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that men of the same wicked inclinations may be no less affrighted with their lasting ignominy, than enticed by their momentary glories. And, that your highness may perceive, that I speak not all this out of any private animosity against the person of the late protector, I assure you, upon my faith, that I bear no more hatred to his name, than I do to that of Marius or Sylla, who never did me, or any friend of mine, the least Injury;" and with that, transported by a holy Fury, I fell into this sudden rapture:

Curst be the man (what do I wish? as though
The wretch already were not so ;
But curst on let him be) who thinks it brave
And great, his countrey to enslave;
Who seeks to overpoise alone

The balance of a nation;

Against the whole but naked state,

Who in his own light scale makes up with arms the weight:

Who of his nation loves to be the first,

Though at the rate of being worst;

Who would be rather a great monster, than A well-proportion'd man.

The son of Earth with hundred hand Upon his three-pil'd mountain stands, Till thunder strikes him from the sky; The son of Earth again in his Earth's womb does lie.

What blood, confusion, ruin, to obtain
A short and miserable reign!
In what oblique and humble creeping wise
Does the mischievous serpent rise!
But even his forked tongue strikes dead:
When he has rear'd up his wicked head,
He murders with his mortal frown;
A basilisk he grows, if once he get a crown.

But no guards can oppose assaulting fears,
Or undermining tears,

No more than doors or close-drawn curtains keep

The swarming dreams out, when we sleep.
That bloody conscience, too, of his
(For, oh, a rebel red-coat 'tis)
Does here his early Hell begin,

He sees his slaves without, his tyrant feels within.

Let, gracious God! let never more thine hand
Lift up this rod against our land!
A tyrant is a rod, and serpent too,

And brings worse plagues than Egypt knew. What rivers stain'd with blood have been! What storm and hail-shot have we seen' What sores deform'd the ulcerous state! What darkness, to be felt, has buried us of late!

Countrey.] This word, in the sense of patria, as including in it the idea of a civil constitution, is always spelt by Mr. Cowley, I observe, with an e before y,-countrey;-in the sense of rus, without an e-country; and this distinction, for the sake of perspicuity, may be worth preserving. HURD.

VOL VIA

How has it snatch'd our flocks and herds away!
And made even of our sons a prey!
What croaking sects and vermin has it sent,
The restless nation to torment!
What greedy troops, what armed power
Of flies and locusts, to devour

The land, which every where they fill! Nor fly they, Lord! away; no, they devour it still.

Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be ;

Come sink us rather in the sea.
Come rather pestilence, and reap us down;
Come God's sword rather than our own.
Let rather Roman come again,

Or Saxon, Norman, or the Dane:
In all the bonds we ever bore,

We griev'd, we sigh'd, we wept; we never blush'd before.

If by our sins the divine justice be
Call'd to this last extremity,
Let some denouncing Jonas first be sent,
To try, if England can repent.
Methinks, at least, some prodigy,
Some dreadful comet from on high,

Should terribly forewarn the Earth,
As of good princes death, so of a tyrant's birth."

Here, the spirit of verse beginning a little to fail, I stopt: and his highness, smiling, said, "I was glad to see you engaged in the enclosure of metre; for, if you had staid in the open plain of declaiming against the word tyrant, I must have had patience for half a dozen hours, till you had tired yourself as well as me. But pray, countryman, to avoid this sciomacy, or imaginary combat with words, let me know, sir, what you mean by the name of tyrant, for I remember that, among your ancient authors, not only all. kings, but even Jupiter himself (your juvans pater) is so termed; and perhaps, as it was used formerly in a good sense, so we shall find it, upon better consideration, to be still a good thing for the benefit and peace of mankind; at least, it will appear whether your interpretation of it may be justly applied to the person, who is now the subject of our discourse."

"I call him (said I) a tyrant, who either intrudes himself forcibly into the government of his fellow-citizens without any legal authority over them; or who, having a just title to the government of a people, abuses it to the destruction or tormenting of them. So that all tyrants are at the same time usurpers, either of the whole, or at least of a part, of that power which they assume to themselves; and no less are they to be accounted rebels, since no man can usurp authority over others, but by rebelling against them who had it before, or at least against those laws which were his superiors: and in all these senses no history can afford us a more evident example of tyranny, or more out of all possibility of excuse or palliation, than that of the person whom you are pleased to defend; whether we consider his reiterated rebellions against all his superiors, or his usurpation of the supreme power to himself, or his tyranny in the exercise of it: and, if law

N

ful princes have been esteemed tyrants, by not serves, no doubt, to have the command of her containing themselves within the bounds of those (even as his highness had) by the desire of the laws which have been left them, as the sphere of seamen and passengers themselves. And do but their authority, by their fore-fathers, what shall consider, lastly, (for I omit a multitude of weighty we say of that man, who, having by right no things, that might be spoken upon this noble arpower at all in this nation, could not content him-gument) do but consider seriously and impartiself with that which had satisfied the most ambi-ally with yourself, what admirable parts of wit tious of our princes? nay, not with those vastly extended limits of sovereignty, which he (disdaining all which had been prescribed and obser. ved before) was pleased (out of great modesty) to set to himself; not abstaining from rebellion and usurpation even against his own laws, as well as those of the nation?"

and prudence, what indefatigable diligence and invincible courage, must of necessity have concurred in the person of that man, who, from so contemptible beginnings (as I observed before) and through so many thousand difficulties, was able not only to make himself the greatest and most absolute monarch of this nation, but to add to it the entire conquest of Ireland and Scotland (which the whole force of the world, joined with the Roman virtue, could never attain to); and to crown all this with illustrious and heroical undertakings and successes upon all our foreign enemies: do but (I say again) consider this, and you will confess, that his prodigious merits were a better title to imperial dignity, than the blood of an hundred royal progenitors; and will rather lament that he lived not to overcome more nations than envy him the conquest and dominion of these."

"Whoever you are," said I, (my indignation making me somewhat bolder) "your discourse, methinks, becomes as little the person of a tutelar angel, as Cromwell's actions did that of a protector. It is upon these principles, that all the great crimes of the world have been committed, and most particularly those which I have had the misfortune to see in my own time, and in my own

"Hold, friend, (said his highness, pulling me by my arm) for I see your zeal is transporting you again; whether the protector were a tyrant in the exorbitant exercise of his power, we shall see anon; it is requisite to examine, first, whether he were so in the usurpation of it. And I say, that not only he, but no man else, ever was, or can be so; and that for these reasons. First, because all power belongs only to God, who is the source and fountain of it, as kings are of all honours in their dominions. Princes are but his viceroys in the little provinces of this world; and to some he gives their places for a few years, to some for their lives, and to others (upon ends or deserts best known to himself, or merely for his undisputable good pleasure) he bestows, as it were, leases upon them, and their posterity, for such a date of time as is prefixed in that patent of their destiny, which is not legible to you men below. Neither is it more unlawful for Oliver to succeed Charles in the kingdom of Eng-country. If these be to be allowed, we must land, when God so disposes of it, than it had break up human society, retire into the woods, been for him to have succeeded the lord Strafford and equally there stand upon our guards against in the lieutenancy of Ireland, if he had been ap- our brethren mankind, and our rebels the wild pointed to it by the king then reigning. Men beasts. For, if there can be no usurpation upon are in both the cases obliged to obey him whom the rights of a whole nation, there can be none they see actually invested with the authority, by most certainly upon those of a private person; that sovereign from whom he ought to derive it, and, if the robbers of countries be God's vicegewithout disputing or examining the causes, either rents, there is no doubt but the thieves and banof the removal of the one, or the preferment of ditos, and murderers, re his under-officers. It the other. Secondly, because all power is at- is true which you say, that God is the source and tained, either by the election and consent of the fountain of all power; and it is no less true, that people (and that takes away your objection of he is the creator of serpents, as well as angels; forcible intrusion); or else by a conquest of them nor does his goodness fail of its ends, even in the (and that gives such a legal authority as you malice of his own creatures. What power he mention to be wanting in the usurpation of a suffers the Devil to exercise in this world, is too tyrant); so that either this title is right, and then apparent by our daily experience; and by nothere are no usurpers, or else it is a wrong one, thing more than the late monstrous iniquities and then there are none else but usurpers, if which you dispute for, and patronize in England: you examine the original pretences of the princes but would you infer from thence, that the power of the world. Thirdly, (which, quitting the dis-of the Devil is a just and lawfu! one; and that all pute in general, is a particular justification of his highness) the government of England was totally broken and dissolved, and extinguished by the confusions of a civil war; so that his highness could not be accused to have possessed himself violently of the ancient building of the commonwealth, but to have prudently and peaceably built up a new one out of the ruins and ashes of the former; and he, who after a deplorable shipwreck, can with extraordinary industry gather together the dispersed and broken planks and pieces of it, and with no less wonderful art and felicity so rejoin them, as to make a new vessel more tight and beautiful than the old one, de

men ought, as well as most men do, obey him? God is the fountain of all powers; but some flow from the right hand (as it were) of his goodness, and others from the left hand of his justice; and the world, like an island between these two rivers, is sometimes refreshed and nourished by the one and sometimes over-run and ruined by the other; and (to continue a little farther the allegory) we are never overwhelmed with the latter, till, either by our malice or negligence, we have stopped and dammed up the former.

"But to come a little closer to your argument or rather the image of an argument, your similitude. If Cromwell had come to command in Ire

land, in the place of the late lord Strafford, I should have yielded obedience, not for the equipage, and the strength, and the guards which he brought with him, but for the commission which he should first have showed me from our common Sovereign that sent him; and, if he could have done that from God Almighty, I would have obey-against, the one part being slain, and the other ed him too in England; but that he was so far from being able to do, that, on the contrary, I read nothing but commands, and even public proclamations, from God Almighty, not to admit him.

"Your second argument is, that he had the same right for his authority, that is the foundation of all others, even the right of conquest. Are we then so unhappy as to be conquered by the person whom we hired at a daily rate, like a labourer, to conquer others for us? Did we furnish him with arms, only to draw and try upon our enemies (as we, it seems, falsely thought them) and keep them for ever sheathed in the bowels of his friends? Did we fight for liberty against our prince, that we might become slaves to our servant? This is such an impudent pretence, as neither he nor any of his flatterers for him had ever the face to mention. Though it can hardly be spoken or thought of without passion, yet I shall, if you please, argue it more calmly than the case deserves.

"The right, certainly, of conquest can only be exercised upon those against whom the war is declared, and the victory obtained. So that no whole nation can be said to be conquered, but by foreign force. In all civil wars, men are so far from stating the quarrel against their country, that they do it only against a person or party, which they really believe, or at least pretend, to be pernicious to it; neither can there be any just cause for the destruction of a part of the body, but when it is done for the preservation and safety of the whole. It is our country that raises men in the quarrel, our country that arms, our country that pays, them, our country that authorizes the undertaking, and by that distinguishes it from rapine and murder; lastly it is our country that directs and commands the army, and is indeed their general. So that to say, in civil wars, that the prevailing party conquers their country, is to say, the country conquers itself. And, if the general only of that party be the conqueror, the army, by which he is made so, is no less conquered than the army which is beaten, and have as little reason to triumph in that victory, by which they lose both their honour and liberty. So that, if Cromwell conquered any party, it was only that against which he was sent; and what that was must appear by his commission. It was (says that) against a company of evil counsellors, and disaffected persons, who kept the king from a good intelligence and conjunction with his people. It was not then against the people. It is so far from being so, that even of that party which was beaten, the conquest did not belong to Cromwell, but to the parliament which employed him in their service, or rather indeed to the king and parliament, for whose service (if there had been any faith in men's vows and protestations) the wars were undertaken. Merciful God! did the right of this

miserable conquest remain then in his majesty ; and didst thou suffer him to be destroyed, with more barbarity than if he had been conquered even by savages and canibals? Was it for king and parliament that we fought; and has it fared with them just as with the army which we fought fled? It appears therefore plainly, that Cromwell was not a conqueror, but a thief and robber of the rights of the king and parliament, and an usurper upon those of the people. I do not here deny conquest to be sometimes (though it be very rarely) a true title; but I deny this to be a true conquest. Sure I am, that the race of our princes came not in by such a one. One nation may conquer another sometimes justly; and if it be unjustly, yet still it is a true conquest, and they are to answer for the injustice only to God Almighty (having nothing else in authority above them) and not as particular rebels to their country, which is, and ought always to be, their superior and their lord. If perhaps we find usurpation instead of conquest in the original titles of some royal families abroad, (as no doubt there have been many usurpers, before ours, though none in so impudent and execrable a manner) all I can say for them is, that their title was very weak, till, by length of time, and the death of all juster pretenders, it became to be the true, because it was the only one.

"Your third defence of his highness (as your highness pleases to call him) enters in most seasonably after his pretence of conquest; for then a man may say any thing. The government was broken; who broke it? It was dissolved; who dissolved it? It was extinguished; who was it, but Cromwell, who not only put out the light, but cast away even the very snuff of it? As if a man should murder a whole family, and then possess himself of the house, because it is better that he, than that only rats, should live there. Jesus God! (said I, and at that word I perceived my pretended angel to give a start and trembled, but I took no notice of it, and went on) this were a wicked pretension, even though the whole family were destroyed; but the heirs (blessed be God!) are yet surviving, and likely to out-live all heirs of their dispossessors, besides their infamy. Rode, caper, vitem, &c. There will be yet wine enough left for the sacrifice of those wild beasts, that have made so much spoil in the vineyard. But did Cromwell think, like Nero, to set the city on fire, only that he might have the honour of being founder of a new and more beautiful one? He could not have such a shadow of virtue in his wickedness; he meant only to rob more securely and more richly in midst of the combustion; he little thought then that he should ever have been able to make himself master of the palace, as well as plunder the goods of the commonwealth. He was glad to see the public vessel (the sovereign of the seas) in as desperate a condition as his own little canoe, and thought only, with some scattered planks of that great shipwreck, to make a better fisherboat for himself. But when he saw that, by the drowning of the master, (whom he himself treacherously knocked on the head, as he was swimining for his life) by the flight and dispersion of others,

and cowardly patience of the remaining company, all was abandoned to his pleasure; with the old hulk, and new mis-shapen and disagreeing pieces of his own, he made up, with much ado, that piratical vessel which we have seen him command, and which, how tight indeed it was, may best be judged by its perpetual leaking.

force or policy, but of the divine justice and pre destination; and, though we see a man, like that which we call Jack of the clock-house, striking, as it were, the hour of that fulness of time, yet our reason must needs be convinced, that the hand is moved by some secret, and, to us who stand without, invisible direction. And the stream of the current is then so violent, that the strong"First then, (much more wicked than those fool- est men in the world cannot draw up against it; ish daughters in the fable, who cut their old father and none are so weak, but they may sail down into pieces, in hope by charms and witchcraft to with it. These are the spring-tides of public make him young and lusty again) this man en-affairs, which we see often happen, but seek in deavoured to destroy the building, before he vain to discover any certain causes: could imagine in what manner, with what mateIrials, by what workmen, or what architect, it was to be rebuilt. Secondly, if he had dreamt himself to be able to revive that body which he had killed, yet it had been but the insupportable insolence of an ignorant mountebank; and thirdly (which concerns us nearest), that very new thing, which he made out of the ruins of the old, is no more like the original, either for beauty, use, or duration, than an artificial plant, raised by the fire of a chymist, is comparable to the true and natural one which he first burnt, that out of the ashes of it he might produce an imperfect similitude of his own making.

:

"Your last argument is such (when reduced to syllogism, that the major proposition of it would make strange work in the world, if it were received for truth; to wit, that he who has the best parts in a nation, has the right of being king over it. We had enough to do here of old with the contention between two branches of the same family what would become of us, when every man in England should lay his claim to the government? And truly, if Cromwell should have commenced his plea, when he seems to have begun his ambition, there were few persons besides, that might not at the same time have put in theirs too. But his deserts, I suppose, you will date from the same term that I do his great demerits, that is, from the beginning of our late calamities (for, as for his private faults before, I can only wish, and that with as much charity to him as to the public that he had continued in them till hisdeath, rather than changed them for those of his latter days); and therefore we must begin the consideration of his greatness from the unlucky era of our own misfortune; which puts me in mind of what was said less truly of Pompey the Great, Nostrâ miseriâ magnus es. But, because the general ground of your augmentation consists in this, that all men who are effecters of extraordinary mutations in the world, must needs have extraordinary forces of nature, by which they are enabled to turn about, as they please, so great a wheel; I shall speak first a few words upon this universal proposition, which seems so reasonable, and is so popular, before I descend to the particular examination of the eminences of that person which is in question.

"I have often observed (with all submission and resignation of spirit to the inscrutable mysteries of Eternal Providence) that when the fulness and maturity of time is come, that produces the great confusions and changes in the world, it usually pleases God to make it appear, by the manner of them, that they are not the effects of human

-Omnia fluminis

Ritu feruntur, nunc medio alveo
Cum pace delabentis Etruscum

In mare, nunc lapides adesos,
Stirpésque raptas, & pecus & domos
Volventis unâ, non sine montium
Clamore, vicinæque sylvæ ;

Cùm fera diluvies quietos

Irritat amnes.

Hor. 3 Carm. xxix.

"And one man then, by maliciously opening all the sluices that he can come at, can never be the sole author of all this (though he may be as guilty as if really he were, by intending and imagining to be so); but it is God that breaks up the flood-gates of so general a deluge, and all the art then and industry of mankind is not sufficient to raise up dikes and ramparts against it. In such a time it was as this, that not all the wisdom and power, of the Roman senate, nor the wit and eloquence of Cicero, nor the courage and virtue of Brutus, was able to defend their country, or themselves, against the unexperienced rashness of a beardless boy, and the loose rage of a voluptuous madman. The valour and prudent counsels on the one side are made fruitless, and the errors and cowardice on the other harmless, by unexpected accidents. The one general saves his life, and gains the whole world, by a very dream and the other loses both at once, by a little mistake of the shortness of his sight. And though this be not always so, for we see that, in the translation of the great monarchies from one to another, it pleased God to make choice of the most eminent men in nature, as Cyrus, Alexander, Scipio, and his contemporaries, for his chief instruments and actors in so admirable a work (the end of this being, not only to destroy or punish one nation, which may be done by the worst of mankind, but to exalt and bless another, which is only to be effected by great and virtuous persons); yet, when God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people, he does not raise up his servant Cyrus (as he himself is pleased to call him), or an Alexander (who had as many virtues to do good, as vices to do harm); but he makes the Massanellos, and the Johns of Leyden, the instruments of his vengeance, that the power of the Almighty might be more evident by the weakness of the means which he chooses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents and the monsters of Africa, to correct the pride of the Egyptians; but called for his

Armies of locusts out of Æthiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust; and because you see a whole country destroyed by these, you will argue from thence they must needs have both the craft of foxes, and the courage of lions?

those who are born for the erection of new em pires.

"And, I confess, I find nothing of that kind, no not any shadow (taking away the false light of some prosperity) in the man whom you extol for the first example of it. And certainly, all virtues being rightly divided into moral and intellectual, I know not how we can better judge of the former, than by men's ac-' tions; or of the latter than by their writings or speeches. As for these latter (which are least in merit, or rather which are only the instruments of mischief, where the other are wanting) I think you can hardly pick out the name of a man who ever was called great, besides him we are now speaking of, who never left the memory behind him of one wise or witty apophthegm even amongst his domestic servants or greatest flatterers. That little in print, which remains upon a sad record for him, is such, as a satire against him would not have made him say, for fear of trans

I know not what you can produce for the justification of his parts in this kind, but his having been able to deceive so many particular persons, and so many whole parties; which if you please to take notice of for the advantage of his intellectuals, I desire you to allow me the liberty to do so too when I am to speak of his morals. The truth of the thing is this, that if craft be wisdom, and dissimulation wit, (assisted both and improved with hypocrisies and perjuries) I must not deny him to have been singular in both; but so gross was the manner in which he made use of them, that, as wise men ought not to have believed him at first, so no man was fool

"It is easy to apply this general observation to the particular case of our troubles in England: and that they seem only to be meant for a temporary chastisement of our sins, and not for a total abolishment of the old, and introduction of a new government, appears probable to me from these considerations, as far as we may be bold to make a judgment of the will of God in future events. First, because he has suffered nothing to settle or take root in the place of that, which hath been so unwisely and unjustly removed, that none of these untempered mortars can hold out against the next blast of wind, nor any stone stick to a stone, till that which these foolish builders have refused, be made again the head of the corner. For, when the indisposed and long-tor-gressing too much the rules of probability. mented commonwealth has wearied and spent itself almost to nothing, with the chargeable, various, and dangerous experiments of several mounte-banks, it is to be supposed, it will have the wit at last to send for a true physician, especially when it sees (which is the second consideration) most evidently (as it now begins to do, and will do every day more and more, and might have done perfectly long since) that no usurpation (under what name or pretext soever) can be kept up without open force, nor force without the continuance of those oppressions upon the people, which will at last tire out their patience, though it be great even to stupidity. They cannot be so dull (when poverty and hunger begins to wet their under-enough to believe him at last: neither did any standing) as not to find out this no extraor- man seem to do it, but those who, thought dinary mystery, that it is madness in a na- they gained as much by that dissembling, as tion to pay three millions a year for the he did by his. His very actings of godliness maintaining of their servitude under tyrants, grew at last as ridiculous, as if a player by putwhen they might live free for nothing under ting on a gown, should think he represented their princes. This, I say, will not always lie excellently a woman, though his beard at the hid, even to the slowest capacities; and the same time were seen by all the spectators. If next truth they will discover afterwards is, you ask me, why they did not hiss, and exthat a whole people can never have the will, plode him off the stage; I can only answer, that without having at the same time the power, they durst not do so, because the actors and the to redeem themselves. Thirdly, it does not door-keepers were too strong for the company. look (me thinks) as if God had forsaken the I must confess that by these arts (how grossly family of that man, from whom he has raised soever managed, as by hypocritical praying and up five children, of as eminent virtue, and all silly preaching, by unmanly tears and whin other commendable qualities, as ever lived ings, by falsehoods, and perjuries even diaboliperhaps (for so many together, and so young) cal) he had at first the good-fortune (as men in any other family in the whole world. Es- call it, that is, the ill-fortune) to attain his pecially, if we add hereto this consideration, ends; but it was because his ends were so that by protecting and preserving some of unreasonable, that no human reason could forethem already through as great dangers as ever see them; which made them, who had to do were past with safety, either by prince or with him, believe, that he was rather a wellprivate person, he has given them already meaning and deluded bigot, than a crafty and (as we may reasonably hope it to be meant) malicious impostor: that these arts were a promise and earnest of his future favours. helped by an indefatigable industry, (as you And lastly (to return closely to the discourse term it) I am so far from doubting, that I infrom which have a little digressed) because tended to object that diligence, as the worst of his I see nothing of those excellent parts of na- crimes. It makes me almost mad, when I hear ture, and mixture of merit with their vices, in a man commended for his diligence in wickedthe late disturbers of our peace and happiness. If I were his son, I should wish to Ress, that uses to be found in the persons of God he had been a more lazy person, and that

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