
had greater mercies, yet none clearer: because, in the first place, God
brought them to our hands when we looked not for them; and delivered
them out of our hands, when we laid a reasonable design to surprise
them, and which we carefully endeavoured. His mercy appears in this
also, that I did much doubt the storming of the house, it being strong
and well manned, and I having few dragoons, and this being not my
business; and yet we got it. I hope you will pardon me if I say, God is
not enough owned. _We look too much to men and visible helps_: this hath
much hindered our success." This from Oliver, who so well knew how "to
keep his powder dry!" from Oliver, who, enthusiast himself, could yet
shrewdly calculate on the military efficacy of enthusiasm, and set it
down amongst the ways and means! Cant or not, it is sad stuff.

But, Puritan as he was, we can admire Cromwell. Every great man, in
whatever times, or in whatever part of the world he has made his
appearance, has earned his title to fame and distinction, not by
qualities peculiar to the sect or religion to which he may have
belonged, but qualities which, though connected with his own especial
faith or tenets, are recognised as the common property of mankind; he
has been great not as Catholic, as Puritan, as Pagan, as Mahometan, but
as _man_; he has been great, because he was pious, brave, patriotic,
sagacious, resolute, and has achieved great enterprises on the theatre
of life. The greatness of Cromwell was indeed allied to Puritanism,
inasmuch as his mind grew up under this peculiar form of religion; but
what we, and all posterity must admire in Cromwell, is by no means the
puritan. His steadiness of purpose, his unshaken resolution, his
military prowess, his eminent talent to govern and command, and his
religious sense of duty to the Supreme, might all have existed under
other modes of religion. In our admiration we entirely separate these
qualities from that least gainly and least wholesome of the forms of
Christian piety with which they are here found connected. History gives
us examples of every kind of virtue, and every kind of talent, united
with every species of fanaticism that has afflicted civilised life. It
follows not that we applaud the fanaticism. The early caliphs were
several of them distinguished by exalted virtues, temperance,
self-denial, justice, patriotism: we praise these virtues, we
acknowledge, too, that they are here linked with the profession of the
faith of Islam; but for all this we do not admire the religion of
Mahomet, nor that fanaticism which writ its texts upon the sword.

We insist upon this obvious distinction, because, whilst agreeing--_to a
certain extent_--in Mr Carlyle's view of the character of Cromwell, we
beg not to be implicated in that esteem and reverence which he professes
to entertain for Puritanism, or the Puritans as a body. And this brings
us to the extraordinary part of Mr Carlyle's performance--his ardent
sympathy, nay his acquiescence with, and adherence to the Puritans, to
that point that he adopts their convictions, their feelings, and even
some of their most grotesque reasonings. Their violence and ferocity, we
were prepared to see Mr Carlyle, in his own sardonic fashion, abet and
encourage; his sympathy is always with the party _who strikes_; but that
he should identify himself with their mumming thoughts, their "plentiful
reasons," their gloomiest superstitions, was what no one could have
anticipated. On this subject we must quote his own words; our own would
not be credited; they would seem to any one who had not read his work to
be scandalous misrepresentations. The extravagance runs through the
whole book, but we have it perhaps more concentrated in the
Introduction.

This Introduction, which we sat down to with keen expectations,
disappointed us extremely, at least in those parts where any general
views are taken. We feel, and have elsewhere ungrudgingly expressed, a
certain admiration for the talents of Mr Carlyle. We shall never forget
the surprise and pleasure with which we read the "Sartor Resartus," as
it one day burst suddenly and accidentally upon us; and no one who has
once read his graphic and passionate history of the French Revolution,
can ever forget the vivid pictures that were there presented to him. We
opened this book, therefore, with a sort of anticipatory relish. But we
found very little of his genius, and very much of his extravagance; less
of the one and more of the other, than we thought could possibly have
been brought together. Metaphors and allusions, already worn
thread-bare, are introduced as stock phrases, as if he had inserted them
in his dictionary of the English language. All his vices of manner are
exaggerated, while the freshness of thought, which half excused them, is
departed. These strange metaphors, these glaring colours, which are
ready spread out upon his palette, he transfers with hasty profusion to
his canvass, till--(as it has been said of Mr Turner's, pictures)--the
canvass and the palette-plate very nearly resemble. But were it
otherwise, were there all and more than the wit, and humour, and
sarcasm, and pungent phrase, and graphic power, which may be found
scattered through Mr Carlyle's best performances, there is here a
substratum of sheer and violent absurdity, which all these together
would fail to disguise or compensate. Certainly there are pages of
writing in this Introduction which contain such an amount of extravagant
assertion, uttered in such fantastic jargon, as we think could nowhere
be paralleled. Dulness could never have attained to any thing so
extraordinary; and surely genius never before condescended to such
workmanship.

"What and how great," thus commences the book, "are the interests which
connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some,
practical belief and understanding of its history during the seventeenth
century, need not be insisted on at present, such hope being still very
distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which
guided us in that century, _and indeed which had guided us in all
preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate
manifestation_. We have wandered very far, and must endeavour to return
and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than
those of poor peddling dilettantism, other aims than the writing of
successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies
himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The _last
glimpse of the godlike_ vanishing from this England; conviction and
veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism--antique 'Reign of
God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always
striven for, giving place to the modern reign of the No-God, whom men
name devil; this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight
to create reflections in the earnest man! One wishes there were a
history of English Puritanism, _the last of all our heroisms_, but sees
small prospect of such a thing at present."

Then, beginning to quote himself, as his manner is, changing his voice
and adopting another key, as if by this thin disguise to obtain somewhat
more license for the wildness and vehemence of his speech--an artifice
surely not necessary here--he thus continues:--

"'Few nobler heroisms,' says a well-known writer, long occupied on this
subject, 'at bottom, perhaps, _no nobler heroism_, ever transacted
itself on this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us, overwhelmed
under such an avalanche of human stupidities as no heroism before ever
did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible
to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has
become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the
documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are
not legible. They lie there printed, written, to the extent of tons of
square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as
indexed; full of every conceivable confusion; yielding light to very
few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many.' ...

"'This, then,' continues our impatient friend, 'is the Elysium we
English have provided for our heroes! The Rushworthian Elysium.
Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on
confusion to your utmost horizon's edge; obscure in lurid twilight as of
the shadow of death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or
mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still
human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by
somnambulant pedants, dilettants, and doleful creatures, by phantasms,
errors, inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins,
wiverns, and chimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under
such waste lumber mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six
unbelieving generations, does the age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie
hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to
accomplish towards keeping _our heroic ones_ in memory.'"

After some further diatribe against all preceding historians,
collectors, and editors, he drops his ventriloquism, and, resuming a
somewhat more natural voice, he proceeds:--

"Nay, in addition to the sad state of our historical books, and what
indeed is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common
spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called
spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that seventeenth
century. _The Christian doctrines, which then dwelt alive in every
heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts_--very mournful to
behold--and are not the guidance of this world any more. Nay, worse
still, the cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting
that it is cant, in which fatal intermediate state the eternal
sacredness of this universe itself, of this human life itself, has
fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that, too, a cant and a
creed."

So!--as our honest German friend would exclaim, puffing from his mouth
at the same time a huge volume of symbolic smoke. We have withdrawn it
seems, from the path of light ever since the reign of the army and its
godly officers established A.D. 1649. We must return and connect
ourselves therewith; it is our only salvation; though, indeed, if
Puritanism was the manifestation of the ideas of all preceding
centuries--if the same current of thought can be traced from William the
Conqueror to Oliver the conqueror--a very little ingenuity would suffice
to trace the same ideas, the same current of thought, somewhat farther
still. But this reign of the puritanical army was really "the last
glimpse of the godlike!"--it was "the reign of God!" and we live under
the reign of ----, psha! Why, he does not even give us a substantial
devil, but coins a strange personification of a negative. Such was not
the devil, by the way, at the time of "the noblest heroism ever
transacted on the earth." Such a definition of the "roaring lion,"
would, in those days of light and happiness, have procured its author,
at the very least, a trip to Barbadoes. Even Cromwell himself would have
_Barbadoesed_ him.

"This last of our heroisms!" God grant it is the last! It is only out of
another religious war that another such heroism can arise. If church and
dissent should take up arms, and, instead of controversies carried on in
pamphlets, upon tradition and white surplices, should blow out each
other's brains with gunpowder, then Mr Carlyle would see his "heroic
ones" revive upon the earth.

"The Christian doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now
in a manner died out of all hearts." Only the cant of them dwells alive
with us. The same clear-sighted author, who sees the Christian doctrines
so beautifully and pre-eminently developed in the Ironsides of Cromwell,
in the troopers of Lambert and Harrison, sacking, pillaging,
slaughtering, and in all that tribe of men who ever shed blood the
readier after prayer-time--men who had dropped from their memory
Christ's own preaching, to fill their mouths with the curses which the
Hebrew prophets had been permitted, under a past dispensation, to
denounce against the enemies of Judea, who had constructed their
theology out of the darkest parts of the New, and the most fearful
portion of the Old Testament;--this same author, opening his eyes and
ears upon his own day and generation, finds that Christianity has died
out of all hearts, and its phraseology, as he expresses himself
elsewhere, "become mournful to him when spouted as frothy cant from
Exeter Hall." If Mr Carlyle would visit Exeter Hall, and carry there one
tithe of the determination to approve, that he exhibits in favour of the
Puritan, he would find a Christian piety as sincere, as genuine, and far
more humane, than his heroes of Naseby, or Dunbar, or Drogheda were
acquainted with. He would see the descendants of his Puritans, relieved,
at least we may say, from the necessity of raising their psalm on the
battle-field, indulging in none of the ferocities of our nature,
assembling in numerous but peaceful meetings, raising annually, by a
quiet but no contemptible sacrifice, their millions for the
dissemination of Gospel truth. But Mr Carlyle would call this cant; he
sees nothing good, or generous, or high-minded in any portion of the
world in which he lives; he reserves his sympathies for the past--for
the men of buckram and broad-sword, who, on a question of church
government, were always ready "to hew Agag to pieces," let Agag stand
for who, or what number it might.

If there is one spectacle more odious than another of all which history
presents to us, whether it take place amongst Mahometan or Christian,
Catholic or Protestant, it is this:--to see men practising all the
terrible brutalities of war, treading down their enemies, doing all that
rage and the worst passions prompt, and doing all amidst exclamations of
piety, devout acknowledgments of submission to Divine will, and
professions of gratitude to God. Other religious factions have committed
far greater atrocities than the Puritans, but nowhere in history is this
same spectacle exhibited with more distasteful and sickening
accompaniments. The Moslem thanked God upon his sword in at least a
somewhat soldierly manner; and the Catholic, by the very pomp with which
he chants his _Te Deum_, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and,
keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural
feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling
and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid
sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle.
All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in answer to his
long and miserable prayers--prayers which, to a man of rational piety,
sound very much like blasphemies. He carries with him to the
battle-field, to the siege, to the massacre, not one even of those
generous feelings which war itself permits towards a foe. He chooses to
call his enemy the enemy of God, and kneels before he fights, that the
inexpressible _mercy_ may be granted of cutting his throat!

"That the sense of difference between right and wrong," says Mr Carlyle,
"had filled all time and all space for man, and bodied itself forth into
a heaven and hell for him,--this constitutes the grand feature of those
Puritan, old-Christian ages; this is the element which stamps them as
heroic, and has rendered their works great, manlike, fruitful to all
generations." Quite on the contrary. The sense of right and wrong was
obscured, confused, lost sight of, in the promptings of a presumptuous
enthusiasm; and it is exactly _this_ which constitutes the perilous
characteristic of such men as the Puritans and Cameronians, and similar
sectaries. How can the sense of right and wrong keep its footing in an
enthusiasm which has brought itself to believe that all its successes
are a direct answer to its prayers? Success becomes the very measure of
right and wrong. The two extremes of Atheism and Fanaticism have met;
they may both dispense with conscience, and make the event the criterion
of the deed. Hear how the pious heroes of Mr Carlyle reason on one of
the most solemn occasions of the civil war. The army is remonstrating
with the Parliament because it appeared slow to shed the blood of their
conquered and captured King, and it actually speaks of the death of
Charles "as appeasing the wrath of God" against that sovereign! and bids
the Parliament "sadly to consider, as men accountable to the Highest,"
how far an accommodation with the King, "when God hath given him so
clearly into your power to do justice, can be just before God or good
men." The _power_ to do the act is full authority, is absolute command
to do it. What other doctrine could a Caesar Borgia, or an Eccelino, the
tyrant of Padua, desire to be governed, or rather to be manumitted by
from all government?

The argument drawn from the success given to their cause, is perpetually
in the mouth of Cromwell and of his Puritans. It establishes, without a
doubt, that they have used the sword justly, and are still further to
use it. Every "mercy" of this kind is in answer to prayer. Basing-House,
a private residence, cannot be sacked and plundered, and the inhabitants
put to the sword, but the pious historian of the feat, Mr Peters, adds,
that it, and the like triumphs, were "answers to the prayers and
trophies of the faith of some of God's servants." When Greek meets
Greek, when the Scottish Covenanter encounters the English Puritan, and
the former, being worsted, finds out "that he had not so learned Christ
as to hang the equity of a cause upon events," Cromwell answers, "Did
not you solemnly appeal and pray? Did not we do so too? And ought not
you and we to think, with fear and trembling, of the hand of the Great
God, in this mighty and strange appearance of His, instead of slightly
calling it an 'event'? Were not both your and our expectations renewed
from time to time, whilst we waited upon God, to see which way He would
manifest himself upon our appeals? And shall we, after all these our
prayers, fastings, tears, expectations, and solemn appeals, call these
bare 'events'? The Lord pity you."

Men prayed in those days! says Mr Carlyle, "actually prayed! It was a
capability old London and its preachers and populations had; to us the
incredibilest." Beyond a doubt the Puritans and the Covenanters prayed,
and in such a manner and at such a length, that the strange doctrine on
which Southey has founded his "Curse of Kehama," of the essential and
irresistible force of prayer, seems to have got mixed up with their
Christianity.[2] But we do not think that the voice of prayer has quite
died out amongst us. It is curious to observe what a vivid perception
this author has for the historical past, and what a voluntary blindness
and deafness for the actually present. It is a fact! he frequently
exclaims, with all the energy of a discoverer,--a fact! that men in
these ages prayed, and had a religious faith. Our churches and chapels
are not facts. The control--none the worse for being exercised without
pike or musket--which the religious public, meeting in that very Exeter
Hall, have over the measures of government, and all political
transactions,--is not a fact. Were he writing, some centuries hence, the
history of this our age, he would detect these facts. What facts,
indeed, might he not detect, and what exaggerated significance might he
not give to them! Why, in those days, he might exclaim, in his
enthusiasm, the very beggars in the street, in asking charity, poured
God's blessing on you! It was a credible thing, in those days, God's
blessing!--and men gave their money for it!

A passage in one of Cromwell's letters instances, in rather a touching
manner, what school of piety this army of saints must have proved. At
the battle of Marston Moor a Colonel Walton had lost his son. "He was a
gallant young man, exceedingly gracious," and Cromwell, giving an
account of his death, in his consolatory letter to the father, writes
thus,--"A little after, he said, one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked
him what that was. He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be
any more _the executioner of his enemies!_"

But nothing disturbs the equanimity of our editor, or interrupts his
flow of rapture over the fanaticism of these times, especially when
expressed in the letters of Cromwell. Over the theological effusions
which the general of the Puritan army addresses, from his camp, to the
Edinburgh clergy, Mr Carlyle thus expatiates:--"Dryasdust, carrying his
learned eye over these, and the like letters, finds them, of course,
full of 'hypocrisy,' &c. Unfortunate Dryasdust! they are corruscations
terrible as lightning, and beautiful as lightning, from the innermost
temple of the human soul; intimations, still credible, of what a human
soul does mean when it _believes_ in the Highest--a thing poor Dryasdust
never did, nor will do. The hapless generation that now reads these
words ought to hold its peace when it has read them, and sink into
unutterable reflections, not unmixed with tears, and some substitute for
'sackcloth and ashes,' if it liked. In its poor canting, sniffling,
flimsy vocabulary, there is no word that can make any response to them.
This man has a living God-inspired soul in him, not an enchanted
artificial 'substitute for salt,' as our fashion is. They that have
human eyes can look at him; they that have only owl-eyes need not."

And then follows something upon _light_ and _lightning_. "As lightning
is to light, so is a Cromwell to a Shakspere. The light is beautifuller.
Ah, yes; but, until by lightning and other fierce labour your foul chaos
has become a world, you cannot have any light, or the smallest chance
for any!... The melodious speaker is great, but the melodious worker is
greater than he. Our Time cannot speak at all, but only cant and sneer,
and argumentatively jargon and recite the multiplication-table:
neither, as yet, can it work, except at mere railroads and
cotton-spinning. It will, apparently, return to chaos soon, and then
more lightnings will be needed, lightning enough,--to which Cromwell's
was but a mild matter,--to be followed by light, we may hope!"--by
another Shakspeare, as the tenor of the passage would imply.

Strange jumble this of Cromwell and Shakspeare, of light and lightning!
There is one species of light which we are often reminded of here; a
certain fitful, flickering beam, which partakes indeed of a luminous
nature, but which chooses its path for ever over bottomless bog.

The sincerity of Oliver Cromwell, in these his letters and speeches, has
been questioned and discussed; the sincerity of their present editor may
become a question at least as difficult and perplexing. Is there any
genuine conviction at the bottom of all this rant and raving? Our
extravagant worshipper of the "old heathen" Goethe, stands forth the
champion and admirer of certain harsh, narrow-thoughted, impetuous
sectaries, proclaims _them_ the only "Reformers" of the world; descends
to their lowest prejudices, to their saddest bigotries, to their gloomy
puerilities; arguing with them solemnly against the sinfulness of
drinking healths, and quite fraternising with them in all their
animosity against Popery and Prelacy. What does he mean? Is it a case of
conversion? Is it an outpouring merely, by a strange vent, of certain
acrid humours? Is he honest, and in earnest? or is he making sport of
those hapless Englishmen whom he pronounces "in human stupidity to have
no fellow?"

Observers of a curious and speculative turn might, perhaps, explain it
thus:--Mr Carlyle is evidently a writer of strong religious feelings.
Marry, when he would exhibit them to the world, he is under the
necessity of borrowing a creed from some one else. His own philosophy
has nothing palpable enough for ordinary vision; nothing, as we
remember, but vague infinities and eternities, with an "everlasting
_yes_," and an "everlasting _no_." As the choice lay quite open to him,
there was no reason why he should not select the very hottest creed he
could any where find lying about in our history. From contemporaries it
was not likely that he should borrow: he loves nothing, praises nothing,
esteems nothing of this poor visible present; but it was an additional
recommendation to the Puritanic piety, that it had left a detestable
memory behind it, and was in declared hostility with all contemporaneous
ways of thinking. What could he better do, therefore, than borrow this
old volcanic crater of Puritanism, and pour out from it his religion and
his anger upon a graceless world?

Others, not given to such refinements, would explain the phenomenon upon
more ordinary principles, and reduce the enigma to a case merely of
literary monomania. Mr Carlyle, they would say, has been striving to
understand these Puritans till he has grown, for the time, to resemble
them. In the effort to project his mind into their mind, he has overshot
the mark; he has not been able yet to get his own mind back again. It is
a case, they would say, of mere imagination. Could you bring Mr Carlyle
into contact with a live Puritan, the charm would be instantly
dispelled. If one of Harrison's troopers would but ask him to step aside
with him, under a hedge, to wrestle for a blessing, or would kindly
undertake to catechise him on some point of divinity,--on that notion of
his, for instance, of "Right and Wrong bodying themselves into Hell and
Heaven,"--the alliance would be dissolved, not, perhaps, without violent
rupture.

For ourselves, we sometimes think that Mr Carlyle is in earnest. Men
should be honest. One who talks so loudly about _faith_, ought to be
sincere in his utterances to the public. At other times, the mummery
becomes too violent, grows too "fast and furious," to permit us to
believe that what we witness is the sane carriage of a sane man. At all
events, we can but look on with calm surprise. If our philosopher will
tuck his robe high up about his loins, and play the merry-andrew, if he
will grimace, and paint thick, and hold dialogue with himself, who shall
hinder him?--only we would rather not wear, on such an occasion, the
docile aspect of admiring pupils; we prefer to stand aside, and look on
with Mr Dryasdust.

It is worthy of note, that however Mr Carlyle extols his "Heroic Ones"
in a body, Cromwell is the only individual that finds a good word
throughout the work. Every one else, Hampden not excepted, is spoken of
with slight and disparagement. Amongst all the "godlike," there is but
one who finds favour in his sight,--him, however, he never deserts,--and
the very parties who have before been applauded, in general terms,
become the subjects of ridicule or castigation the moment they are seen
in opposition to Cromwell.

To Cromwell, then, let us turn our attention. Him we also can admire. We
admire his great practical sagacity, his eminent talents for war and for
government, the moderation and the conscientiousness which, though a
usurper and a zealot, he displayed in the use of power. He was, as we
have said, a genuine Puritan. This must be understood, or no
intelligible view of his character can be taken. It is not only
hostility to his memory which has attributed to him a studied hypocrisy;
the love of the marvellous has lent its aid. Such a supposition was
thought to magnify his talents and his genius. It was more dramatic to
make him the "honest Iago" of the piece. A French writer, M. Villemain,
in his History of Cromwell, expresses this feeling very naively, and
speaks of an hypocrisy "que l'histoire atteste, et qu'on ne saurait
mettre en doute sans oter quelque chose a l'idee de son genie; car les
hommes verront toujours moins de grandeur dans un fanatique de bonne
foi, que dans une ambition qui fait des enthusiastes. Cromwell mena les
hommes par la prise qu'ils lui donnaient sur eux. _L'ambition seule lui
inspira des crimes, qu'il fit executer par le fanatisme des autres._"
That he thus employed the spirit of the age without sharing it, is a
theory which will not stand the light for a moment. Besides, it is not
in this manner that history is transacted: we may all be puppets, if you
will, upon the scene, but it is not in this fashion that any one man
gets hold of the wires. The supposition, whatever honour it may do the
genius of Cromwell, will do very little honour to the speculative genius
of any writer who adopts it. But this is evident, that to whatever
extent Cromwell shared the distempered feelings of a sectarian party,
nothing ever clouded his penetration upon any affair of conduct, any
question of means to an end. The hour never came that found him wanting.
At every phase of the revolution he is there to lead, or control, or
predominate over it.

Starting from this point of view--understanding him, in the first place,
as the conscientious zealous Puritan, and endeavouring to estimate, as
the history proceeds, the modifications which the soldier and the
general, and finally the Protector, would induce upon this original
substratum--the character of Cromwell becomes intelligible, and his
conduct, in a measure, consistent. Whilst yet a private man, he had
warmly espoused the extreme opinions of that religious party who looked
on Popery as antichrist, and the Church of England as little better than
Popery in disguise, as the same scarlet lady in a somewhat more modest
attire. He was one of a class occasionally met with in the most quiet
walks of life, men who torment their spirit on some public question till
it becomes a personal grievance, or rather a corroding passion. What
were bishops personally to him? He might have prayed, and expounded, and
walked meditative in his fields, and left a public question to be
decided by the movements, necessarily slow, of public opinion. But no;
he was constituted quite otherwise. From a spiritual jurisdiction,
claimed though not exercised over him, his soul revolted. And this
hatred to prelacy, to any spiritual authority over him or his--this
determination to be his own priest--is, if not the strongest, certainly
the steadiest and most constant feeling that he manifests. We trace it
throughout his whole career. The first thing we hear of him in the House
of Commons is a protest, a sort of ominous growl, against the promotion
of some Arminian or semi-Popish divine. "If these are the steps to
church preferment, what are we to expect!" Almost the first glimpse we
catch of him when he has taken arms, is as the captain of a troop
entering some cathedral church, and bidding the surpliced priest, who
was reading the liturgy, "to cease his fooling, and come down!" And
throughout the letters which he addresses to the Speaker from the seat
of war, he rarely omits the opportunity of hinting, that the soldiers
are worthy of that religious liberty for which they have fought so well.
"We pray you, own His people more and more; for they are the chariots
and horsemen of Israel." And in one of his latest speeches, he describes
it as the great "extremity" of past times, that men were not permitted
to preach in public unless they were ordained.

A rooted animosity to prelatical or other spiritual domination, is the
key-note of this "melodious worker," as Mr Carlyle calls him. Cromwell
entered the civil war provided with no theory or plan of civil
government, animated with no republican zeal; it was not patriotism in
any ordinary sense of the word, it was his controversy with the church
of England that brought him on the field of battle. After fighting
against episcopacy, he fought with equal zeal against presbyterianism;
but against monarchy, or for the republic, he can hardly be said to have
drawn the sword. We all applaud the sagacity which saw at once that the
strongest antagonist to the honour and fidelity of the royalist, was to
be found in the passion of the zealot. He enlisted his praying regiment.
From that time the battle was won. But the cause was lost. What hope
could there be for the cause of civil freedom, of constitutional rights,
when the champion who won its victories was fanatical zeal, and the rage
of theological controversy?

It is the glaring defect in Cromwell--a defect which he had in common
with many others of his time--that he threw himself into a revolution
having for its first object to remodel the civil government, animated
only with the passions of the collateral controversy upon ecclesiastical
government. He fought the battle which was to destroy the monarchy,
without any fixed idea or desire for the republican government which
must be its substitute. This was not the subject that had engaged his
thoughts or inflamed his ardour. When, therefore, the royalists had been
conquered, it is not at all surprising that he should have seen nothing
but the difficulties in the way of forming a republic. At this point of
his history some excuse for him may be drawn from the very defect we are
noticing. His mind had dwelt on no theory of civil government--to the
cause of the commonwealth his heart had never been pledged--and we can
hardly call him, with justice, as Godwin does, a traitor to the
republic. But, on the other hand, what a gap, what a void, does this
disclose in the mind of our hero? What should we say of one who had
plunged heart and soul into the French Revolution, conducted only by his
rage against the Roman Catholic hierarchy? Such a one, had he risen to
take a leading part in that drama, might have acted with greater wisdom
and moderation than ardent and patriotic men; the very absence of any
political opinion or passion might have enabled him to see more clearly
than others the position which they all occupied; but this would not
justify or palliate the original error, the rash, exclusive,
self-blinding zeal which had brought him into that position.

To the ecclesiastical controversy, Cromwell clings throughout with an
utter recklessness of the fate of civil government. When episcopacy had
been vanquished, and presbyterianism threatened to take its place, he
was quite as willing to plunge the whole kingdom into confusion and
anarchy in his opposition to this new enemy, as to the old. Those who
would defend him from the charge of personal ambition--all who excuse
his conduct at this period of the history, put this plea upon
record,--and without a doubt his hostility to presbyterianism was a very
great and leading motive with him in his opposition to the Parliament,
and his determination to prevent a reconciliation between the House and
the King. When Charles was a prisoner at the Isle of Wight, it is well
known that the Parliament were anxious to come to some terms of
reconcilement, and the concessions which he then made were voted to be
"a sufficient ground for the future settlement of the kingdom." Why did
Cromwell interfere at this juncture between the two parties, in such a
way as entirely to destroy both? His best public ground is his hostility
to presbyterianism. And what was the presbytery, that to him it should
be so distasteful, and an object of so great animosity? Its forms of
worship, the doctrines preached by its divines, were exactly those he
himself practised and approved. There were no altars here, no surplices,
no traditions, no sympathies with Rome, no stealthy approximations to
her detested idolatries. But there was a claim put forward to
ecclesiastical supremacy, to ordain, and authorise, and control public
preachers, which he could not tolerate; and if no other motive had
existed, he was ready to oppose every settlement, at every risk, having
for its object to establish a claim of this description.

We will open the Letters and Speeches of Cromwell at this period of the
history, and present our readers with a specimen of his epistolary
style, and one which will go far to show how little his mind was
influenced, even at this great crisis, by any thing which we should
describe as political reasoning. Cromwell was a great _administrator_,
but he had no vocation for speculative politics, and little attachment
to forms of government. Framers of constitutions are not in repute at
present; they have not covered themselves with applause, rather with
confusion; and this defect in Cromwell's mind will probably be looked
upon with great indulgence. Nevertheless, people who go to war to
demolish an existing government, ought to have taken thought for a
substitute; on _them_ it is incumbent to have a political creed, and a
constitution to set up. At this very moment when the question is no
less, than whether the king should be put to death, and monarchy rooted
out of the land--ay, and the Parliament coerced, in order to effect
these objects--our Puritan general reasons--like a Puritan and nothing
better.

The following letter was addressed to Colonel Hammond, then governor of
the Isle of Wight. The colonel had been distressed by his scruples at
the extreme course the army was disposed to take, and had solicited this
appointment to the Isle of Wight as a retreat from the scene of faction
and violence. But it was precisely in this quiet little island that the
king took refuge; his perplexities, therefore, were increased and not
diminished. Cromwell writes to him to remove his scruples, and makes a
characteristic allusion to this circumstance--_improves_ it, as we
should say.

We must apprise the reader, however, that it would be dangerous to form
any opinion upon the religious sincerity or insincerity of Cromwell,
upon extracts from his letters and speeches, or even upon any single
letter or speech. From the incongruity we feel between the solemnity of
the subject of religion, and the manner and occasion in which it is
introduced, and from the use of certain expressions long since
consecrated to ridicule, it is impossible for a modern reader, on
falling upon some isolated passages, not to exclaim, that this is cant
and hypocrisy! But when the whole series, or the greater part of it, is
read--when the same strain of thought and feeling, in season and out of
season, is constantly observed--it is equally impossible not to feel
persuaded that these letters and speeches body forth the genuine
character of the man, and that the writer was verily a solemn and most
serious person, in whom religious zeal was the last quality which needed
reinforcement.

     "DEAR ROBIN,--No man rejoiceth more to see a line from thee
     than myself. I know thou hast long been under trial. Thou shalt
     be no loser by it. All things must work for the best.

     "Thou desirest to hear of my experiences. I can tell thee, I am
     such a one as thou did formerly know, having a body of sin and
     death; but I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, there is
     no condemnation though much infirmity; and I wait for the
     redemption. And in this poor condition I obtain mercy, and
     sweet consolation through the Spirit. And find abundant cause
     every day to exalt the Lord and abase flesh--and herein I have
     some exercise.

     "As to outward dispensations, if we may so call them, we have
     not been without our share of beholding some remarkable
     providences and appearances of the Lord. His presence hath been
     amongst us, and by the light of his countenance we have
     prevailed (_alludes to the battle of Preston_.) We are sure the
     goodness of Him who dwelt in the bush has shined upon us; and
     we can humbly say, we know in whom we have believed; who can
     and will perfect what remaineth, and us also in doing what is
     well-pleasing in His eye-sight.

     "I find some trouble in your spirit, occasioned first not only
     by your sad and heavy burden, as you call it, but also by the
     dissatisfaction you take at the ways of some good men whom you
     love with your heart, who through the principle, that it is
     lawful for a lesser part, if in the right, to force a numerical
     majority, &c. &c.

     "To the first: call not your burden sad or heavy. If your
     Father laid it on you, He intended neither. He is the Father of
     light, from whom comes every good and perfect gift; who of His
     own will begot us.... Dear Robin, our fleshly reasonings
     ensnare us. These make us say 'heavy,' 'sad,' 'pleasant,'
     'easy.' Was there not a little of this when Robert Hammond,
     through dissatisfaction too, desired retirement from the army,
     and thought of quiet in the Isle of Wight? Did not God find him
     out there? I believe he will never forget this. And now I
     perceive he is to seek again; partly through his sad and heavy
     burden, and partly through his dissatisfaction with friends'
     actings.

     "Dear Robin, thou and I were never worthy to be door-keepers in
     this service. If thou wilt seek, seek to know the mind of God
     in all that chain of providence, whereby God brought thee
     thither, and that person (_the king_) to thee; how, before and
     since, God hath ordered him, and affairs concerning him; and
     then tell me, whether there be not some glorious and high
     meaning in all this, above what thou hast yet attained? And,
     laying aside thy fleshly reason, seek of the Lord to teach thee
     what that is; and He will do it. I dare be positive to say, It
     is not that the wicked should be exalted that God should so
     appear as indeed He hath done. For there is no peace to _them_.
     No; it is set upon the hearts of such as fear the Lord, and we
     have witness upon witness, that it shall go ill with them and
     their partakers.

     "As to thy dissatisfaction with friends' actings upon that
     supposed principle--I wonder not at that. If a man take not his
     own burden well, he shall hardly others'; especially if
     involved by so near a relation of love and Christian
     brotherhood as thou art, I shall not take upon me to satisfy;
     but I hold myself bound to lay my thoughts before so dear a
     friend. The Lord do His own will.

     "You say, 'God hath appointed authorities among the nations, to
     which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This
     resides, in England, in the Parliament. Therefore, active or
     passive resistance,' &c. &c.

     "Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God. This or that
     species is of human institution, and limited some with larger,
     others with stricter bands, each one according to its
     constitution. But I do not therefore think that the authorities
     may do _any thing_, and yet such obedience be due. All agree
     that there are cases in which it is lawful to resist. If so,
     your ground fails, and so likewise the inference. Indeed, dear
     Robin, not to multiply words, the query is,--Whether ours be
     such case? This, ingenuously, is the true question.

     "To this I shall say nothing, though I could say very much; but
     only desire thee to see what thou findest in thy own heart to
     two or three plain considerations. _First_, Whether _Salus
     populi_ be a sound position? _Secondly_, Whether, in the way in
     hand (_the parliamentary treaty with the king_,) really and
     before the Lord, before whom conscience has to stand, this be
     provided for--or if the whole fruit of the war is not likely to
     be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and
     worse? And this contrary to engagements, explicit covenants
     with those who ventured their lives upon those covenants and
     engagements, without whom, perhaps in equity, relaxation ought
     not to be? _Thirdly_, Whether this army be not a lawful power,
     called by God to oppose and fight against the king upon some
     stated grounds; and being in power to such ends, may not oppose
     one name of authority, for those ends, as well as another
     name--since it was not the outward authority summoning them
     that by its power made the quarrel lawful, but the quarrel was
     lawful in itself? If so, it may be, acting will be justified
     _in foro humano_. _But truly this kind of reasoning may be but
     fleshly, either with or against: only it is good to try what
     truth may be in them. And the Lord teach us._

     "My dear friend, let us look into providences; surely they mean
     somewhat. They hang so together; have been so constant, so
     clear, unclouded. Malice, swoln malice against God's people,
     now called 'saints,' to root out their name;--and yet they
     these poor saints getting arms and therein blessed with defence
     and more! I desire he that is for a principle of suffering
     (_passive obedience_) would not too much slight this. I slight
     not him who is so minded; but let us beware lest fleshly
     reasoning see more safety in making use of this principle than
     in acting! Who acts, if he resolve not through God to be
     willing to part with all? Our hearts are very deceitful, on the
     right and on the left.

     "What think you of providence disposing the hearts of so many
     of God's people this way--especially in this poor army, wherein
     the great God has vouchsafed to appear! I know not one officer
     but is on the increasing side (_come over to this opinion_.) ...

     "Thou mentionest somewhat as if by acting against such
     opposition as is like to be, there will be a tempting of God.
     Dear Robin, tempting of God ordinarily is either by acting
     presumptuously in carnal confidence, or in unbelief through
     diffidence: both these ways Israel tempted God in the
     wilderness, and He was grieved by them. Not the encountering of
     difficulties, therefore, makes us to tempt God; but the acting
     before and without faith. If the Lord have in any measure
     persuaded His people, as generally He hath, of the lawfulness,
     nay of the _duty_,--this persuasion prevailing upon the heart
     is faith; and acting thereupon is acting in faith; and the more
     the difficulties are the more the faith. And it is most sweet
     that he who is not persuaded have patience towards them that
     are, and judge not; and this will free thee from the trouble of
     others' actings, which thou sayest adds to thy grief....

     "Robin, I have done. Ask we our hearts whether we think that
     after all these dispensations, the like to which many
     generations cannot afford, should end in so corrupt reasonings
     of good men, and should so hit the designings of bad? Thinkest
     thou in thy heart that the glorious dispensations of God point
     out to this? Or to teach his people to trust in Him and wait
     for better things--when, it may be, better are sealed to many
     of their spirits (_indubitably sure to many of them_.)

     "This trouble I have been at because my soul loves thee, and I
     would not have thee swerve or lose any glorious opportunity the
     Lord puts into thy hand. The Lord be thy counsellor. Dear
     Robin, I rest thine,

     "OLIVER CROMWELL."

For ourselves, we cannot read this, and other letters breathing the same
spirit, without being convinced that Cromwell fully shared in those
fanatical sentiments which prompted the army to insist upon the king's
death. A contemporary account, from which Mr Carlyle, some pages before
this letter occurs, has quoted largely, represents this chief of the
Puritans in exactly the same point of view. The officers of the army had
made certain overtures to the king, certain efforts at a reconciliation,
which had been fruitless; and which had been, moreover, attended with
much division and contention amongst themselves. They had turned aside,
it seems, from "that path of _simplicity_ they had been blessed in, to
walk in a _politic_ path," and were, accordingly, afflicted, "as the
wages of their backsliding hearts," with tumults, and jealousies, and
divisions. But the godly officers, says the pious record of Adjutant
Allen, met at _Windsor Castle_! "and there we spent one day together in
prayer; inquiring into the causes of that sad dispensation. And, on the
morrow, we met again in the morning; where many spake from the Word and
prayed; and the then Lieutenant-General Cromwell did press very
earnestly on all there present, to a thorough consideration of our
actions as an army, and of our ways particularly as private Christians;
to see if any iniquity could be found in them; and what it was; that, if
possible, he might find it out, and so remove the cause of such sad
rebukes as were upon us, (by reason of our iniquities, as we judged,) at
that time. And the way, more particularly, the Lord led us to herein was
this: to look back and consider what time it was when, with joint
satisfaction, we could last say, to the best of our judgments, The
presence of the Lord was amongst us, and rebukes and judgments were not,
as then, upon us.... By which means we were, by a gracious hand of the
Lord, led to find out the very steps, (as were all there jointly
convinced,) by which we had departed from the Lord, and provoked Him to
depart from us, which we found to be those cursed carnal conferences,
our own conceited wisdom, our fears, and want of faith, had prompted us,
the year before, to entertain with the king and his party. And at this
time, and on this occasion, did the then Major Goffe, (as I remember was
his title,) make use of that good word, Proverbs 1st and 23d, _Turn you
at my reproof; behold I will pour out my Spirit unto you, I will make
known my words unto you._" In fine, their "iniquities," their want of
faith, their carnal conferences--that is to say, all desire for peace,
all humanity, all moderation, all care for their country--were cast
aside, and they came to the solitary gloomy resolution, "That it is our
duty to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that
blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the
Lord's cause and people in these poor nations."

Let no one suppose that, because Cromwell, and other officers of the
army, had been negotiating with the king, bidding for him, in fact,
against the Parliament, and offering terms such as it was mere
infatuation upon his part not to accept, that they were, therefore, not
sincere in this their fanaticism, which now so clearly told them they
should be doing the express will of God in putting him to death. Those
who have paid attention to this disease of the mind, know well, that
while nothing is more violent at one moment, nothing is more flexible at
another. Against the assaults of reason it is rock,--it is adamant; but
to self-interest, or a covert passion, it is often surprisingly ductile.
The genuine fanatic is gifted with a power which will equally uphold
him, whether he walks to the right or to the left, and lets him change
his course as often as he will. He has a logic that is always
triumphant--which proves him always in the right--whether he would
advance or recede. Success--it is God's own sanction; failure--it is
what you please,--God's disapproval if you would retreat--a trial only
of your faith, if you have the heart to advance. In the present case,
our pious army, having found it impossible to treat with the king, has
but to spend "its day in prayer," and its fierce zeal resumes its former
channel with greater violence than ever. It has been led astray, it
finds, by carnal reasonings and sinful weakness; and, rushing back to
its old "path of simplicity," it raises the cry of death!

This account, which Adjutent Allan gives of diseased piety and perilous
fanaticism, Mr Carlyle accompanies with interjections of applause, and
cheers of encouragement. To him, also, it seems quite fit that the army
should return to its path of "simplicity." The King must die.

How little, up to the very last, did that unfortunate monarch know of
the terrible spirit of those enemies into whose hands he had fallen! He
saw himself necessary to the tranquillisation and stable government of a
nation still imbued with the love of monarchy, he therefore thought
himself and the monarchy were safe; he knew not that he was contending
with men who, when they rose to their high "heroic" mood, had a supreme
contempt for all considerations touching mere human polity,--the mere
peace and government of mankind. He trusted much to the sacredness of
royalty, the majesty of the purple, the divinity of a King; he was
delivered over to the power of enemies, whose glory it was to tread down
the glories of the world; who, so far from finding any sacredness in his
royalty, had classed him amongst all the wicked kings of the Old
Testament, sentenced to be exterminated with the idolatry they fostered,
and with whom the very audacity and fearful temerity of the deed, (if
this at all affected them,) would add only to its merit. Unfortunate
monarch! The tide of sympathy runs now against him, but we confess still
to retain our compassion for the fallen prince,--our compassion, very
little, it may be, of admiration. We see him contending against fearful
odds, keeping up a high and kingly spirit to the last. So far he braved
it nobly, and played a desperate game, if not wisely, yet with unshaken
nerves. His character, without a doubt, bears, as Lingard writes, "the
taint of duplicity." But it was a duplicity which, in his father's
court, would have been chuckled over as good practice of state-craft. We
are strangely fashioned--kings, and all of us--made up of fragments of
virtue, ill-assorted parcels of morality. Charles, when he had given his
parole of honour, would not escape from his imprisonment in the Isle of
Wight, though the means of escape were offered to him. But the wily and
diplomatic monarch thought he was entitling himself to the praise of all
men of spirit and intelligence, when, by fallacious promises and
protestations, he strove to play off one party of his enemies against
the other. He was practising, to the best of his ability, all the
traditionary maxims and manoeuvres of a subtle policy. Nor was it
ability that he wanted. On an Italian soil, these Italian arts might
have availed him. But what were the sleights and contrivances of a
traditionary state-craft against the rude storm of tumultuous passions
which had been conjured up around him! He was fencing with the
whirlwind. Perhaps no prince, trained in a court, can be a match for the
rude adversaries which revolutionary times raise up against him. What
chance is there that he should ever learn the nature of his new and
terrible enemy? You have taught him, according to all the laws of
woodcraft, to chase the stag and the fox, and now you let loose upon him
the wild beast of the forest! How was Charles to learn what manner of
being was a Puritan, and how it struck its prey? His courtiers would
have taught him to despise and ridicule--his bishops to look askance
with solemn aversion,--but who was there to teach him to fear this
Puritan?--to teach him that he must forthwith conciliate, if he could
not crush?

It is worth while to continue the narrative a little further. We adopt
Mr Carlyle's words. "At London, matters are coming rapidly to a crisis.
The resumed debate, 'shall the army remonstrance be taken into
consideration?' does not come out affirmative; on the contrary, on
Thursday the 31st, it comes out negative, by a majority of ninety. 'No,
we will not take it into consideration.' 'No?' The army at Windsor
thereupon spends again 'a day in prayer.' The army at Windsor has
decided on the morrow, that it will march to London; marches, arrives
accordingly, on Saturday, December 2d; quarters itself in Whitehall, in
St James's, 'and other great vacant houses in the skirts of the city and
villages about, no offence being given any where.' In the drama of
modern history, one knows not any graver, more note-worthy scene;
earnest as very death and judgment. They have decided to have justice,
these men; to see God's justice done, and his judgments executed on this
earth."

Adjutant Allen and Mr Carlyle are both of the same mind,--take the same
views of public matters, political and religious. But the Adjutant
himself would open great eyes at the sentence which next follows:--

"The abysses where the thunders and splendours are bred--the reader sees
them again laid bare and black. Madness lying close to the wisdom which
is brightest and highest;--and owls and godless men who hate the
lightning and the light, and love the mephitic dusk and darkness, are no
judges of the actions of heroes! Shedders of blood? Yes, blood is
occasionally shed. The healing surgeon, the sacrificial priest, the
august judge, pronouncer of God's oracles to man, these and the
atrocious murderer are alike shedders of blood; and it is an owl's eye,
that, except for the _dresses_ they wear, discerns no difference in
these! Let us leave the owl to his hootings; let us get on with our
chronology and swift course of events."

By forcibly expelling more than one hundred of the members of
Parliament, and thus converting a minority into a majority, these
"sacrificial priests" contrived to accomplish their very righteous act.
In the face of raving such as this, it would be absurd to enter
seriously upon any consideration, moral or political, touching the
King's death. We would rather that Mr Carlyle occupied the field alone.
We saw him just now dealing with his "abysses," and his "lightning;" we
quote his concluding comment on this event, which will present a
specimen of his more facetious style of eloquence, and the singular
_taste_ he is capable of displaying:--

"This action of the English regicides did in effect strike a damp like
death through the heart of _flunkeyism_ universally in this world.
Whereof flunkeyism, cant, cloth-worship, or whatever ugly name it have,
has gone about incurably sick ever since; and is now at length, in these
generations, very rapidly dying. The like of which action will not be
needed for a thousand years again. Needed, alas! not till a new genuine
hero-worship has arisen, has perfected itself; and had time to
degenerate into a flunkeyism and cloth-worship again! which I take to be
a very long date indeed.

"Thus ends the second civil war: in regicide, in a Commonwealth, and
keepers of the liberties of England: In punishment of delinquents, in
abolition of cobwebs;--if it be possible, in a government of Heroism
and veracity; at lowest of anti-flunkeyism, anti-cant, and the
_endeavour_ after heroism and veracity."

Flunkeyism! Such is the title which our _many-sided_ man thinks fit to
bestow on the loyalty of England! But serious indignation would be out
of place. A buffoon expression has this advantage, it is unanswerable.
Yet will we venture to say, that it is a losing game this which you are
playing, Mr Carlyle, this defiance of all common sense and all good
taste. There is a respectability other than that which, in the
unwearying love of one poor jest, you delight to call "gig
respectability," a respectability based on intelligence and not on
"Long-Acre springs," whose disesteem it cannot be wise to provoke, nor
very pleasant to endure.

The Commonwealth is proclaimed by sound of trumpet. The king and the
lords are cashiered and dismissed. A house of representatives and a
council of state form the constitution of England. Cromwell is one of
the council. But for the present the war in Ireland carries him away
from the scene of politics.

On this Irish campaign, Mr Carlyle breaks out, as may be supposed, in a
strain of exultation. He always warms at blood and battle. His piety, or
his poetry--not admirable whichever it may be--glows here to a red heat.
We are as little disposed perhaps as himself, to stand "shrieking out"
over the military severities of this campaign, but if we could bring
ourselves to believe that Mr Carlyle is really serious in what he
writes, we should say that the most impracticable maudlin of peace
societies, or "Rousseau-sentimentalism," were wisdom itself compared to
his own outrageous and fanatical strain. If the apologist of Cromwell
will be content to rest his case on the plain ground open to all
generals and captains on whom has devolved the task of subjecting a
rebellious and insurrectionary country--on the plain ground that the
object is to be more speedily effected, and with less bloodshed and
misery to the inhabitants, by carrying on the war at the commencement
with the utmost severity, (thus breaking down at once the spirit of
insurrection,) than by prolonging the contest through an exercise of
leniency and forbearance--we are not aware that any decisive answer can
be given to him. It is an awful piece of surgery to contemplate--one may
be excused, if one shudders both at it and the operator--but,
nevertheless, it may have been the wisest course to pursue. As a general
rule, every one will admit that--if war there must be--it is better that
it should be short and violent, than long and indecisive; for there is
nothing so mischievous, so destructive of the industry and moral
character of a people, as a war which, so to speak, _domesticates_
itself amongst them. Put aside "the saint" entirely,--let us see only
the soldier,--and Cromwell's campaign in Ireland may present nothing
more terrible than what elsewhere, and in the campaigns of other
generals, we are accustomed to regard as the necessary evils of war;
nothing more than what a Turenne, a Conde, or a Frederic of Prussia,
might have applauded or practised. But this is precisely the last thing
our editor would be disposed to do; any so common-place, and commonsense
view of the matter, would have been utterly distasteful: he _does_ bring
the saint very prominently upon the field, and we are to recognise in
Cromwell--"an armed soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom;
_doing God's judgments on the enemies of God!_"

"It is a phenomenon," he continues, "not of joyful nature; no, but of
awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe. Not a phenomenon which
you are taught to recognise with bright smiles, and fall in love with at
sight:--thou, art thou worthy to love such a thing; worthy to do other
than hate it, and shriek over it? Darest thou wed the Heaven's
lightning, then; and say to it, Godlike One? Is thy own life beautiful
and terrible to thee; steeped in the eternal depths, in the eternal
plendours?"--(Vol. ii. p. 53.)

In the despatch which Cromwell addresses to the Speaker, Lenthall, after
the storm of Tredah, otherwise Drogheda, we observe that the Puritan is
as strong as ever, but that the Soldier and the great Captain speak out
with increased boldness. Our sectarian farmer of St Ives, who brooded,
by the dark waters of the Ouse, over the wickedness of surpliced
prelacy, whose unemployed spirit sank at times into hypochondria, and
was afflicted with "strange fancies about the town-cross," has been
moving for some time in the very busiest scene the world could furnish
him, and has become the great general of his age. The spirit of the "big
wars" has entered, and grown up side by side with his Puritanism. The
ardour of the battle fully possesses him; he is the conqueror always in
the tremendous charge he makes at the head of his Ironsides; and he lets
appear, notwithstanding his self-denying style, a consciousness and a
triumph in his own skill as a tactician. He is still the genuine
Puritan; but the arduous life, the administrative duties of a soldier
and a general, have also been busy in modifying his character, and
calling forth and exercising that self-confidence, which he will by and
by recognise as "faith" and the leading of Providence, when he assumes
the place of dictator of his country.

From one passage in this despatch it would appear that his severity at
the storm of Drogheda was not wholly the result of predetermined policy,
but rose, in part, from the natural passion which the sword, and the
desperate struggle for life, call forth.

"Divers of the enemy retreated into the Mill-Mount, a place very strong
and of difficult access. The Governor, Sir Arthur Ashton, and divers
considerable officers being there, our men getting up to them, were
ordered by me to put them all to the sword. _And, indeed, being in the
heat of action_, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the
town; and, I think, that night they put to the sword about 2000 men:
divers of the officers and soldiers being fled over the bridge into the
other part of the town, where about 100 of them possessed St Peter's
church steeple, some the west gate, and others a strong round tower next
the gate called St Sunday's. These being summoned to yield to mercy,
refused; whereupon I ordered the steeple of St Peter's church to be
fired, when one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames,
'God damn me, God confound me! I burn, I burn.'"

In the same despatch there is rather a noticeable passage, which
illustrates the manner in which the Puritan general was accustomed to
regard the Roman Catholics and their worship. There may be some who have
been so far deceived by the frequent use of the terms "religious
toleration" in conjunction with the name of Cromwell, as to attribute to
him a portion of that liberal spirit which is the greatest boast of
cultivated minds in the present century. His religious toleration
extended only to the small circle of sects whose Christian doctrine,
whose preaching, and whose forms of worship were almost identical; it
was just the same toleration that a Baptist dissenter of our day may be
supposed to extend towards an Independent dissenter, or a member of the
Countess of Huntingdon's connexion. The Independents differed from the
Presbyterians in no one definite article of creed, with this
exception--that they set no value upon _ordination_, and violently
objected to the restraining any good man from public preaching, or any
of the ministrations of a pastor, because he wanted this authorisation
of a visible church. For this point of "religious freedom" (an
expression which in their mouths has little other than this narrow
signification) they had to contend with the Presbyterians. The sect
which has to resist oppression, or the restraints of power, uses, of
course, the language of toleration. The Independents used it in their
controversy with the Presbyterians, just as the latter had employed it
in their controversy with Episcopacy. But Independents and Presbyterians
were alike intolerant of the Episcopalian or the Roman Catholic. All
sects of that age preached toleration when a powerful adversary was to
be deprecated--preached it then, and then only. The Independents coming
last upon the field, preached it last; but they have no title beyond
others to the spirit of toleration. Cromwell put down the mass as he
would put down a rebellion--as openly, as decidedly, as rigorously.

"It is remarkable," continued the despatch, "that these people, at the
first, set up the mass in some places of the town that had been
monasteries; but afterwards grew so insolent, that, the last Lord's day
before the storm, the Protestants were thrust out of the great church
called St Peter's, and they had public mass there; and in this very
place near 1000 of them (_the Catholics--a clear judgment_) were put to
the sword, fleeing thither for safety. I believe all their friars were
knocked on the head promiscuously but two; the one of which was Father
Peter Taaff, brother to the Lord Taaff, whom the soldiers took the next
day and made an end of. The other was taken in the Round Tower, under
the repute, (_the disguise_) of a lieutenant, and when he understood
that the officers in that tower had no quarter, he confessed he was a
friar; but that did not save him."

Ireland was no sooner subjected by this unflinching and terrific
severity, than the presence of the great general of the Commonwealth was
needed in Scotland. The Scots had no predilection for a republic, no
desire whatever for it; they were bent solely on their covenant, their
covenant and a Stuart king. It was a combination very difficult to
achieve. Nevertheless they took their oath to both, and marched into
England to establish them both over the United Kingdom. Here was
sufficient enthusiasm at all events; sufficient, and of the proper kind,
one would think, to earn the sympathies of our editor. And he does look
upon the Scots at this time as an "heroic nation." But, unfortunately,
it is precisely the heroic nation that his own great hero is about to
combat and subdue. He is compelled, therefore, upon his part, as the
faithful bard and minstrel of his chosen champion, to give them
up--them, and their covenant, and Stuart king--to merciless sarcasm.
Indeed, he tells us, that the great, the sole fault of the Scots, was
precisely this--that they did not produce a Cromwell. "With Oliver born
Scotch," he says or sings, "one sees not but the whole world might have
become Puritan!"

However, he launches his Puritan hero against the godly and heroic
nation with full sound of trumpet, not unmixed with a certain vague and
solemn voice of prophecy.

"In such spirit goes Oliver to the wars--a god-intoxicated man, as
Novalis elsewhere phrases it. I have asked myself, if any where in
modern European history, or even in ancient Asiatic, there was found a
man practising this mean world's affairs with a heart more filled by the
idea of the Highest? Bathed in the eternal splendours--it is so he walks
our dim earth: this man is one of few. He is projected with a terrible
force out of the Eternities, and in the Times and their arenas there is
nothing that can withstand him. It is great; to us it is tragic; a thing
that should strike us dumb! My brave one, thy noble prophecy _is_
divine; older than Hebrew David; old as the origin of man; and shall,
though in wider ways than those supposed, be fulfilled."--(P. 172.)

We feel no disposition to follow Cromwell to the Scottish wars, though
"bathed in the eternal splendours." We hardly know of any thing in
history to our taste more odious than this war between the Scottish
Covenanter and the English Puritan; the one praying clamorously for
victory against "a blaspheming general and a sectarian army;" the other
animating his battle with a psalm, and charging with a "Lord, arise! and
let thy enemies be scattered," or some such exclamation. Both generals,
in the intervals of actual war, sermonise each other, and with much the
same spirit that they fight. Their diplomacy is a tangled preachment,
and texts are their war-cries. Meanwhile, both are fighting for the
gospel of Christ! only one will have it _with_, the other _without_ the
covenant! Such "eternal splendours" are not inviting to us. We will step
on at once to the battle of Worcester, which concluded both the Scottish
war, and all hopes for the present of the royalist party.

This last of his battles and his victories dismisses the great Puritan
from the wars. It is a striking despatch he writes from the field of
Worcester. He is still the unmitigated Puritan; he still preaches to
Speaker Lenthall, but he preaches somewhat more dogmatically. There is
an air of authority in the sermon. We all know that godly exhortation
may be made to express almost every shade of human passion; as what son
and what wife has not felt who has lived under the dominion and
discourse of one of these "rulers in Israel." The Parliament felt, no
doubt, the difference between the sermons of their general and those of
their chaplain.

Cromwell and the army return to London. It is now that the Commonwealth
is to be really put upon its trial. Hitherto the army, that had made and
could unmake it, had been occupied first in Ireland, then in Scotland;
and the minds of people at home had been equally occupied in watching
its achievements. The Commonwealth has lived upon the expectations of
men. It has been itself an expectation. It is now to be perfected, its
organisation to be completed, its authority established.

But Cromwell was not a Washington. Not only did he want that serene and
steady virtue which counselled the champion of American independence to
retire into the ranks of the constitution--commander in the field,
private soldier in the city--not only did he fail in this civic virtue,
and found it hard to resign the sway and authority he had so long
exercised; but the inestimable advantages of a constitutional government
his mind had not been cultivated to appreciate. His thoughts had
hitherto taken another direction. His speculative habits theology had
moulded; his active habits had been formed in the camp. He felt that he
could administer the government better than any of the men around him:
we will give him credit, too, for the full intention to administer it
conscientiously, and for the good of the nation; but for those enlarged
views of the more enlightened patriot, who is solicitous to provide not
alone for the present necessities, but for the future long life of a
people--he had them not. He grew afterwards into the statesman, as he
had grown into the soldier; but at this time the Puritan general had
very little respect for human institutions.

We are far from asserting, that even with the assistance of Cromwell a
republic could have been established in England. But he lent no helping
hand; his great abilities, his fervent zeal, were never employed in this
service. He kept aloof--aloof with the army. He gathered himself to his
full height, standing amidst the ruins of the civil war: all men might
see that he alone kept his footing there. When the unhappy Parliament,
struggling with its cruel embarrassments, not knowing how to dissolve
itself with safety, had brought down on it the impatience, the distrust,
the contempt of men--when he had allowed its members to reap the full
harvest of a people's jealousies and suspicions--when at length they
were on the point of extricating themselves by a bill determining the
mode of electing a successor--_then_ he interfered, and dissolved them!

A question may be raised, how far Cromwell had the power, if such had
been his wish, to take over the army to the side of the Parliament, to
lead it into due allegiance to the Commonwealth. The officers of the
army and the members of the Parliament formed the two rival powers in
the kingdom. Cromwell, it may be said, _could_ not have united them,
could only make his choice between them. It would have been only a
fraction of the army that he could have carried over with him. The
division between the council of officers and the Parliament was too
wide, the alienation too confirmed and inveterate, to have been healed
by one man, though it was the Lord General himself. Thus, it may be said
that Cromwell, in the part he acted against the Long Parliament, was
thrust forward by a revolutionary movement, which, according to the law
of such movements, must either have carried him forward in the van, or
left him deserted or down-trodden in the rear.

This would be no flattering excuse. But whatever truth there may be in
this view of the case, Cromwell never manifested any intention or any
desire to quit the cause of the army for that of the Parliament. He was
heart and soul with the army; it was there his power lay; it was there
he found the spirits he most sympathised with. He walked at the head of
the army here as in the war. It was alone that he entered the House of
Parliament--alone "in his gray stockings and black coat," with no staff
of officers about him, no military parade, only a few of his Ironsides
in the lobby. Though aware he should have the support of his officers,
there is no proof that he had consulted them. The daring deed was _his_.
And it is one of the most daring deeds on record. The execution of the
King--in that day when kings were something more in the imagination of
men than they are now--was indeed an audacious act. But it was shared
with others. This dissolution of the Parliament, and assumption of the
dictatorship--this facing alone all his old compeers, met in due
legislative dignity, and bidding them one and all depart--strikes us as
the bolder deed.

The scene has been often described, but nowhere so well, or so fully, as
by Mr Carlyle. We cannot resist the pleasure of quoting his spirited
account of this notable transaction.

     "The Parliament sitting as usual, and being in debate upon the
     bill, which it was thought would have been passed that day,
     'the Lord General Cromwell came into the House, clad in plain
     black clothes and gray worsted stockings, and sat down, as he
     used to do, in an ordinary place.' For some time he listens to
     this interesting debate on the bill, beckoning once to
     Harrison, who came over to him, and answered dubitatingly.
     Whereupon the Lord General sat still for about a quarter of an
     hour longer. But now the question being to be put, That this
     bill do now pass, he beckons again to Harrison, says, 'This is
     the time; I must do it!' and so 'rose up, put off his hat, and
     spake. At the first, and for a good while, he spake to the
     commendation of the Parliament, for their pains and care of the
     public good; but afterwards he changed his style, told them of
     their injustice, delays of justice, self-interest, and other
     faults,' rising higher and higher into a very aggravated style
     indeed. An honourable member, Sir Peter Wentworth by name, not
     known to my readers, and by me better known than trusted, rises
     to order, as we phrase it; says, 'It is a strange language
     this; unusual within the walls of Parliament this! And from a
     trusted servant, too; and one whom we have so highly honoured;
     and one--' Come, come,' exclaims my Lord General, in a very
     high key, 'we have had enough of this'--and in fact my Lord
     General, now blazing all up into clear conflagration, exclaims,
     'I will put an end to your prating,' and steps forth into the
     floor of the House, and 'clapping on his hat,' and occasionally
     'stamping the floor with his feet,' begins a discourse which no
     man can report! He says--Heavens! he is heard saying: 'It is
     not fit that you should sit here any longer!' You have sat too
     long here for any good you have been doing lately, 'You shall
     now give place to better men! Call them in!' adds he, briefly,
     to Harrison, in way of command; and some 'twenty or thirty'
     grim musketeers enter, with bullets in their snaphances; grimly
     prompt for orders; and stand in some attitude of carry arms
     there. Veteran men: men of might and men of war, their faces
     are as the faces of lions, and their feet are swift as the roes
     upon the mountains; not beautiful to honourable gentlemen at
     this moment!

     "'You call yourselves a Parliament,' continues my Lord General,
     in clear blaze of conflagration. 'You are no Parliament! Some
     of you are drunkards,' and his eye flashes on poor Mr Chalmer,
     an official man of some value, addicted to the bottle; 'some of
     you are'--and he glares into Henry Martin and the poor Sir
     Peter, who rose to order, lewd livers both--'living in open
     contempt of God's, commandments. Following your own greedy
     appetites, and the devil's commandments. Corrupt, unjust
     persons,' and here I think he glanced 'at Sir Bulstrode
     Whitlocke, one of the Commissioners of the Great Seal, giving
     him and others very sharp language, though he named them not.'
     'Corrupt, unjust persons, scandalous to the profession of the
     Gospel:' how can you be a Parliament for God's people? Depart,
     I say, and let us have done with you. In the name, of God--go!

     "The House is of course all on its feet--uncertain, almost,
     whether not on its head: such a scene as was never seen before
     in any House of Commons. History reports with a shudder that my
     Lord General, lifting the sacred mace itself, said, 'What shall
     we do with this bauble? Take it away!'--and gave it to a
     musketeer. And now--'Fetch him down!' says he to Harrison,
     flashing on the Speaker. Speaker Lenthall, more an ancient
     Roman than any thing else, declares, He will not come till
     forced. 'Sir,' said Harrison, 'I will lend you a hand;' on
     which Speaker Lenthall came down, and gloomily vanished. They
     all vanished; flooding gloomily, clamorously out, to their
     ulterior businesses, and respective places of abode: the Long
     Parliament is dissolved! 'It's you that have forced me to
     this,' exclaims my Lord General, 'I have sought the Lord night
     and day, that He would rather slay me than put me upon the
     doing of this work.' 'At their going out, some say the Lord
     General said to young Sir Harry Vane, calling him by his name,
     That _he_ might have prevented this; but that he was a juggler,
     and had not common honesty.' 'O Sir Harry Vane,' thou, with thy
     subtle casuistries and abstruse hair-splittings, thou art other
     than a good one, I think! 'The Lord deliver me from thee, Sir
     Harry Vane!' 'All being gone out, the door of the House was
     locked, and the key, with the mace, as I heard, was carried
     away by Colonel Otley,' and it is all over, and the unspeakable
     catastrophe has come, and remains."--(Vol. ii. p. 361.)

The usurpation of Cromwell is, we believe, generally considered as the
most fortunate event which, under the peculiar circumstances of the
country, could have occurred. The people, it is said; were not prepared
for a republic. The attempt, therefore, to establish one, would have
been attended by incessant tumults; its short and precarious existence
would have been supported by the scaffold and the prison. It would have
terminated indeed, as did the Protectorate, in a Restoration, but the
interval between the death of Charles I. and the accession of his son,
would have been passed in a very different manner. Under the
Protectorate the country rallied its strength, put forth its naval
power, obtained peace at home, and respect abroad. Under a republic, it
would have probably spent its force, and demoralised itself, in
intestine strife and by a succession of revolutionary movements.

But if this view be quite correct, it will not justify Cromwell. It is
one thing to be satisfied with the course of events, quite another with
the conduct of the several agents in them. Cromwell, in the position in
which he stood, as an honest man and a patriot, should have done his
best for the establishment of the Commonwealth; and this he did not. We
are far, as we have said, from venturing to give a decisive opinion on
the probability (with the united efforts of the victorious general and
the Parliament) of forming a republic. But we are not disposed to think
that the cause was hopeless. Had the Parliament been allowed to recruit
its numbers without dissolving itself--the measure which it constantly
desired, and which Cromwell would not hear of, though, without a doubt,
it was the very line of conduct which his own practical sagacity would
have led him to, if his heart had been in the business--the minds of men
would have had time to settle and reflect, and a mode of government,
which had already existed for some years, might have been adopted by the
general consent.

_We_ look upon the Restoration very calmly, very satisfactorily, for
whom a second revolution has placed another dynasty upon the throne,
governing upon principles quite different from those which were rooted
in the Stuarts. We see the Restoration, with the Revolution of 1688 at
its back, and almost consider them as one event. But a most loyal and
contented subject of Queen Victoria, would have been a Commonwealthsman
in those days. How could it then have been foreseen that all the power,
and privilege, and splendour of royalty, should exist only to _protect_
the law, to secure the equal rights of all--that monarchy, retaining a
traditionary awe and majesty derived from remote times, should remain
amongst us to supply to a representative government that powerful,
constant, and impartial executive which, from the mere elements of a
republic, it is so difficult to extract? Who could have imagined that a
popular legislature, and the supremacy of the law, could have been so
fortunately combined and secured under the shadow of the monarchy?
Enlightened minds at that time could not have looked calmly towards a
Restoration; they probably thought, or would have been led to think,
that, in the position they then were, it was better to take the
constitution of Holland, than the government of France, for their model.

But the multitude--with what enthusiasm they welcomed the restoration of
the Stuarts! Very true. But the Protectorate was no antagonist to
monarchy. Republican pride was never called forth to contend in the
public mind against the feeling of loyalty, and an attachment to kings.
The Protectorate was itself a monarchy without its splendour, or the
prestige of hereditary greatness. It was a monarchy under the Geneva
gown. Was it likely that the populace would accept of this in lieu of
the crowned and jewelled royalty which was wont to fill its imagination?

However, the experiment--fortunately for us, as the result has turned
out--was never destined to be made. Cromwell dissolved the Long
Parliament. He now stood alone, he and the army, the sole power in the
state. His first measure, that of sending a summons in his own name, to
persons of his own choice, and thus, without any popular election
whatever, assembling what is called the Little Parliament, or Barebones
Parliament, shows a singular audacity, and proves how little trammelled
he was himself by traditionary or constitutional maxims. He who would
not allow the Long Parliament to recruit its numbers, and thus escape
the perils of a free election of an altogether new assembly, extricates
himself from the same embarrassment by electing the whole Parliament
himself. Some historians have represented this measure as having for its
very object to create additional confusion, and render himself, and his
own dictatorial power, more necessary to the state. It has not appeared
to us in this light. We see in it a bold but rude assay at government.
In this off-hand manner of constituting a Parliament, we detect the
mingled daring of the Puritan and the Soldier. In neither of these
characters was he likely to have much respect for legal maxims, or rules
of merely human contrivance. Cromwell was educating himself for the
Statesman: at this juncture it is the Puritan General that we have
before us.

The Little Parliament having blundered on till it had got itself
entangled in the Mosaic dispensation, resigned its power into the hands
of him who had bestowed it. Thereupon a new _Instrument of Government_
is framed, with the advice of the council of officers, appointing
Cromwell Protector, and providing for the election of a Parliament.

This Parliament being elected, falls, of course, on the discussion of
this very Instrument of government. Henceforth Cromwell's great
difficulty is the management of his Parliaments. The speeches he
delivered to them at various times, and which occupy the third volume of
the work before us, are of high historical interest. They are in every
respect superior to his letters. Neither will their perusal be found to
be of that arduous and painful nature which, from the reputation they
have had, most persons will be disposed to expect. The _sermon_ may
weary, but the _speech_ is always fraught with meaning; and the mixture
of sermon and speech together, portray the man with singular
distinctness. We see the Puritan divine, the Puritan soldier, becoming
the Puritan statesman. His originally powerful mind is excited to fresh
exertion by his onerous and exalted position. But he is still constant
to himself. Very interesting is the exhibition presented to us of this
powerful intellect, breaking out in flashes of strong sense, and
relapsing again into the puerilities of the sect. But as it falls upon
the strong sense to _act_, and on the puerilities only to _preach_, the
man comes out, upon the whole, as a great and able governor.

The reputation which Oliver's speeches have borne, as being involved,
spiritless, tortuous, and even purposely confused, has resulted, we
think, from this--that an opinion of the whole has been formed from an
examination of a few, and chiefly of those which were delivered on the
occasion of his refusing the offered title of king. His conduct on this
occasion, it would be necessary for an historian particularly to
investigate, and in the discharge of this duty he would have to peruse a
series of discourses undoubtedly of a very bewildering character. They
are the only speeches of Cromwell of which it can be said that their
meaning is not clearly, and even forcibly expressed. And in this case it
is quite evident, that he had no distinct meaning to express; he had no
definite answer to give the Parliament who were petitioning him to take
the title of king. He was anxious to gain time--he was talking _against
time_--an art which we moderns only have thoroughly mastered. How could
Cromwell, who was no great rhetorician, be otherwise than palpably
confused, and dubious and intricate? Nothing can be clearer than that he
himself leant towards the opinion of the Parliament, that it would be
good policy to adopt the royal title. It was so connected with the old
attachments and associations of Englishmen, it had so long given force
to the language of the law, its claims were so much better known, its
prerogatives so much better understood than those of the new title of
Protector, that the resumption of it must have appeared very advisable.
But the army had been all along fighting against _the King_. Whilst to
the lawyer and the citizen the title was still the most honourable and
ever to be venerated, to the soldier of the Commonwealth it had become a
term of reproach, of execration, of unsparing hostility. Oliver Cromwell
might well hesitate before assuming a title which might forfeit for him
the allegiance of a great portion of the army. He deferred his answer,
to have an opportunity for estimating the nature and amount of the
resistance he might expect from that quarter; and he came to the
conclusion, that the risk of unsettling the affections of the army was
not to be incurred for either any personal gratification to himself
(which we take to have not weighed much with him) in assuming the title
of king, or for the advantages which might accrue from it in the
ultimate settlement of the nation. His addresses, therefore, to the
Parliament on this occasion not being definite answers to the
Parliament, nor intended to be such, but mere postponements of his
answer, were necessarily distinguished by indecision, uncertainty, and
all sorts of obscurities. But, these excepted, his speeches, however
deficient in what pertains to the _art of composition_, in terseness, or
method, or elegance of phrase, are never wanting in the great
essentials--the expression of his meaning in a very earnest and forcible
manner. The mixture of sermon and speech, we allow, is not inviting; but
the sermon is just as clear, perhaps, as any which the chaplain of the
House would have preached to them, and it must be remembered, that to
explain _his_ meaning, _his_ political sentiments, the sermon was as
necessary as the speech.

By the new instrument of government, the Protector, with his council,
was authorised, in the interval before the meeting of Parliament, to
issue such ordinances as might be deemed necessary. This interval our
Puritan governor very consistently employed, first of all, in
establishing a gospel ministry throughout the nation. Thirty-eight
chosen men, "the acknowledged flower of English Puritanism," were
nominated a Supreme Commission, for the trial of public preachers. Any
person holding a church-living, or pretending to the tithes or
clergy-dues, was to be tried and approved of by these men. "A very
republican arrangement," says Mr Carlyle, "such as could be made on the
sudden, but was found in practice to work well."

This and other ordinances having been issued, his first Parliament
meets. It cannot be said that our Puritan Protector does not rise to the
full level of his position. One might describe him as something of a
propagandist, disposed to teach his doctrine of _the rights of
Christian men_ to the world at large. It is thus he opens his
address:--"GENTLEMEN, You are met here on the greatest occasion that, I
believe, England ever saw; having upon your shoulders the interests of
three great nations, with the territories belonging to them: and truly I
believe I may say it without any hyperbole, you have upon your shoulders
_the interest of all the Christian people in the world_. And the
expectation is, that I should let you know, as far as I have cognisance
of it, the occasion of your assembling together at this time."

But this Parliament fell upon the discussion, as we have said, of the
very instrument of government under which they had been called together.
Mr Carlyle is as impatient as was Oliver himself at this proceeding of
the "Talking apparatus." But how could it be otherwise? Every thing
that had taken place since the dissolution of the Long Parliament was
done by mere arbitrary authority. The present Parliament, however called
together, must consider itself the only legitimate, the only
constitutional power: it _must_ look into this instrument of government.
But if it was impossible not to commence the discussion, it was equally
impossible ever to conclude it. We all know to what length a debate will
run upon a constitutional question; and here there was not one such
question, but a whole constitution to be discussed. In vain they debated
"from eight in the morning to eight at night, with an hour for
refreshment about noon:" there was no probability of their ever coming
to a conclusion.

This would never do. Oliver shuts up the Parliament-house, stations his
musketeers at the door, calls the members to him, presents them with a
parchment, "a little thing," to sign, acknowledging his authority, and
tells them he will open the door of the House to such only as shall put
their names to it. We will quote some parts of the speech he made to
them on this occasion, and our readers shall judge whether such a
speech, delivered by the living man Cromwell, was likely to fail in
effect, whether it was deficient in meaning or in energy. We shall omit
the parenthetical comments of the editor, because, however these may
amuse and relieve the reader who is making his way through the whole
work, and who becomes familiarised with their style, they would only
confuse and distract the attention in a brief extract. The single words
or phrases which he has introduced, merely to make the sense clear, are
retained whenever they are really necessary for this purpose, and
without the inverted commas by which they are properly distinguished in
the text. We will premise, that the protestations which Cromwell here
makes, that he did not seek the government, but was earnestly petitioned
to undertake it, may well, in part, be true. When he had once dissolved
the Long Parliament, it was no longer a matter of choice for himself or
others whether he would take the reins of government. To whom could he
commit them? From that time, the government rested upon his shoulders.
If he had manifested a wish to withdraw from the burden he had thus
brought down upon himself, there is no doubt but that he would have been
earnestly petitioned to remain at his post. The greatest enemy of
Cromwell, if he had been a lover of his country, would have joined in
such a petition; would have besought him to remain at the helm, now he
had thrown all other steersmen overboard. No; he must not quit it now.
He is there for the rest of his life, to do battle with the waves, and
navigate amongst rocks and quicksands as best he may.

Let us hear his own statement and defence of the manner in which he
became advanced and "captive" to his high and perilous place.

     "GENTLEMEN,--It is not long since I met you in this place, upon
     an occasion which gave me much more content and comfort than
     this doth. That which I have now to say to you will need no
     preamble to let me into my discourse; for the occasion of this
     meeting is plain enough. I could have wished, with all my
     heart, there had been no cause for it.

     "At our former meeting I did acquaint you what was the first
     rise of this government which hath called you hither, and by
     the authority of which you have come hither. Among other things
     which I then told you of, I said you were a Free Parliament;
     and so you are, whilst you own the government and authority
     which called you hither. But certainly that word (Free
     Parliament) implied a reciprocity, or it implied nothing at
     all. Indeed, there was a reciprocity implied and expressed; and
     I think your actions and carriages ought to be suitable. But I
     see it will be necessary for me now a little to magnify my
     office, which I have not been apt to do. I have been of this
     mind, I have been always of this mind, since I first entered
     upon my office. If God will not bear it up, let it sink!--but
     if a duty be incumbent upon me, to bear my testimony to it,
     (which in modesty I have hitherto forborne,) I am, in some
     measure, necessitated thereunto: and therefore that will be the
     prologue to my discourse.

     "I called not myself to this place. I say again, I called not
     myself to this place! Of that God is witness: and I have many
     witnesses who, I do believe, could lay down their lives bearing
     witness to the truth of that, namely, that I called not myself
     to this place! And, being in it, I bear not witness to myself
     or my office; but God and the people of these nations have also
     borne testimony to it. If my calling be from God, and my
     testimony from the people, _God and the people shall take it
     from me, else I will not part with it!_ I should be false to
     the trust that God hath placed in me, and to the interest of
     the people of these nations if I did.

     "I was by birth a gentleman; living neither in any considerable
     height, nor yet in obscurity. I have been called to several
     employments in the nation--to serve in Parliament and others;
     and, not to be over-tedious, I did endeavour to discharge the
     duty of an honest man, in those services, to God and his
     people's interest, and to the Commonwealth; having, when time
     was, a competent acceptation in the hearts of men, and some
     evidences thereof. I resolve not to recite the times, and
     occasions, and opportunities, which have been appointed me by
     God to serve him in; nor the presence and blessing of God,
     therein bearing testimony to me.

     "Having had some occasion to see, together with my brethren and
     countrymen, a happy period put to our sharp wars and contests
     with the then common enemy, I hoped, in a private capacity, to
     have reaped the fruit and benefit, together with my brethren,
     of our hard labours and hazards: the enjoyment, to wit, of
     peace and liberty, and the privileges of a Christian and a man,
     in some equality with others, according as it should please the
     Lord to dispense unto me. And when I say God had put an end to
     our wars, or at least brought them to a very hopeful issue,
     very near an end,--after Worcester fight,--I came up to London
     to pay my service and duty to the Parliament which then sat,
     hoping that all minds would have been disposed to answer what
     seemed to be the mind of God, namely, to give peace and rest to
     his people, and especially to those who had bled more than
     others in the carrying on of the military affairs,--I was much
     disappointed of my expectation. For the issue did not prove so.
     _Whatever may be boasted or misrepresented, it was not so, not
     so!_

     "I can say in the simplicity of my soul, I love not, I love
     not,--I declined it in my former speech,--I say, I love not to
     rake into sores, or to discover nakednesses! The thing I drive
     at is this: I say to you, I hoped to have had leave to retire
     to a private life. I begged to be dismissed of my charge; I
     begged it again and again; and God be judge between me and all
     men if I lie in this matter! That I lie not in matter of fact,
     is known to very many; but whether I tell a lie in my heart, as
     labouring to represent to you what was not upon my heart, I say
     the Lord be judge. Let uncharitable men, who measure others by
     themselves, judge as they please. As to the matter of fact, I
     say it is true. As to the ingenuity and integrity of my heart
     in that desire--I do appeal, as before, upon the truth of that
     also. But I could not obtain what my soul longed for. And the
     plain truth is, I did afterwards apprehend some more of
     opinion, (such the differences of their judgment from mine,)
     that it could not well be.

     "I confess I am in some strait to say what I could say, and
     what is true, of what then followed. I pressed the Parliament,
     as a member, to period themselves; once and again, and again,
     and ten, nay twenty times over. I told them, for I knew it
     better than any one man in the parliament could know it,
     because of my manner of life, which had led me every where up
     and down the nation, thereby giving me to see and know the
     temper and spirits of all men, and of the best of men--that the
     nation loathed their sitting. I knew it. And so far as I could
     discern, when they _were_ dissolved, _there was not so much as
     the barking of a dog_, or any general or visible repining at
     it.

     "And that there was high cause for their dissolution, is most
     evident: not only in regard there was a just fear of that
     parliament's perpetuating themselves, but because it actually
     was their design. Had not their heels been trod upon by
     importunities from abroad, even to threats, I believe there
     never would have been any thoughts of rising, or of going out
     of that room, to the world's end. I myself was sounded, and by
     no mean persons tempted; and proposals were made me to that
     very end: that the parliament might be thus perpetuated; that
     the vacant places might be supplied by new elections, and so
     continue from generation to generation."

He proceeds to object to the measure which the Parliament was really
about to pass, that it would have established an uninterrupted
succession of Parliaments, that there would have been "a legislative
power always sitting," which would thereby have encroached upon the
executive power. The speech then enlarges on the general assent of the
people, of the army, of the judges, of the civic powers, to the
instrument of government, to the Protectorate, and on the implied
assent which they themselves had given by accepting their commissions
under it.

     "And this being so, though I told you in my last speech that
     you were a free Parliament, yet I thought it was understood
     withal that I was the Protector, and the authority that called
     you! That I was in possession of the government by a good right
     from God and man. And I believe, that if the learnedest men in
     this nation were called to show a precedent equally clear of a
     government so many ways approved of, they would not in all
     their search find it. And if the fact be so, why should we
     sport with it? With a business so serious!... For you to disown
     or not to own it; for you to act with parliamentary authority
     especially, in the disowning of it, contrary to the very
     fundamental things, yea against the very root itself of this
     establishment, to sit and not own the authority by which you
     sit--is that which I believe astonisheth more men than myself;
     and doth as dangerously disappoint and discompose the nation,
     as any thing that could have been invented by the greatest
     enemy to our peace and welfare."

After drawing the distinction between fundamentals, which may not be
shaken, and circumstantials, which it is in the power of Parliament to
alter and modify, he continues:--

     "I would it had not been needful for me to call you hither to
     expostulate these things with you, and in such a manner as
     this! But necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary
     necessities, are the greatest cozenage which man can put upon
     the providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules
     by. But it is as legal, as carnal, and as stupid to think that
     there are _no_ necessities which are manifest and real, because
     necessities may be abused or feigned. I have to say, the wilful
     throwing away of this government, such as it is, so owned by
     God, so approved by men, so witnessed to, as was mentioned
     above, were a thing which--and in reference to the good of
     these nations and of posterity--_I can sooner be willing to be
     rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my
     consent unto!_

     "You have been called hither to save a nation--nations. You had
     the best people, indeed, of the Christian world put into your
     trust, when you came hither. You had the affairs of these
     nations delivered over to you in peace and quiet; you were, and
     we all are, put into an undisturbed possession, nobody making
     title to us: Through the blessing of God, our enemies were
     hopeless and scattered. We had peace at home; peace with almost
     all our neighbours round about. To have our peace and interest,
     whereof those were our hopes the other day, thus shaken, and
     put under such a confusion; and ourselves rendered hereby
     almost the scorn and contempt of those strangers who are
     amongst us to negotiate their masters' affairs!... Who shall
     answer for these things to God or to men? To men, to the people
     who sent you hither? who looked for refreshment from you; who
     looked for nothing but peace and quietness, and rest and
     settlement? When we come to give an account to them, we shall
     have it to say, 'Oh, we quarrelled for the _Liberty of
     England_; we contested, and went to confusion for
     that!--_Wherein, I pray you, for the Liberty of England?_ I
     appeal to the Lord, that the desires and endeavours we have
     had--nay, the things will speak for themselves,--the liberty of
     England, the liberty of the people, the avoiding of tyrannous
     impositions either upon men as men, or Christians as
     Christians,--is made so safe by this act of settlement, that it
     will speak for itself."

The Protector then tells them that, "seeing the authority which
called them is so little valued and so much slighted, he had
caused a stop to be put to their entrance into the Parliament-house,"
until a certain "somewhat," which would be found "in the lobby
without the Parliament-door"--an adhesion to the government in its
fundamentals--should be signed.

This extract, as will be readily supposed, would lead to a far too
favourable opinion of Cromwell's oratory, if understood as a specimen of
his usual manner of speaking; but our readers will probably confess,
that they did not expect that the speeches of Cromwell would have
yielded such an extract.

Oliver has, it will be observed, a singularly modest way of speaking of
his political remedies and projects. In referring, on a later occasion,
to his major-generals, he says, "Truly when that insurrection was, we
did find out a _little poor invention_, which I hear has been much
regretted. I say there was _a little thing_ invented, which was the
erecting of your major-generals, to have a little inspection upon the
people thus divided, thus discontented, thus dissatisfied." On the
present occasion, the "somewhat which was to be found at the lobby of
the Parliament-door," was, after a little demur, accepted and signed by
all but a certain number of declared republicans. The parliament
afterwards fell from the discussion of a whole constitution, to debates
apparently as warm, and as endless, upon poor Biddle the Quaker, and
other kindred subjects. Thus their allotted session of five months
passed; at the end of which time Cromwell dissolved them.

"I do not know what you have been doing," he tells them in his speech on
this occasion. "I do not know whether you have been alive or dead. I
have not once heard from you all this time--I have not--and that you all
know."

Cromwell's second parliament manifested a wiser industry, and a more
harmonious temper--thanks to one of the Protector's "little inventions."
Each member was to be provided with a certificate before entering the
house; "but near one hundred honourable gentlemen can get no
certificate--none provided for _them_--and without certificate there is
no admittance. Soldiers stand ranked at the door; no man enters without
his certificate!" The stiff republicans, and known turbalent persons,
are excluded. From this Parliament Cromwell accepts again the title of
Protector, and is installed with great state; things take a more legal
aspect; the major-generals are suppressed; a House of Lords is
instituted; and a settlement of the nation seems at last effected.

But the second session of this Parliament relapsed again into a restive
and republican humour. The excluded members had been admitted, and
debates arose about this "other house," as they were disposed to
nominate the Lords. So much confusion resulted in the country from this
unsettled state of the representative assembly, and so many
insurrectionary designs were fostered by it, that the Protector was
compelled abruptly to dissolve the Parliament. He tells them:--

     "That which brought me into the capacity I now stand in, was
     the petition and advice given me by you, who, in reference to
     the ancient constitution, did draw me to accept the place of
     Protector. _There is not a man living can say I sought it; no,
     not a man nor a woman treading upon English ground._ But,
     contemplating the sad condition of these nations, relieved from
     an intestine war into a six or seven years' peace, I did think
     the nation happy therein. But to be petitioned thereunto, and
     to be advised by you to undertake such a government, a burden
     too heavy for any creature--and this to be done by the House
     which then had the legislative capacity--certainly I did look
     that the same men who made the frame, should make it good unto
     me. _I can say, in the presence of God, in comparison with whom
     we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have
     been glad to have lived under any woodside, to have kept a
     flock of sheep, rather then have undertaken such a government
     as this._ But, undertaking it by the advice and petition of
     you, I did look that you who had offered it unto me, should
     make it good."

He concludes thus:--

     "It hath been not only your endeavour to pervert the army while
     you have been sitting, and to draw them to state the question
     about a 'Commonwealth;' but some of you have been listing of
     persons, by commission of Charles Stuart, to join with any
     insurrection that may be made. And what is like to come upon
     this, the enemy being ready to invade us, but even present
     blood and confusion? And if this be so, I do assign it to this
     cause--your not assenting to what you did invite me to by your
     petition and advice, as that which might prove the settlement
     of the nation. And if this be the end of your sitting, and this
     be your carriage, I think it 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!"

It is at this latter period of his career that the character of
Cromwell, to our apprehension, stands out to greatest advantage, becomes
more grave, and solemn, and estimable. Other dictators, other men of
ambitious aims and fortunes, show themselves, for the most part, less
amiable, more tyrannous than ever, more violent and selfish, when they
have obtained the last reward of all their striving, and possessed
themselves of the seat of power. It was otherwise with Cromwell. He
became more moderate, his views more expanded, his temper milder and
more pensive. The stormy passions of the civil war were overblown, the
intricate and ambiguous passages of his political course had been left
behind; and _now_, whatever may have been the errors of the past, and
however his own ambition or rashness may have led him to it, he occupied
a position which he might say with truth he held for his country's good.
Forsake it he could not. Repose in it he could not. A man of religious
breeding, of strong conscientiousness, though tainted with superstition,
he could not but feel the great responsibility of that position. A
vulgar usurper is found at this era of his career to sink into the
voluptuary, or else to vent his dissatisfied humour in acts of cruelty
and oppression. Cromwell must govern, and govern to his best. The
restless and ardent spirit that had ever prompted him onwards and
upwards, and which had carried him to that high place, was now upon the
wane. It had borne him to that giddy pinnacle, and threatened to leave
him there. Men were now aiming at his life; the assassin was abroad;
one-half the world was execrating him; we doubt not that he spoke with
sincerity when he said, that "he would gladly live under any woodside,
and keep a flock of sheep." He would gladly lay down his burden, but he
cannot; can lay it down only in the grave. The sere and yellow leaf is
falling on the shelterless head of the royal Puritan. The asperity of
his earlier character is gone, the acrimony of many of his prejudices
has, in his long and wide intercourse with mankind, abated; his great
duties have taught him moderation of many kinds; there remains of the
fiery sectarian, who so hastily "turned the buckle of his girdle behind
him," little more than his firmness and conscientiousness: his firmness
that, as he truly said, "could be bold with men;" his conscientiousness,
which made the power he attained by that boldness, a burden and a heavy
responsibility.

"We have not been now four years and upwards in this government," says
the Protector, in one of his speeches, "to be totally ignorant of what
things may be of the greatest concernment to us." No; this man has not
been an idle scholar. Since the Lord General took the reins of civil
government, and became Lord Protector, he has thought and learned much
of statemanship. But as a statesman, he is still first of all the
Puritan. It is worth while to observe how his foreign policy, which has
been justly admired, took its turn and direction from his religious
feelings. He made alliances with the Protestant powers of the north, and
assumed a firm attitude of hostility towards Spain--and reasons of state
may have had some sway in determining him to these measures; but his
great motive for hostility with Spain was, that she stood "at the head
of the antichristian interest"--"was described in the Scriptures to be
papal and antichristian."

"Why, truly your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is a natural enemy. He
is naturally so throughout, by reason of that enmity that is in him
against whatever is of God.... Your enemy, as I tell you, naturally, by
that antipathy which is in him,--and also providentially, (that is, by
special ordering of Providence.) An enmity is put in him by God. 'I will
put an enmity between thy seed and her seed,' which goes but for little
among statesmen, but is more considerable than all things. And he that
considers not such natural enmity, the _providential_ enmity as well as
the _accidental_, I think he is not well acquainted with the Scripture,
and the things of God,"--(_Speech_ 5.)

In fine, we see in Cromwell, every where and throughout, the genuine,
fervid Puritan--the Puritan general, the Puritan statesman. He was a
man, and, therefore, doubtless ambitious; he rose through a scene of
civil as well as military contest, and, doubtless, was not unacquainted
with dissimulation; but if we would describe him briefly, it is as the
GREAT PURITAN that he must, ever be remembered in history.

In parting company with the editor of these letters and speeches, we
feel that we have not done justice to the editorial industry and
research which these volumes display. Our space would not permit it. For
the same reason we have been unable to quote several instances of vivid
narrative, which we had hoped to transfer to our own pages. And as to
our main quarrel with him--this outrageous adoption of Puritanical bile
and superstition,--we have been haunted all along by a suspicion we have
occasionally expressed, that the man _cannot_ be in earnest. He could
not have been so abandoned by his common sense. He has been so
accustomed to mingle sport, and buffoonery, and all sorts of wilful
extravagance, with his most serious mood, that he perhaps does not know
himself when, and how far, he is in earnest. In turning over the leaves
of his work, we light, towards the end of the second volume, upon the
following passage, which may, _perhaps_, explain the temper of the
writer, when he is abetting and encouraging his fanatical heroes. He is
uttering some sarcasms upon the poor "art of speech."

"Is there no sacredness, then, any longer in the miraculous tongue of
man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle
to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this
two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without
rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence,
with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up
that; or by the Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou
blasphemous scandalous misbirth of Nature, is not even _that_ the
kindest thing I can do for thee, if thou repent not, and alter in the
name of Allah?'"

To this sort of satirical humour--to "the truth of a song,"--not
Dryasdust himself would call upon him to swear. And may not all his
rhapsodies upon his "sword-in-hand" Puritans be little more than an
amplification of this one passage? And, if we insist upon it, that a
reform by the pen, or even by speech-making, is better than one by pike
and musket--if we should suggest that matters of civil government are
better decided by civil and political reasoning than by metaphorical
texts of Scripture, interpreted by prejudice and passion--if we contend
for such truisms as these, shall we not be in danger of occupying some
such position as the worthy prelate whose sagacity led him to discover
that _some facts_ in Gulliver's Travels had surely been overcharged?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations by Thomas
Carlyle._

[2] Take the following instance from the early and more moderate times
of the Revolution, and wherein the most staid and sober of this class of
people is concerned. When Essex left London to march against the king,
then at Oxford, he requested the assembly of divines to keep a fast for
his success. Baillie informs us how it was celebrated. "We spent from
nine to five graciously. After Dr Twisse had begun with a brief prayer,
Mr Marshall prayed large two hours, most divinely confessing the sins of
the members of the assembly in a wonderful, pathetic, and prudent way.
After Mr Arrowsmith preached an hour, then a psalm; thereafter Mr Vines
prayed near two hours, and Mr Palmer preached an hour, and Mr. Seaman
prayed near two hours, then a psalm; after Mr Henderson brought them to
a sweet conference of the heat confessed in the assembly, and other seen
faults to be remedied, and the conveniency to preach against all sects,
especially anabaptists and antinomians. Dr Twisse closed with a short
prayer and blessing. God was so evidently in all this exercise that we
expect certainly a blessing."--_Baillie_, quoted from _Lingard_.




LAYS AND LEGENDS OF THE THAMES.

PART III.


----On passing the little village of Erith, once one of the prettiest
rustic spots in Kent, where the parson and the surgeon formed the heads
of the community, and its only intelligence of the living world depended
on the casual arrival of a boat from the Margate Hoy in search of fresh
eggs for the voyage, a small house was pointed out to me, embosomed in a
dell, which would have completely suited the solitary tastes of a poet
weary of the world:

    "Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
    Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
    Of unsuccessful, or successful war,
    Might never reach me more!"

Fifty years ago, a weekly newspaper was the only remembrancer to either
parson or doctor, of the world which they had left, and that one only
sent by the member for the county, when he thought it desirable to awake
the general gratitude on the approach of a general election. The Thames
certainly might remind the village population that there were merchants
and mariners among mankind; but what were those passing phantoms to
them? John the son of Thomas lived and died as Thomas the father of John
had lived and died from generation to generation. The first news of the
American war reached it in the firing of the Woolwich guns for peace;
and the original tidings of the French Revolution, in similar rejoicings
for the Battle of Waterloo.

    "O happy ye, the happiest of your kind,
    Who leave alike life's woes and joys behind!"

says the philosophic Cowley; and with Cowley I perfectly agree.

But Erith is this scene of philosophy no more. It has now shared the
march of mind: it has become almost a watering-place; it has a library,
a promenade, lodgings for gouty gentlemen, a conventicle, several
vigorous politicians, three doctors, and, most fatal of all, four
steam-boat arrivals every day. Solitude has fled, and meditation is no
more.

But, to my story. In that lonely house, lived for several years, in the
beginning of the century, a singular character, of whom nothing more was
known, than that he had come from some distant place of abode; that he
never received a letter; and that he never hunted, shot, or fished with
the squiredom of the country. He was of large form, loud voice, had a
sullen look, and no trust in her Majesty's ministers for the time being.
At length, on some occasion of peculiar public excitement, the recluse
had gone to Gravesend, where, tempted by the impulse of the moment, he
had broken through his reserve, dashed out into a diatribe of singular
fierceness, but of remarkable power, accused England of all kinds of
oppression to all kinds of countries, and finished his speech by a
recapitulation of all the wishes, wants, woes, and wrongs, as he called
them, of Ireland,

    "First flower of the west, and first gem of the ocean."

Within the next twelve hours, a pair of Bow Street officers were seen
galloping into the village in a post-chaise and four. They brought a
warrant from the Secretary of State to arrest the Irish orator, as a
leader of the late Rebellion returned from transportation, on his own
authority. He was captured, and conveyed to the Tower. And this was the
last intelligence of the patriot; except that he appealed to the
government against all repetition of his Australian voyage, and swore
that he preferred the speedier performance of the law to the operations
on the Coal-mine river. A remarkable tempest, which broke all the
windows, and threw down half the chimneys of the city, a few weeks
after; was supposed by the imaginative to be connected with his
disappearance. At all events, he was heard of no more.


THE VISION.

    Thunder pealed and lightning quivered,
    Gusts a prison's casements shivered.
    From its dungeon rose a scream,
    Where, awakened by the gleam,
    From his pallet rose and ran,
    Wild with fear, a stalwart man.
    Saw he in his tortured sleep,
    Things that make the heart-veins creep?
    Swept he through the world of flame,
    Chased by shapes that none may name?
    Still, as bars and windows clanged,
    Still he roared--"I _will_ be hanged."

    Sleep had swept him o'er the seas,
    To the drear antipodes;
    There he saw a felon band,
    Chains on neck, and spade in hand,
    Orators, all sworn to die
    In "Old Ireland's" cause--or fly!
    Now, divorced from pike and pen,
    Digging ditch, and draining fen,
    Sky their ceiling, sand their bed,
    Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed.
    "Operatives!" he harangued;
    "Ere I'm banished--I'll be hanged."

    Now, he strove to strike a light,
    But, a form of giant height
    Through the crashing casement sprang;
    Shattered stanchions round him rang,
    From his eyes a light within
    Showed the blackness of his skin;
    In his lips a huge cigar
    Smouldered, like a dying star;
    Holding to the culprit's eyes,
    Writ in flame, a scroll of lies,
    Champing jaws with iron fanged,
    "Friend," cried he, "you _shall_ be hanged."

    'Twixt the tempter and the rogue,
    Then began the dialogue:
    --"Master--shall I rob the state?"
    "Not, unless you'd dine off plate."
    --"Shall I try my hand at law?"
    "You'll be sure to make a flaw."
    --"Shall I job in Parliament?"
    "You'll be richer, cent per cent."
    --"Shall I truckle, or talk big?"
    "You'll but get a judge's wig,
    Blockheads may be conscience-panged,
    Knaves are pensioned, but, _not_ hanged!"

    --"Master, _must_ I then escape?"
    "No," exclaimed the knowing shape,
    "You shall perish by Lynch-Law."
    Through his skull he struck a claw,
    On the tempest burst a wail,
    Through the bars a serpent-tail,
    Flashing like a lightning spire,
    Seemed to set the cell on fire;
    Far and wide was heard the clang,
    Through the whirlwind as they sprang.
    Many a year the sulphurous fume
    Stung the nostril in that room.

The river widens, and we sweep along by the rich slopes and deep wooded
vales of the Kentish shore. From time to time little pastoral villages
emerge, from plantations of willows and poplars, and all water-loving
trees. Before coming to Purfleet, we had passed a noble hill, looking
over a vast expanse of country, on which stands a princely
mansion,--Belvedere, with its battlements glittering above groves as
thick as the depths of the Black Forest. This was once the mansion of
Lord Eardley, one of the greatest humorists of the age,--the companion
of George the Fourth, before he ceased to be a wit and became a king.

How many delightful things are lost to the world, by the world's own
laziness. Why have we not a Boswell in every city? Her majesty pays a
laureate, who writes nothing but the annual receipt for his pension. Why
not transfer the office to a Boswell? why not establish a Cabinet-dinner
Boswell? a Buckingham-palace Boswell? a Windsor Boswell? with orders to
make their weekly returns of gaiety and gossipry to the Home Department;
to be thence issued by instalments of anecdote, in volumes, like "Lord
Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors," or in columns, like the protocols
of the Montpensier marriage, for the laughter of mankind?

But the report of a heavy gun, and all eyes turned to a huge shell,
making its curve a mile above our heads, reminded us that the artillery
had a field-day as we passed Woolwich, and that there was every
possibility that this vagrant messenger of destruction, might plump into
our midships. The consternation on board grew, as it descended, looking
bigger and blacker every instant. If it had come on board, it must have
torn us up like paper. The catastrophe would have been invaluable to the
journals of the empire, at this moment of a dearth of news, enough to
make bankrupts of all the coffee-houses in London, and close every club
from Charing Cross to Hyde Park Corner. _We_ should all have been
immortal in paragraphs without number. Coroners, surgeons, poets, and
special juries, would have made their reputation out of _us_; and for a
month of hot weather, we should have been a refreshing topic in the
mouths of mankind. But it was otherwise decreed: the shell dropped
within a foot of the steamer, and we were _quittes pour la peur_.

I fired a poetic shot at Woolwich in return.

    THE ROYAL ARSENAL.

    Woolwich--Woolwich,
    The Thames is thy ditch,
      And stout hearts are thy fortification.
    Let come who come may,
    All is open as day,
      Thy gates are as free as thy nation.

    Let the King of the French
    Build wall, or dig trench,
      Though he has no more princes to marry,
    _Our_ trench is the sea,
    And _our_ walls are the free,
      And we laugh at thy "_grande enceinte, Paris._"

    Deep and dark on their quay,
    Like lions at bay,
      Stand the guns that set earth at defiance;
    With mountains of ball,
    Which, wherever they fall,
      With their message make speedy compliance.

    Along the Parade
    Lies the brisk carronade,
      With Wellington's joy, the twelve-pounder.
    And the long sixty-eight,
    Made for matters of weight,
      The world has no arguments sounder.

    There stands the long rocket,
    That shot, from its socket,
      Puts armies, pell-mell, to the rout, sir;
    At Leipsic, its tail
    Made Napoleon turn pale,
      And sent all his _braves_ right about, sir.

    And there gapes the mortar,
    That seldom gives quarter,
      When speaking to ship or to city;
    For, although deaf and dumb,
    Its tongue is a bomb--
      And so, there's an end of my ditty.

The sun had now overcome the mists of the morning, and was throwing a
rich lustre over the long sheets of foliage which screened, but without
concealing, a large and classic villa on the Essex side. The park
reached to the water's edge, in broad vistas, green as the emerald; deer
were moving in groups over the lawn, or on standing still to gaze on the
wonder of our flying ship. A few boats were slowly passing near the
shore, along with the tide; the water was without a ripple,--the air was
soft and fragrant, as it flowed from grove and garden; and the whole was
a scene of sylvan and summer beauty. The thought suddenly shot across my
mind, what a capital prize this would be, in a revolution! How
handsomely it would repay a patriot for his trouble in uprooting lords
and commons! What a philosophic consummation of a life of husting
harangues, and league itinerancy, it would be, to lie on the
drawing-room sofa of a mansion so perfectly Greek, railing at the
tyranny of thrones, the bigotry of bishops, and the avarice of
aristocracies; lamenting the privations of the poor, over a table of
three courses, and drinking confusion to all monopolies in _Vin de
Comete!_

But, who was the present possessor? I asked the name and heard it. But,
from the captain to the cabin-boy, not a soul could give me another
syllable of information. Like the gravedigger in Hamlet, they might
"cudgel their brains," but all came to the gravedigger's confession at
last,--"Mass, I cannot tell."

Such, thought I, are the chances of the world. The owner of this marine
palace,--of these gardens, groves, deer, and dovecotes,--cannot have
less than L10,000 a-year; yet his name has never reached the auricular
sensibilities of man, beyond the fence of his own park. Was he
philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, historian? inventor of
steam-engine, of spinning jenny, of gunpowder, or of gun-cotton? No, I
searched every cell of memory for some "trivial fond record" which might
justify his title to a mansion and grounds fit for Sophocles, Schiller,
or Shakspeare, the master of them all. I could not find, in all the
rolls of the court of reminiscences, a single scrape of the pen to
inform me; not so much as the commemorative smoke of a candle on the
ceiling of the alcove of Mnemosyne; not a vestige of the "light
fantastic toe," of those sylphs who treasure the flippancies of noble
pens, and live in the fragrance of albums, otto-perfumed. Still I was
driven to the confession, "Mass, I cannot tell."

I had brought a volume of poor Tom Campbell in my pocket, and had been
glancing over his _chef-d'oeuvre_, "Ye Mariners of England," when this
stately edifice first checked my inspiration. In the wrath of my spirit
I tossed the volume overboard. "Psha!" I involuntarily exclaimed, "what
is the use of being a genius? What is the gratitude of a country, where
a cotton-spinner can purchase the fee-simple of a province, while the
man who spreads its fame over the world is left to gather his
contemplations over a stove in an attic, watch the visage of his
landlady, and shudder at the rise of coals!

     'England, with all thy faults I love thee still.'

But it must be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry,
beggarly, blind--" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole
magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen
region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and
the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers--is exactly L1200 a-year! and this
to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of
the sons and daughters of the muse,--the whole "school of the prophets,"
the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! L1200 a-year for
the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes
by the generation to come. L1200 a-year, the salary of an Excise
commissioner, of a manipulator of the penny post, of a charity
inspector, of a police magistrate, of a register of cabs, of any thing
and every body: and this, reduced to decimals, is to be the national
prize, the luxurious provision, the brilliant prospect, the illustrious
tribute of a treasury of fifty millions sterling a-year, to the whole
literature of a land which boasts of its being the intellectual leader
of the world!

I have found the poems of our living bards on the shores of Hudson's
Bay, and heard men talking of them round a stove, while the thermometer
outside the window was 30 deg. below zero. I have found them in a
plantain-thatched hovel on the banks of the Niger, and forgotten while I
read them that the thermometer was 110 deg. in the shade. I have found them
in the hands of a learned pundit on the banks of the Ganges, whom they
were seducing into dreams of dewy pastures and crystal rills. And one of
the pleasantest evenings I ever remember to have spent, was, by the help
of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," as I sat at a supper of rice milk,
after a day of fire on the eastern branch of the Nile, a thousand miles
above Tourists, sheltered under the wagon of a Moorish ambassador from
Sultaun Abderahman to the monarch of Gondar. "England!" exclaimed this
ebony-visaged worshipper of the Beaux Arts, as he displayed the volume
before me. It was the only civilised word in his vocabulary. But I felt
the compliment with patriotic fervency, and in spirit thanked the bard
for the barbarian's acknowledgment of my poetic and penurious country.

I have not done with the theme yet. On returning from the equator, I saw
Campbell's funeral. Westminster Abbey was a mob of dukes, statesmen,
privy-councillors, and men of countless acres. Poor Tom's whole life had
been thankless toil; wasting in meagre industry the powers which ought
to have been cherished by his country for purposes of national honour.
Such is always the course of things. The very stones of Burns' pillars
would have made the great poet happy for life, if their price had been
given to him to cheer his melancholy fireside. Why has the poetic spirit
of England folded its wings, and been content to abandon its brilliant
region to the butterflies of albums, but that the spirit of England has
suffered itself to be fettered by the red tape of a peddling parsimony?
Should we have had a Shakspeare without the smiles of an Elizabeth, and
the generosity of a Southampton? No. He would have split his pen after
his first tragedy; have thrown his ink-stand into the Thames; have taken
the carrier's cart to Stratford, and there finished his days in writing
epitaphs in the churchyard, laughing at Sir Thomas Lucy, and bequeathing
deathless scoffs, to the beggary of mankind.

I was growing into what the dramatists call a "towering passion," and
meditating general reforms of Civil Lists, Chancellors of the Exchequer,
and Lord Chamberlains, when my attention was turned to a very animated
scene going on between a pair who seemed perfectly unconscious of all
the external creation. One of the parties was a showy-looking fellow,
with the mingled expression of _roueism_ and half-pay, which is so
frequent and so unmistakeable in the neighbourhood of St James's. The
lady was a calm and composed personage, whom, on a second glance, I
remembered to have seen wherever the world could bow down to the fair
possessor of countless "consols." But the passion for a handsome
mansion, a handsome stud, and a handsome rental, is indefatigable, and
the ex-staff man poured his adorations into her ear with all the glow of
a suitor ten thousand pounds worse than nothing.

Poesy! sweetest of all the maids of Parnassus! it is thou that givest
thy votary power to read the soul: it is thou that canst translate the
glance into a speech, and give eloquence to the clasp of a hand. It is
thou alone to whom the world is indebted for this _true_ version of the
pleadings of the Guardsman.




TRUE LOVE.


    Exquisite Miss Millionaire!
    Hear a lover's genuine prayer:
    Let the world adore your charms,
    Swan-like neck, or snowy arms,
    Rosy smile, or dazzling glance,
    Making all our bosoms dance;
    For your purse alone I care,
    Exquisite Miss Millionaire!
    Ringlets blackest of the black,
    Ivory shoulders, Grecian back,
    Tresses so divinely twined,
    That we long to be the wind,
    Waiting till the lady's face
    Turns, to give the _coup de grace_.
    All those spells to _me_ are air.
    Truth is truth, Miss Millionaire.

    Let them talk of finger-tips,
    Pearly teeth, or coral lips,
    Cheeks the morning rose that mock,
    _Still_ there _is_ a charm in Stock!
    Solid mortgage, five per cent,
    Freehold with "improving" rent,
    Russia bond, and railroad share,
    Steal _my_ soul, Miss Millionaire.

    Let your rhymers (all are crackt)
    Rave of cloud or cataract;
    On the Rhine, or Rhone, or Arve,
    Let romancers stroll and starve.
    Cupid loves a gilded cage,
    (Let _me_ choose your equipage,)
    Passion pants for Portman Square,
    (Be but mine,) Miss Millionaire.

    There you'll lead a London life,
    More a goddess than a wife;
    Fifty thousand pounds a-year
    Making our expenses clear;
    Giving, once a-week, a _fete_,
    Simply to display our plate.
    Never earth saw such a pair,
    Exquisite Miss Millionaire!

But a steeple starts up from its green thickets; not one of the hideous
objects which the architects of our district churches perpetrate, to
puzzle the passer-by as to the purpose of its being,--whether a brewer's
chimney, or a shot-tower,--a perch for city pigeons, or a standing
burlesque on the builders of the nineteenth age of the fine arts in
England. This steeple is an old grey turret, ivy-mantled, modest, and
with that look of venerable age which instinctively makes us feel, that
it has witnessed memorable things in its time.

And it _has_ witnessed them. On the slope of the hill above this church
once waved the banners of a king, and the opposing banners of his
nobles: the one receiving the lesson, that kings have duties as well as
their subjects; and the others enforcing the lesson by the sight of
lines and columns of the stout bowmen and billmen of the Norman
chivalry.--On this spot, just this day six hundred and thirty years ago,
was held the grand conference between John and the Barons.

Further inland, but rising on the view, is Swainscomb, the hill on which
the Danish armies encamped, in their pirate rovings of the British seas,
and their invasions of the Thames.

What a contrast between the green landscape of this moment, and the camp
of Sweno. All before me was the luxury of cultivation, the yellowing
crop, the grazing cattle, the cottage smoke curling slowly upward on the
back-ground of noble beech, ash, and sycamore. On the summit, the sun
gleamed on a rectory house, half buried in roses, where the most learned
of our Orientalists perused the Koran in the peace of a Mahometan
paradise, and doubtless saw, on the dancing waters of the mighty river
at his feet, perpetual visions of houris.

Yet those pastures once echoed with the barbarian cries of the Cimbric
warriors; tents of seal-skin and white bear fur covered the hill; the
smokes of savage feasting and Scandinavian sacrifice clouded the skies;
and on the summit, surrounded by iron guards and spectral-looking
priests, stood the magic standard of the north, the image of the Raven,
which flapped its wings on the coming of battle, and gave the oracular
cry of victory.

But, what sounds of harmony sweep along the water! I see a range of
showy figures on the shore; it is a whole brass band, seducing us, in
the style of the syrens of old, to bring our ship to an anchor, and
hazard the enchantments of the most delicious of tea-gardens.--We are
within a hundred yards of the pier of Rosherville.

Within five minutes, we might be roaming through this paradise of the
Thames, climbing rustic slopes carpeted with flowers, or gazing at a
menagerie, where the monkeys bound, chatter, and take apples out of your
hand; or sipping coffee of the most fragrant growth, or dancing the
polka under alcoves of painted canvass, large enough to manoeuvre a
brigade of the Horse-guards. By day the scene is romantic, but by night
it is magical. By day the stranger roams through labyrinths of exotic
vegetation, but by night he is enchanted with invisible music, dazzled
with fireworks, and goes to his pillow to dream of the Arabian Nights.
Honour to the name of Jeremiah Rosher, the discoverer of the
"capabilities" of this Garden of the Hesperides. He found it a lime
quarry, and made it a bower of Armida. If, as the great moralist said,
"the man who makes two blades of grass grow where but one grew before,
is a benefactor to mankind," what honours should be paid to the genius,
which substituted human beings for lime-burners, and made the elite of
the east end of the mighty metropolis dance by thousands, where nothing
but the top of a thistle ever danced before. There have been more "first
affections" awakened in the rambles through the shades of Rosherville
than in fifty Almacks, and five hundred times more matches in
consequence, than ever took refuge in Gretna; and all this--for a
shilling!

As we neared the pier, I observed a small but elegant yacht, lying to;
with several groups of dark-featured and cloak-covered men listening,
with all the eagerness of foreign gesture, to the brazen harmony. My
Italian _compagnon de voyage_, instantly bounded from his seat, ran to
the ship's side, and held a rapid dialogue with the crew of the little
vessel. They were just from Rome, and were bringing over the newly
appointed Archbishop from the Vatican! The novelty of the voyage did not
seem to agree with the pleasurable faculties of those sons of "Bella
Italia," for nothing could be conceived more deplorable than their
physiognomies.

The scene reminded me of one which I had witnessed at Naples, on the
arrival of the first steam-boat from Rome, conveying the Cardinal Legate
to the Court of his Majesty of the Two Sicilies.

I disdain all the formalities of poetry. Let others prepare their
parchment-bound portfolios, throw their visages into the _penseroso_,
fling their curls back from their brows, unbutton their shirt-collars,
and, thus Byronised, begin. To _me_ all times and places are the
same.--The inspiration rushes on me, and I pour out my "unpremeditated
song" in the original rapture of Bardism!




THE CARDINAL'S VOYAGE.


    I have seen some queer things,
    Both in people and kings,
        Since first I began as a dreamer;
    But I ne'er thought to hear
    Any thing half so queer
        As a Cardinal's trip in a steamer.

    I once saw a Rabbi,
    The prince of the shabby,
        In a gale of wind playing the screamer,
    Till we plumped him o'erboard,
    Towed along by a cord,
        For a bath at the tail of the steamer.

    'Tis true, the Chinese
    Looked as black as their teas,
        When battered by brave Sir John Bremer:
    But John Chinaman's slaughter
    Was all milk and water,
        To the havoc on board of the steamer.

    On a coil of the cable,
    Right under the table,
        With the glass at 500 of Reaumur,
    Busy "making his soul,"
    As he felt every roll,
        Lay his Highness, on board of the steamer.

    Around him ten chaplains,
    And none of them saplings,
        Lay pale as a quarantine streamer.
    With six dozen of monks,
    All as helpless as trunks,
        All rolling about in the steamer.

    As she steered down the Tiber,
    It shook every fibre
        Of the conclave from forehead to _femur_;
    But, 'twas when in her glee,
    She got sight of the sea,
        That she showed them the tricks of the steamer.

    At Civita Vecchia,
    Oh, mie orecchie!
        What howls called the Saints to redeem her.
    But she darted along
    Like a stone from a thong,
        In the style of a true British steamer.

    She now ruled the roast,
    As she sprang from the coast,
        Through such surges no buckets could teem her:
    The Lipari Isles
    Got but very few smiles
        From the brethren on board of the steamer.

    "As sure as we're born,
    We'll ne'er see Leghorn."
        "Peccavi!" cried out every schemer:
    The whole of the friars.
    In that court were "criers,"
        While thundered the wheels of the steamer.

    I'd not stand in their shoes,
    As they passed Syracuse,
        Where thy frigate lay moored, Captain Seymour:
    At the top of their throats
    Yelling out for thy boats,
        While teeth to the wind went the steamer.

    As they swept by Messina--
    Thy birth-place, Christina!--
        Old Etna was scarce such a beamer:
    In vain they cried--"Stop!"
    With a blaze at her top,
        Like a pillar of flame rushed the steamer.

    She bounced by Charybdis,
    With limestone which ribb'd is;
        A touch from a pebble might seam her;
    Made a curtsey to Scylla,
    As the Turks say, "Bismillah,"
        'Twas a very close shave for the steamer.

    But the surges grew brown,
    And the night hurried down,
        And they saw in each flash a death-gleamer;
    While the peals from the clouds,
    And the wind in the shrouds,
        Made them all very sick of the steamer.

    When they made Capri's lights
    It redoubled their frights,
        And the friars all bellowed--"Tenemur!"
    One and all made confessions,
    (E'en popes have transgressions,)
        There was some heavy work in the steamer.

    But they soon smelt the apples
    And fish-shops of Naples,
        And the cargo began to esteem her--
    "No witch in a sieve,
    They could ever believe,
        Had sailed half so fast as the steamer."

    Could my pen give a sketch
    Of each wo-begone wretch,
        Like Gilray, H. B., or old Damer,
    You should have the whole troop
    That lay stretched on the poop,
        As up by the mole dashed the steamer.

    Were I Guizot, or Florian,
    Or "Oxford Historian,"
        Or "Orator" like Dr Cremer,
    In my grand paragraphs,
    You should have all the laughs
        Of the mob as they rushed from the steamer!




LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.


II.--VAMPYRISM.

Dear Archy,--In acknowledging my former letter, you express an eager
desire to learn, as you phrase it, "all about vampyrs, if there ever
were such things." I will not delay satisfying your curiosity, wondering
only how my friend, your late tutor, Mr H., should have left you in a
state of uncertainty upon a point on which, in my time, schoolboys many
years your juniors had fully made up their minds.

"Were there ever such things as vampyrs?" _tantamne rem tam
negligenter?_ I turn to the learned pages of Horst for a luminous and
precise definition of the destructive and mysterious beings, whose
existence you have ventured to consider problematical.

"A vampyr is a dead body, which continues to live in the grave, which it
leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the
living, whereby it is nourished, and preserved in good condition,
instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies."

Upon my word, you really deserve--Since Mr George Combe has clearly
shown in his admirable work "On the Constitution of Man, and its
adaptation to the world around him," that ignorance is a statutable
crime before Nature, and punishable, and punished by the laws of
Providence,--you deserve, I say, unless you contrive to make Mr H. your
substitute, which I think would be just, yourself to be the subject of
the nocturnal visit of a vampyr. Your scepticism will abate pretty
considerably, when you see him stealthily entering your room, yet are
powerless under the fascination of his fixed and leaden eye--when you
are conscious, as you lie motionless with terror, of his nearer and
nearer approach,--when you feel his face, fresh with the smell of the
grave, bent over your throat, while his keen teeth make a fine incision
in your jugular, preparatively to his commencing his plain, but
nutritive repast.

You would look a little paler the next morning, but that would be all
for the moment; for Fischer informs us, that the bite of a vampyr leaves
in general no mark upon the person. But he fearfully adds, "it (the
bite) is nevertheless speedily fatal, unless the bitten person protect
himself by eating some of the earth from the grave of the vampyr, and
smearing himself with his blood." Unfortunately, indeed, these measures
are only of temporary use. Fischer adds, "if through these precautions
the life of the victim be prolonged for a period, sooner or later he
ends with becoming a vampyr himself; that is to say, he dies, and is
buried, but continues to lead a vampyr life in the grave, nourishing
himself by infecting others, and promiscuously propagating vampyrism."

Now this is no romancer's dream. It is a succinct account of a
superstition, which to this day survives in the east of Europe, where
little more than a century ago it was frightfully prevalent. At that
epoch, vampyrism spread like, an epidemic pestilence through Servia and
Wallachia, causing innumerable deaths, and disturbing all the land with
apprehension of the mysterious visitation, against which no one felt his
life secure.

This is something like a good solid practical popular delusion. Do I
believe it?--to be sure I do; the facts are matter of history. The
people died like sheep, and the cause and method of their dying was, in
their belief, what has just been stated. You suppose, then, they died,
frightened out of their lives; as men have died, whose pardon has been
proclaimed when their necks were already on the block, of the belief
that they were going to die? Well, if that were all, the subject would
be worth examining; but there is more in it than that, as the following
o'er true tale will convince you, the essential parts of which are
attested by perfect documentary evidence.

It was in the spring of 1727 that there returned from the Levant to the
village of Meduegna, near Belgrade, one Arnod Paole, who, in a few years
of military service and varied adventure, had amassed enough to purchase
him a cottage, and an acre or two of land in his native place, where he
gave out he meant to pass the remainder of his days. He kept his word.
Arnod had yet scarcely reached the prime of manhood; and though he must
have encountered the rough, as well as the smooth of life, and have
mingled with many a wild and reckless companion, yet his natural good
disposition, and honest principle, had preserved him unscathed amid the
scenes he had passed through. At all events, such were the thoughts
expressed by his neighbours, as they discussed his return and settlement
among them in the stube of the village Hof. Nor did the frank and open
countenance of Arnod, his obliging habits, and steady conduct, argue
their judgment incorrect. Nevertheless, there was something
occasionally, noticeable in his ways, a look and tone that betrayed
inward inquietude. Often would he refuse to join his friends, or on some
sudden plea abruptly quit their society. And he still more
unaccountably, and as it seemed systematically, avoided meeting his
pretty neighbour, Nina, whose father occupied the next tenement to his
own. At the age of seventeen, Nina was as charming a picture as you
could have seen, of youth, cheerfulness, innocence, and confidence in
all the world. You could not look into her limpid eyes, which steadily
returned your gaze, without seeing to the bottom of the pure and
transparent spring of her thoughts. Then why did Arnod shrink from
meeting her? He was young, had a little property, had health and
industry, and he had told his friends he had formed no ties in other
lands. Why, then, did he avoid the fascination of the pretty Nina, who
seemed a being made to chase from any brow the clouds of gathering care?
But he did so. Yet less and less resolutely; for he felt the charm of
her presence; who could have done otherwise? and how could he at last
resist--he didn't--the impulse of his fondness for the innocent girl who
often sought to cheer his fits of depression?

And they were to be united; were betrothed; yet still an anxious gloom
would fitfully overcast his countenance even in the sunshine of those
hours.

"What is it, dear Arnod, that makes you sad? it cannot be on my account,
I know; for you were sad before you ever noticed me; and that I think,"
and you should have seen the deepening rose upon her cheek, as she
added, "surely first made me notice you."

"Nina," he answered, "I have done, I fear, a great wrong in trying to
gain your affections. Nina, I have a fixed impression that I shall not
live; yet, knowing this, I have selfishly made my existence necessary to
your happiness."

"How strangely you talk, dear Arnod! Who in the village is stronger and
healthier than you? You feared no danger when you were a soldier; what
danger do you fear as a villager of Meduegna?"

"It haunts me, Nina."

"But, Arnod, you were sad before you thought of loving me. Did you then
fear to die?"

"Ah, Nina, it is something worse than death:" and his vigorous frame
shook with agony.

"Arnod, I conjure you, tell me."

"It was in Cossova this fate befel me. Here we have hitherto escaped the
terrible scourge. But there they died, and the dead visited the living.
I experienced a first frightful visitation, and I fled, but not till I
had sought his grave, and exacted the dread expiation from the vampyr."

Nina uttered a piercing cry, and fell senseless. Afterwards, they found
a consolation in the length of time, now months, that had elapsed, since
Arnod had left Cossova, during which no fearful visitant had again
approached him; and they fondly began to hope _that_ gave them security.
For the poor girl well knew from many a village tale the danger to which
Arnod had been exposed.

It is a strange world. The ills we fear often never befall us: the blows
that reach us are for the most part unforeseen ones. One day, about a
week after this conversation, Arnod missed his footing and fell from the
top of his loaded hay-wagon. He was picked up stunned and insensible.
They carried him home; where, after lingering some hours, he died; was
buried; but _not_ forgotten.

Twenty or thirty days after his decease, says the perfectly
authenticated report of these transactions, several in the neighbourhood
made complaints that they had been haunted by the deceased Arnod; and
four of the number (among whom, there being nothing in the report to the
contrary, I am afraid we may include poor Nina) died. To put a term to
this fearful evil, the villagers were advised by their Heyduke, who had
had before some experience in such matters, to disinter the body of
Arnod Paole. This step was accordingly taken _forty days after his
burial_.

"The body," says the report, "was found in a perfectly fresh state, with
no sign of decomposition. Fresh blood had recently escaped from its
mouth, with which its shirt was wet. The skin (the epidermis, no doubt)
had separated together with the nails, and there were new skin and nails
underneath. As it was perfectly clear from these signs that he was a
vampyr, conformably to the use established in such cases, they drove a
stake through his heart.

"Whereupon he gave an audible groan, and a quantity of blood flowed from
him. The same day his body was burned to ashes, which were returned to
the grave."

The authorities further staked and burned the bodies of the four others,
who were supposed to have been infected by Arnod: but no mention is
made of the condition in which they were found.

The adoption of this decisive, measure did not, however, entirely
extinguish the evil, which continued still to hang about the village.
About five years afterwards it had again become rife and very prevalent,
and many again died of it. Whereupon the authorities determined to make
a general clearance of the vampyrs in the churchyard of Meduegna, and
for that purpose they had all the graves to which suspicion was
directed, opened, and their contents dealt with conformably to the state
in which they were found, of which the following is the medical report,
here and there _abridged_ only:--

1. A woman of the name of Stana, 20 years of age, who had died 3 months
before of a 3 days' illness following her confinement. She had before
her death avowed that she had anointed herself with the blood of a
vampyr, to liberate herself from his persecution. Nevertheless she, as
well as her infant, whose body through careless interment had been
half-eaten by dogs, both had died. Her body was entirely free from
decomposition. On opening it, the chest was found full of recently
effused blood. The heart and blood-vessels contained no coagulated
blood, and the bowels had exactly the appearances of sound health. The
skin and nails of the hands and feet were loose and came off, but
underneath lay new skin and nails.

2. A woman of the name of Miliza, who had died at the end of a 3 months'
illness. The body had been buried 90 and odd days. In the chest was
liquid blood. The viscera were as in the former instance. The body was
declared by the Heydukes who recognised it, to be in better condition
and fatter than it had been in the woman's legitimate lifetime.

3. The body of a child of 8 years old, that had likewise been buried 90
days; it was in the vampyr condition.

4. The son of a Heyduke, named Milloc 16 years old. The body had lain in
the grave 9 weeks. He had died after 3 days' indisposition, and was in
the condition of a vampyr.

5. Joachim, likewise a Heyduke's son, 17 years old. He had died after a
3 days' illness; had been buried 8 weeks and 4 days; was found in the
vampyr state.

6. A woman of the name of Rusha, who had died of an illness of 10 days'
duration, and had been buried 6 weeks, in whom likewise fresh blood was
found in the chest.

[The reader will understand, that to see blood in the chest it is first
necessary to _cut_ the chest open.]

7. The body of a girl of 10 years of age, who had died 2 months before.
It was likewise in the vampyr state, perfectly undecomposed, with blood
in the chest.

8. The body of the wife of one Hadnuck, buried 7 weeks before; and that
of her infant, 8 weeks old, buried only 21 days. They were both in a
state of decomposition, though buried in the same ground, and closely
adjoining the others.

9. A servant of the Heyduke of the place, by name Rhade, 23 years old;
he had died after an illness of 3 months' duration, and the body had
been buried 5 weeks. It was in a state of decomposition.

10. The body of the Heyduke Stanco, 60 years of age, who had died six
weeks before: there was much blood and other fluid in the chest and
abdomen, and the body was in the vampyr condition.

11. Milloc, a Heyduke, 25 years old. The body had been in the earth 6
weeks. It was in the perfect vampyr condition.

12. Stanjoika, the wife of a Heyduke, 20 years old; had died after an
illness of three days, and had been buried 18 days. The countenance was
florid, and of a high colour. There was blood in the chest and in the
heart. The viscera were perfectly sound. The skin remarkably fresh.

The document which gives these particulars is signed by three regimental
surgeons, and formally countersigned by the lieutenant-colonel and a
sub-lieutenant, it bears the date of June 7, 1732, Meduegna near
Belgrade. No doubt can be entertained of its authenticity, nor of its
_general_ fidelity; the less so, that it does not stand alone, but is
supported by heaps of parallel evidence, only less rigorously
verifiable. It appears to me to establish beyond a question, that,
where the fear and belief of vampyrism is prevailing, and there occur
several deaths after short illnesses, the bodies, when disinterred,
weeks after burial, present the appearance of corpses, from which life
has only recently departed.

What inference shall we draw from this fact?--that vampyrism is true in
the popular sense, and that these fresh-looking and well-conditioned
corpses had some mysterious way of preternaturally nourishing
themselves? That would be to adopt, not to solve the superstition. Let
us content ourselves for the present with a notion less monstrous, but
still startling enough: That the bodies, which were found in the
so-called vampyr state, instead of being in a new and mystical
condition, were simply alive in the common way; that, in short, they
were the bodies of persons who had been buried alive; and whose life was
only extinguished by the ignorance and barbarity of those who
disinterred them. In the following sketch of a similar scene to that
above described, the truth of this inference comes out with terrific
force and vividness.

Erasmus Francisi, in his remarks upon the description of the Archdukedom
of Krain, by Valvasor, speaks of a man of the name of Grando, in the
district of Kring, who died, was buried, and became a vampyr, and as
such was exhumed for the purpose of having a stake thrust through him.

"When they opened his grave, after he had been long buried, his face was
found with a colour, and his features made natural sorts of movements,
as if the dead man smiled. He even opened his mouth, as if he would
inhale fresh air. They held the crucifix before him, and called in a
loud voice, 'See, this is Jesus Christ who redeemed your soul from hell,
and died for you.' After the sound had acted on his organs of hearing,
and he had connected, perhaps, some ideas with it, tears began to flow
from the dead man's eyes. Finally, when, after a short prayer for his
poor soul, they proceeded to hack off his head, the corpse uttered a
screech, and turned and rolled just as if it had been alive, and the
grave was full of blood."

Alive, then, the bodies surely were. And it is from this position, as a
starting point, that we must follow and unravel the whole mystery, _if
we dare_.

Not that there is any particular virulence in this superstition, but
that all superstitions are awkward things to deal with. They have their
own laws, and run through definite stages, but always menace those who
meddle with them. A superstition waxes and flourishes--that is its first
stage; it then wanes in public opinion, is discredited, and is declared
obsolete; that is stage the second. Eventually comes more enlightenment;
its wonders are again admitted, but explained; the false in it separated
from the true; this is its third and last period. And it may be
remarked, that society is never safe against the reproduction of a
superstition, till it has gone through this third stage (analogous to
the disinterment and dissection of a vampyr); till then, it is always
capable of "walking" again. But, which is singular, to the end the
operation of explaining a superstition is unsafe, that is to say, if you
step a quarter of an inch before the sagacious nose of the public. Of
course, if any one should attempt to explain away a flourishing
superstition, he would encounter, not martyrdom, perhaps, any more, but
the persecution of opinion certainly, and the ban of society. But if he
ventures upon the same process, even with one that is already put down,
he is liable to be viewed and attacked as a credulous person, disposed
to revive forgotten rubbish; for he has unwittingly affronted public
opinion by asserting that to be worth examining, which society had
proclaimed an error. Doubly wo to him if his explanation contain some
startling novelty! But, courage! again,--

The bodies disinterred and found in the so-called vampyr state, were
then alive.

But how could they, you ask, be alive after an interment of days or
weeks? How is it possible they could lie without air, boxed up in a
manner which would certainly kill a strong and healthy person in a few
minutes or hours, and yet retain their vitality? I will not bring
forward as favourable cases in point, the instances of frogs and toads
that have been discovered in rocks, where they must have been encased
for years or centuries, alive: first, because, although they are true,
you might equally question these; secondly, because a human being cannot
compete in vitality with a cold-blooded reptile. I shall content myself
with falling back upon the evidence already adduced. The disinterred
bodies _proved_, by their appearance, some even by their behaviour, that
they were alive; and I shall retort upon you the question, how came you
not to know that bodies could live under such circumstances a
considerable length of time, and that many cases have transpired in
which, totally _apart from vampyrism_, bodies have been found turned
over in the coffin, through efforts made by them, when, after their
burial, they had unhappily recovered consciousness?

But what, then, was the pathological condition in which these persons
continued to exist, after they had ceased to appear alive?

It is just one of the profitable results of examining the superstition
before us, that the above question becomes explicitly propounded, and
its solution demanded of physiologists. Its solution cannot fail of
being full of interest, but it is yet, unluckily, a desideratum, or,
like the principle which gives motion to the divining rod, as yet only
indicated and partially outlined.

What is wanted is direct scientific examination, and verification by
competent persons, of all the phenomena the body presents in these
strange circumstances. In the absence, however, of recorded observation,
let us imagine how the thing might come about.

The series of effects surmised would not begin in the heart; analogy
leads us to suppose that primary interruption of the heart's action for
a very brief period is fatal. Somewhere in the Indian seas, death is
inflicted by a backward blow with the elbow on the region of the heart;
a sudden angina is produced, which is promptly fatal. Neither, upon
similar showing, can it commence in obstructed breathing. Then the
commencement of the changes must be sought in the brain. Now it is
analogically by no means very improbable, that the functions of the
nervous system admit of being brought to a complete stand-still, the
wheels of the machinery locking, as it were, of a sudden, through some
influence directly exerted upon _it_, and that this state of interrupted
function should continue for a very considerable period, without loss of
power of recovery. Nor would it be contrary to analogy that such an
arrest of activity in the nervous system should stop, more or less
completely, the act of breathing and the action of the heart, without at
the same time the consequences following which result from either of
these changes, _when they are primary_. The heart, when _not acting by
order_, need not be supposed to lose its contractile force and tendency.
The blood, though not moving, being in contact with living vessels, need
not coagulate. There is no physiological absurdity in supposing such a
general arrest of function, originating in the nervous system, and
continuing an indefinite period without life being extinguished. If a
swimmer be taken with cramp and sink, he is irretrievably dead in five
minutes. But if he sink from a fit of epilepsy, he may remain a longer
time under water, yet recover. But epilepsy is a form of loss of
consciousness beginning in the nervous system--a kind of fit which may,
under certain circumstances, be thus preservative of life. So may we
presume, that in the singular cases we are considering, the body is but
in another and deeper fit, which suspends the vital phenomena, and
reduces its vitality to that of the unincubated egg, to simple life,
without change, without waste or renewal. The body does not putrefy,
because it is alive; it does not waste or require nourishment, because
every action is stilled within it.

But this must be a dull subject of speculation for you, and your mind is
perhaps wandering thence to more practical views. It has struck you
possibly, not without an uncomfortable misgiving, that this obscure, but
unpleasant event may happen to yourself, and what on earth is there to
prevent _your_ being buried alive?

If you wish individually to be as safe as possible, leave by will to
some eminent surgeon, not your habitual attendant, L50, and his railway
expenses, &c., to be paid him for opening your body, when you are
certainly dead; L25 if he opens you, finds you alive, and succeeds in
sewing you up, and keeping you so; L200, on the contrary, to be expended
in indicting him for manslaughter if you die under his hands. I do not
venture to affirm that with all these precautions you would be perfectly
safe. The eminent Vesalius, surgeon, and a favourite of the Emperor
Charles V., with all his experience and knowledge, was unlucky enough to
open a Spanish nobleman by mistake, while he was yet alive. The
consequences, no doubt, were more serious than they would be now.
Vesalius hardly escaped the claws of the Inquisition, and died during
his expiatory pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

If, more comprehensively, you should wish to save others, as well as
yourself, from this awful risk, and have a friend in the legislature,
urge him, or otherwise Mr Wakley, to move for the insertion in any
convenient bill a clause to appoint in every district a qualified
officer to license burials; he had better not be a practising doctor,
but his office might embrace necroscopic inquiries for the coroner, and
the registrarship of births and deaths.

In either case, I would recommend you to offer publicly a premium of
L500, to be paid at the expiration of three years, for the best treatise
upon the signs of death; the same being calculated to form a useful body
of instruction, as yet wanting, either for your private surgeon, or the
new officials.

In England, indeed, our decent respect for the dead, which leads us to
postpone interment as long as possible, is a tolerable security against
being buried alive. The coffin is seldom closed upon the remains, before
decomposition has already commenced. _That_ is death's certain seal;
nor, in the present state of our knowledge, special cases of course
excepted, is it right to consider life surely extinct, till the impress
of that seal is perceptible to the senses.

On the Continent, generally, the interval observed before burial is far
too short for safety. They calculate that in France from twenty to
thirty are annually interred alive, computing from the number of those
who, after supposed death, come to life before the funeral is completed.
I cannot help imagining that this seeming death must be much less
frequent in England than in some other countries; (is that owing to the
more vigorous practice for which English medical men are celebrated,
they either cure or kill?) In Germany, interment is forbidden by law for
three days after death. And there is a curious and humane provision in
the grave-houses attached to the cemeteries of some of the principal
towns: Bodies which are brought too soon, not having performed the three
days' quarantine, are received and lodged, being disposed upon tressles,
with rings on their toes and fingers which are attached to bell-pulls.
The corpse thus, on coming to itself, may have immediate attendance
merely by ringing for it; some one is always there on the watch. But the
humanity of this arrangement, though perfect as long as it lasts, is
finite in duration. As soon as the seventy-two hours prescribed by law
are expired, it is another thing. The body is then legally dead, and
must comport itself accordingly. At any rate, it is at its own risk if
it behaves otherwise than as a corpse, and gives itself any airs of
vitality. This is appalling enough, and would certainly justify any
body, if it could, in getting out at nights and turning vampyr.

And now, to return again to our inquiry. We have got thus far. The
bodies found in the so-called vampyr state are alive. They are in a sort
of fit, the possible duration of which is undetermined. The same fit may
occur, and does occur continually, with no reference to the superstition
of vampyrism. But where the belief in vampyrism is rife, these fits are
more prevalent, and spread sometimes like an epidemic.

The question naturally follows, how is this malady, viewing it as one in
these cases, propagated?

At such seasons, it is far from improbable that there is some physical
cause in operation, some meteorological influence perhaps, electrical or
otherwise, disposing the system to be a readier prey to the seizure. As
certain constitutions of the year alter the blood and lead to fever or
cholera, why should not others render the nervous system irritable and
proner to derangement?

Then it is well known that fright will bring on certain kinds of
fits--in women hysteric fits, in the youth of either sex epileptic fits;
and certainly no ghastlier terror can there be than the accredited
apprehension of vampyrism. And it deserves remark, that impressions upon
the mind are known to be capable of shaping particular kinds of fits,
and especially of exciting and determining the features of sensorial
illusions, that seem adjuvants in vampyrism.

We are able to creep yet a step nearer to the mark. There is great
reason to believe that some human beings have had the power of throwing
themselves into the state of seeming death, _voluntarily_. In Gooch's
surgical works, there is an account of a Colonel Townsend, who asserted
this of himself, and challenged Gooch to witness the performance. And
you may read in the narrative of Gooch, how he and two or three other
competent witnesses saw Colonel Townsend dispose himself to favour the
invasion of this fit, and how he gradually fell into a state apparently
devoid of animation. A very few years ago there was a story in the
papers of a native in India, who undertook for a reward to do the same
feat, and to allow himself to be buried for a stipulated period. A
gentleman, certainly not of a credulous turn in general, told me he was
in India at the time with his regiment; and, though not on the spot,
that he knew the parties who brought the conjuror to work; and that he
believed they positively buried him, and, at the end of the time agreed
upon, disinterred him, and found him alive. But be _this_ story true or
false, the case of Colonel Townsend remains to show the thing asserted
to have been possible--and this remark may be safely added: Whatever
change of the kind the will can bring about, can be twice as readily
wrought by fear or a disturbed imagination.

You are, I hope, or fear rather, by this time satiated with the
marvellous and with the subject. What!--yet another question? Ay. How
came this superstition to arise?

The answer is ready. In those days the belief in ghosts was absolute,
and a vampyr was a sort of ghost. When an ignorant person, that is, when
any one in those days became the subject of a sensorial illusion
representing a human being, to a certainty he identified the creation of
his fancy as somebody he had seen or heard of; then he would tell his
acquaintances that the ghost of such a person haunted him. If the fright
brought on a fit, or seemed to cause his death, the neighbours would
remember how he had before been haunted. Then, in any case, what more
natural than to disinter the body of a supposed visitant, to know why he
is unquiet in the grave? Then, if once a body so disinterred were found
in the fresh and undecomposed state, the whole delusion would start into
existence. The violence used would force blood from the corpse; and that
would be construed into the blood of a victim. The absence of a scar on
the throat of the victim, would throw no difficulty in the way to the
vampyr theory, because vampyrs enjoyed the ghostly character, and all
its privileges. Supposing, again, that at any time chance had brought to
light a body interred alive, and lying still in this fit, the whole yarn
of superstition might again have been spun from that clue.

Do you want more than this? I shall begin to think you at heart
superstitious. I tell you it is contrary to the rules of inductive
logic, to look for, or to use more principles than are sufficient for
the reasonable explanation of phenomena. Yet you urge, do you, that it
is no less unphilosophical, in an obscure and unsettled inquiry, wholly
to exclude the consideration of unlikely possibilities?--Well! it is
nothing to me. Have it your own way: suppose, if you like, that the man
in the grave _had_ something to do with spreading the disease, and that
his nervous system, in its abnormal state, could put itself in relation
with that of another person at a distance. If you like it, have it so.
In one sense, it simplifies the matter. But though I cannot deny your
supposition to be possible, you will excuse me if I profess to hold the
solution, which I have myself given, to be sufficient.

Well! _there_ is an end of the subject, at all events; and I accept your
thanks for having told you all I know about vampyrism. I deserve them
more than you are aware. At the churchyard in Meduegna, my dear Archy, I
had you thoroughly in my power. I saw how your curiosity was raised, and
that an picture I had drawn would have been accepted by you with
avidity; and I must confess it did at one moment occur to me, to
describe to you the exact dress and deportment of the three regimental
surgeons, or Feldscherers, (a handsome word signifying field-barbers),
John Flickinger, Isaac Stegel, and John Fredrick Baumgartner, as well as
the behaviour and remarks of a drummer boy, who held the instrument case
during the _intermortem_ examination, an event he witnessed for the
first time. But I would not abuse my advantage; so I let you off cheaply
with the sole fabrication of Nina, and the personal characteristics of
Arnod Paole, of whom unfortunately nothing has come down to posterity,
but that he was haunted by a vampyr at Cossova, fell from a hay-cart at
Meduegna, and died, and lived a vampyr himself.

    I remain, dear Archy,
            Yours, &c.
                  MAC DAVUS.


LETTER III.


SPIRITS, GOBLINS, GHOSTS.

Dear Archy.--On what subject shall I next address you? Elves, goblins,
ghosts, real and unreal; dreams, witchcraft, second-sight? Bless me! the
field of marvels seems more thronged, as I approach it closer. The
spirits I have evoked begin to scare me with their numbers. How on earth
shall I ever get them fairly laid? But some, I see, can now only limp
along--they are scotched already; I will begin with finishing these. Yet
they deserve gentle treatment. They sprang from our nature, which seems
expressly made to procreate and rear them. Thick, within and around us,
lie the rich veins of illusive suggestion from which they spring.

The thing nearest us is our mental constitution, the world of
consciousness. It is of it we first learn, though it be the last we
understand. It is that through which we perceive and apprehend all other
things; and nothing becomes part of our knowledge but as it has been
shaped and coloured by its magic reflexion. Nay, more, it is not only
our mirror but our archetype for every thing. So we spiritualise the
material universe, and afterwards, by an incongruous consistency,
anthropomorphise spirit.

Reason in vain reclaims against this misuse of analogy. Feeling,
imagination, instinct are too many for her; and any mood, from fun to
earnest, from nonsense to sublimity, may hear a responsive note when
this chord is touched.

Address to that ingenuous young American a remark upon the slightness of
the legs of her work-table,--she blushes--her lively fancy has given
them personality. Were she a wealthier miss, she would give them,
besides, neat cambric trowsers with lace borders. With less refinement,
and with inexcusable warmth, I take shame to myself for having bestowed
a kick upon a similar mahogany limb, which had, however, begun the
contest by breaking my shin.

To the poet's eye, nature is instinct with life. Greece may be "living
Greece no more"--in the soul of her people; but her immortal plains, and
streams, and hills have their own vitality.

    "The mountains _look_ on Marathon,
    And Marathon _looks_ on the sea."

You go to visit them; they meet you half-way: "spectatum veniunt."

Amid the Alps--with glacier, torrent, forest around--you still evoke
the fancied spirit of the scene, though it be but

    "To gaze upon her beauty--nothing more."

And where, in sublimer grandeur, snowclad, upreared against the nearer
sun, are seen the towering Andes; to the poet's eye, the Cordillera lies
no huge backbone of earth; but lives, a Rhoetus or Enceladus of the
West, and

            "over earth, air, wave,
    Glares with his Titan eye."

This is but the calm, the dignified, the measured march of poetical
conception. No wonder, when superstition steps in to prick on
imagination, that all should vividly team with spirit life. Or that on
Walpurgis' night, bush and streamlet and hill bustle and hurry, with
unequal pace, towards the haunted Brocken: the heavy ones lag, indeed, a
little, and are out of breath--

    "The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!
    How they snort and how they blow!"

No wonder that to the dreamer's eye, in tranquil scenes of sylvan
solitude the fawn of yore skipped in the forest dell, the dryad peeped
from behind the shadowy oak, the fay tripped lightly over the moonlit
sward.

But enough, and too much, of "your philosophy." Yet there are those
still who may be the wiser for it. Let me sketch you a believer in the
creed it would dispel.

He was a Spanish West-Indian--in his active years had been an extensive
planter and slave-owner in Porto Rico. His manners were grave and
dignified, as due to himself; courteous, as not denying equal or
superior worth in others. He had seen the world, and spoke of it
habitually with a fine irony. We had many a walk together. He was
nervous about his health. One day, as our path lay along the banks of
the Rhine, his conversation took this turn:--

"Do you believe in spirits?" he asked me; and upon my intimating the
polite but qualified assent which suited the tone in which the question
was put--"It may be superstition," he continued, "but I am often
inclined to think that the pucks and goblins, which, as they say, once
haunted these scenes, are not entirely visionary beings. You may
smile--but this has happened, nay, often, happens, to me in my walks. I
see a big clod before me in the path, and form the intention of avoiding
it; when close to it, I step to one side, when pr-r-rt, my toe strikes
against it."

I edged slightly away from my companion with the disagreeable impression
that he was gone mad.

He went on;--"When I lived in the West Indies, the children of the
slaves, about my house, were treated with great kindness and indulgence.
They would come about my table at dessert, and often had little presents
given them. So they grew into obj

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