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saying that he would raise such men also in other "kingdoms; and once in good company, where there was "Ménage present, hearing the courage of M. de Beaufort extolled, he said in express terms, if M. de Beaufort is Fairfax, I am Cromwell." We subjoin a portion of M. Guizot's comment, which we need hardly say we have translated for ourselves.

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"Mazarin excelled in poisoning, for the ruin of his enemies, their actions or their words, and at the same time in taking to himself impudently their examples and their weapons. While he thus showed to the queen's eyes, as a crime in the coadjutor, his opinion of Cromwell, he laboured himself to enter with Cromwell into close relations. Too shrewd not to recognise that in that direction, in England, lay the capacity and power,' it was to the future master of the republic, no longer to the republican parliament, that he made his advances. Cromwell lent himself to them willingly; he too was incessantly bent on making to himself powerful friends everywhere. 'He adroitly leaves to others the

conduct and care of whatever begets outcry,' said, in 1650, Croullé to M. Servien, and reserves to himself affairs that confer obligation; concerning which at least he sets rumour afloat, in 'such manner that if they succeed they may be attributed to him, ' and if not that one may see he willed them well, and that the ' result came of hindrance from others.'” 2

We cannot quote all the details of the overtures that thus began, curious and impressive as they are, but through none of them, the reader soon perceives, was Mazarin a match for Cromwell. The great soldier and statesman, though with his own predilections hampered by the prejudices of his country, and standing between the intrigues

1 "Trop sagace pour ne pas recon"naitre que là étaient, en Angleterre, "l'habileté et le pouvoir.' According to the translator, "Too sagacious not "to perceive that in him were centred "all the power and ability then "existing in England."

2 A letter to Mazarin from the Count d'Estrador is added, in which, though the date is the 5th of February, 1652, the title of Protector is given to Cromwell. Of course therefore M. Guizot is careful to remark, in a

note, that as the letter and its date are beyond question, the title of Protector must have been intercalated some years afterwards; but his translator does not think it worth while either to translate this note, or explain the confusion it was intended to remedy; and in subsequently giving the note of June '53, quoted in the text, he appends to its signature the title (P.) which its very contents should have shown him did not then belong to the writer.

of the rival Courts of France and Spain, yet knew how to play his game with perfect safety, and to obtain substantially all that he desired. All through the negotiations that ensued, however, two things are very obvious in his far-sighted policy. He had not simply to adjust the balance in Europe, at that time overweighted by France ; but he had to look to the safety and stability of his own recently settled government, more in danger from so near a neighbour as France, than from one so distant as Spain. Here will be found the real clue to his wonderful management of these two powers, and to the measures by which he had been able to establish so potent and singular an influence in the heart, and over both the parties, of the neighbour kingdom. Up to the time of the expulsion of the Long Parliament, no alliance had been absolutely concluded with either France or Spain; though at the moment of its expulsion, Bordeaux was under the impression that a treaty with it, on the part of the statesman he represented, was on the point of being happily concluded. But already Mazarin had been obliged, even without deriving any immediate advantage from the step, formally to recognise the Republic and its leaders; and with hot haste, as soon as the Long Parliament was dissolved, the Cardinal of course easily betook himself to the power that remained triumphant. "Mazarin," writes M. Guizot, "always pro

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digal of flattering advances, wrote to Cromwell to offer "him, and ask from him, a serviceable friendship. Crom"well replied to him with a rare excess of affected humility." And then follows a little note, concerning which Mr. Carlyle, believing it to exist only in the form of a French translation made by Mazarin, remarked, that "it "would not be wholly without significance if we had it in "the original." Here it is in the original.

"It is surprise to me that your Eminency should take notice of a person so inconsiderable as myself, living (as it were) separate from the world. This honour has done (as it ought) a very deep

impression upon me, and does oblige me to serve your Eminency upon all occasions, so as I shall be happy to find out. So I trust that very honourable person Monsieur Burdoe [Bordeaux] will therein be helpful to

"Your Eminencie's

“Thrice humble Servant,

"O. CROMWELL."

The historian calls this a rare excess of affected humility; but after all what is there more, in the counterfeit humility, than such a reply to a compliment as every gentleman in England makes every week in some form to somebody. You do me too much honour. "There is nothing that I would not do to serve you, Sir. "Good morning."

There is never in truth any affected humility, but rather a contempt very thinly covered, if not openly avowed, on the part of Cromwell to Mazarin; nor does this find anywhere more characteristic expression than in the evidence M. Guizot incidentally gives us of the sort of gifts they interchanged. While Mazarin sent over regal presents of tapestry, wine, and Barbary horses, Cromwell, familiarly and half contemptuously confident that he had to do with a man more avaricious than vain, would return such compliments by forwarding so many cases of pure Cornwall tin. As to their public intercourse throughout, the historian sees that it was but a constant interchange of concessions and resistances, services and refusals, in which they ran little risk of quarrelling, for the simple reason that they mutually understood each other, and did not require from one another anything that could not be denied without doing greater injury than the grant would do service; but it was after all a kind of equality in which the personal predominance undoubtedly remained with Cromwell. It is he whom it is manifestly impossible, throughout, either to intimidate or deceive; and though it was no small art on Mazarin's side, as soon as he saw this, to affect to meet his adversary with the same simple frankness, there can hardly be a question which plays the

greater figure, he who possessed the art, or he who always reduced its possessor to the necessity of practising it.

Of Cromwell's first effort after the dissolution of the Long Parliament to govern with the help of the men who had been parties to that act of violence, the result, according to M. Guizot's view, was to show him that reforming sectaries and innovators, though useful instruments of destruction, are destructive to the very power they establish; and that the classes among whom conservative interests prevail are the only natural and permanent allies of authority. Yet he had no choice but to renew his efforts in the same direction, with what help such experience could give; for the French historian has satisfied himself that his honest desire was so far, by any possible means, to place himself in subordination to English law, as to obtain cooperation from a fairly-chosen Parliament that should consent honestly to assist him in establishing a Cromwell dynasty of kings, and in restoring, with the monarchy, the ancient form of lords and commons. But still his attempts were unavailing. He could not restore what he had so helped to destroy. Amid the ruins which his hands had made, he was doomed to see the vanity of those rash hopes, and to learn that no government is, or can be, the work of man's will alone. In the endeavour to obtain such a Parliament as the old usages of England sanctioned, he raised up more than one semi-constitutional assembly; but merely to destroy it when it disappointed him, and with it, as he well knew, his only safe means of taxing the people he would govern. The money needful for State purposes thus failing him, he was at last driven to the expedient pronounced by M. Guizot to be the political act which caused his ruin-the establishment of Major-Generals to levy tithes on the revenues of the royalists. By this unjustifiable act, M. Guizot declares that he detached his glory from the cause of order and peace, in the name of which he had begun to found his throne, and plunged his power down among the depths of revolutionary violence. "He invoked," says the consti

tutional historian, “necessity; and without doubt thought "himself reduced to that: if he was right, it was one of "those necessities inflicted by God's justice, which reveal "the innate vice of a Government, and become the sen66 tence of its condemnation."

From this time to the end, M. Guizot is of opinion that Cromwell was thoroughly conscious of the weakness with which he was smitten by his own deed, and that it was upon feeling in all directions for support he at last perceived his surest prop to be the advocacy of liberty of conscience. Of the formal discussion which he afterwards raised with his friendly Parliament on the question of his assuming royal state, the historian speaks as of a comedy performed for the instruction of the nation. It was designed to make men familiar with the topic, and to scatter abroad a variety of arguments in its favour; but the interference of the army brought the comedy to an unwelcome end. Cromwell resigned the name of king; and with it, the historian appears to think, any power of retaining much longer the kingly authority. He had arrived at the slippery height on which to stand still was impossible, and there was no alternative but to mount higher or to fall. Even his great heart failed him. He now saw, that, die when he might, he must be content to leave behind him for his successors the two enemies he had most ardently combated, anarchy and the Stuarts; and M. Guizot's comments leave it to be inferred as his opinion, that had he long survived the discomfiture which embittered his last months, even his political position might have been seriously endangered. He died, however, in the fullness of his power, though sorrowful. "Sorrowful not only because he must die, but "also, and above all, because he must die without having "attained his true and final purpose."

But that his, nevertheless, was the strong resolve which exclusively upheld the State as long as life remained to him, M. Guizot shows nowhere so emphatically as in the description of the Protectorate of his son. The weak purpose of Richard being substituted for his father's iron