again he used the noble language which was among the last he addressed to the last parliament that assembled in his name. He would have freedom for the spirits and souls of men, he said, because the spirits of men are the men. The mind was the man. If that were kept pure and free, the man signified somewhat; but if not, he would fain see what difference there was betwixt a man and a beast. Nay he had only some activity to do some more mischief. Upon these principles he would have established, and connected inseparably, government and religion.

The religion which teaches us our duty to others is not very likely to fail us in regard to ourselves. Watch Cromwell in any great crisis of his life, and judge whether the faith he held could have rested on any doubtful or insecure foundation. Take him at the moment of his greatest triumph, or in the hour of his darkest peril, and observe whether the one so unduly elates or the other so unworthily depresses him, as to cause him to lose the sense either of his own weakness or of his Creator's power, either of the littleness of time or of the greatness of eternity. In the very majesty of his reception after the Worcester battle, "he would seldom mention anything "of himself," says Whitelocke, describing their meeting at Aylesbury; "mentioned others only; and gave, as was due, the glory of the action unto God." In his last extremity at Dunbar, when Lesley, with an army of double his numbers, flushed with victory, had so hemmed him in with his sick, starving, and dispirited troops, as they retreated and were falling back upon their ships, that, to use his own expression, "almost a miracle was needed to save them, there is, in the tone of the letter he sent to Haselrig on the Newcastle border, such a quiet and composed disregard of himself, such a care only for the safety of the cause, such a calm and sustained reliance upon God, as we doubt if the annals of heroism can elsewhere parallel. "Whatever becomes of us," he wrote, "it will be well for you to get what forces you can to"gether; and the south to help what they can. If

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your forces had been in readiness to have fallen upon "the back of Copperspath, it might have occasioned supplies to have come to us. But the only wise God knows "what is best. All shall work for good. Our spirits are comfortable, praised be the Lord; though our present condition be as it is. Let Henry Vane know "what I write. I would not make it public, lest danger "should accrue thereby."

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Whatever else might desert this man, hope and faith never did. There was one who stood afterwards by his death-bed, while a worse storm shook the heavens than even that which had swept along the heights of Dunbar, and who recalled these days in testimony of the strong man he had been. "In the dark perils of war, in the high places of the field, hope shone in him like a pillar "of fire, when it had gone out in all the others." Nor in the high places only, but in the solitude or service of his chamber, he impressed in like manner all who had intercourse with him. It was ever they who stood nearest to him who had reason to admire him most; and to the eyes even of valets and chamber-grooms, the heroic shone out of Cromwell. It is from one who held such office in his household we have a picture of him handed down to us which Vandyke or Velasquez might have painted. A body well compact and strong; his stature under six foot ("I believe about two inches "); his head so shaped as you might see it both a storehouse and shop, of a vast treasury of natural parts; his temper exceeding fiery ("as "I have known"), but the flame of it kept down for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had; naturally compassionate towards objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure, though God had made him a heart, wherein was left little room for any fear; "a larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was." What Englishman may not be proud of that written portrait of Oliver Cromwell, still fresh from the hand of worthy Mr. John Maidstone, cofferer and gentleman-in-waiting on the Lord Protector of England?

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Of the general estimate of him formed by the French historian little more need be said. There is much we might further make objection to; but compressed and brief as our summary of M. Guizot's views has been, it will perhaps be understood with sufficient reservation. He does not reject the stories of the Irish massacres, though they are unwittingly refuted even by Cromwell's most eager enemies, the Irish priests, in the Clonmacnoise manifesto. He retains, on authority very decidedly questionable, a great many reports which would. tend to suggest ill thoughts of the Protector. But to the full worldly extent of the term, his Cromwell, whether before or after the Protectorate, was one of the great men of the earth. He is under the influence of ambition, but it is an ambition generally qualified, and often exalted, by the state necessities to which it bends. The question that so early arose between him and the Long Parliament, M. Guizot calls the beginning of a duel, which he holds that neither party engaged in could avoid forcing on to its close. Of one or other of them, he believes it became the duty cedere majori; and from the tone of his reasoning we are left to infer also his belief, that in the latter days of the struggle it could not but occur to the Parliament, while claiming over Cromwell a nominal supremacy, to feel the sting of the last portion of the epigram, Illa gravis palma est, quam minor hostis habet. One very interesting point we think certainly very clearly established by his researches to illustrate the details he gives of this contention. He shows more decisively than any previous historian that Cromwell, before the republic fell by his hand, was indisputably the first man in it; not simply in right of his victories, but by the administrative genius he had displayed, and by the light in which the foreign courts already regarded him. At the same time, as it seems to us, he fails himself to attach sufficient importance to this; and perhaps generally somewhat underrates the influence and connexion of foreign policy with the domestic administration of England at the period.

But the mistake, if it be one, does not stint the details M. Guizot gives, which open to us the manuscript treasures of the Hague, and the unpublished archives of the French foreign office, as well as those of Simancas in Spain, and pour upon this part of his great subject a flood of steady and original light. His volumes thus include details of various confidential missions, and much other matter of the highest interest, of which the most essential portions are given complete in a copious appendix. That we should always admit their evidence in exactly the light in which M. Guizot seems disposed to accept it, we of course do not find to be necessary. Although M. Croullé on the part of France, and Don Alonzo de Cardeñas on the part of Spain, both express and act upon opinions of Cromwell's character which agree generally with the judgment formed of it in M. Guizot's book, it may yet with perfect fairness be said that neither a gentleman from the court of Philip IV, nor a gentleman from the court of Louis Quatorze bound to the policy of a statesman of the stamp of Mazarin, were very likely to understand an exalted zeal like Cromwell's, assuming it to have been always what it claimed to be. Putting aside such feats of policy, however, as an alleged deliberate sowing of discord for state purposes between the absent king and his brothers, and some few other acts justified only by the too freely permitted distinction between private and political morality, especially in foreign relations, there is nothing in these new discoveries of which any defender of Cromwell has need to be ashamed, and there is a vast deal to confirm very strikingly the sense of his greatness.

We give a few examples. Before the time of the Protectorate, by the chief statesmen of both parties in the war of the Fronde then raging in France, the upward course of the great leader of the popular party in England had been watched with anxiety and dread. Both feared and hated him; yet such was their position in regard to Spain, and each other, that his friendly countenance to either was become of inexpressible value. He had

hardly arrived in London after the battle of Worcester, when, in answer to overtures from De Retz at the instant of the brief triumph which preceded that statesman's fall, he sent Henry Vane with a letter to him (a striking proof that up to this time, that "great parliamentarian and "intimate confidant of his," as the Cardinal describes him, could have had no suspicion of any blow meditated against the parliament); and this also is the date when Mazarin, affecting to put a friendly construction upon rumours that had reached him of a proposed expedition of Cromwell's into France, eagerly suggests to M. Croullé through M. Servien that if at the close of his Scottish campaign "Mr. Cromwell should come into France, being "as he is a person of merit, he will be well received here, "for assuredly every one will go to meet him at the place "where he disembarks." Of course M. Croullé promptly disabuses his master of any notion of expecting that kind of neighbourly visit; but, in also contradicting the report that any hostile intentions were entertained to France, he is careful to reproduce for the Cardinal the haughty terms in which Cromwell himself was said to have denied it. "Looking at his hair, which is already white, he said that "if he were ten years younger there was not a king in "Europe whom he could not make to tremble, and that, "as he had a better motive than the late king of Sweden, "he believed himself still capable of doing more for the "good of nations than the other ever did for his own "ambition."

Nevertheless it was while overtures were on all sides secretly going on, and still during De Retz's brief predominance, that the double-faced Mazarin thus wrote from his place of exile at Bruhl to discredit De Retz with the queen. It was probably written at the very moment when the coadjutor himself was attempting to justify his intercourse with Vane on the express ground of what he calls Mazarin's "base and continual" flattery of Cromwell. "The coadjutor has always spoken with veneration of "Cromwell, as of a man sent by God into England,