Oh, glorious time for the church! Oh golden age for the profligate and the slave!

Not so the days before us now:- the month of June has come, and Pym has risen, in this third parliament, the accuser of the royal chaplain, Mainwaring. The various assertions of manly thought and elevated courage that rang through the great assembly after that memorable exposure, have been celebrated in other portions of this work. Mainwaring, given up by Charles and by Laud, received severe judgment. Cromwell sat silently, earnestly watching all, and patiently waiting all.

The house reassembled, smarting with the gross events of the recess. A debate soon followed; and in the course of it were heard the mild, yet potent, accents of the voice of Hampden, insinuating deadly objections, under the notion of modest doubts, and, almost insensibly to themselves, influencing in his behalf the most violent of his opponents. The charm of that exquisite orator hangs yet over the house, when it is suddenly dispelled by a harsh and broken voice of astonishing fervour, whose untunable but piercing tones announce to the royalists a foe to grapple with, and to the patriots a strong arm of help it is Cromwell. Among other things, he accuses Dr. Alabaster of having preached flat popery at St. Paul's Cross; and more, that his diocesan, the bishop of Winchester, had ordered him to do it! By this same bishop's means, he adds, that Mainwaring, so nobly and justly punished here for his sermons, has been recently, recently, within a month, preferred to a rich living. If these are steps to church preferments, what may we not expect? *

Cromwell resumed his seat, and was followed by sir Robert Philips, a veteran in debate, and one of the acknowledged authorities of the house, whose tone, in the few words he addressed to the speaker, bore evidence to the striking effect which the new member had created. Then followed the singular scene which closed in the adoption of Pym's religious vow — the heaviest blow

*See Parl. History, vol. viii. p. 289.

After that disastrous termination of this parliament, Cromwell returned to Huntingdon, but thenceforward kept himself in frequent intercourse with Hampden and the celebrated St. John- the latter of whom had married his uncle's eldest daughter.* He had now openly chosen his part with that mighty body of able and resolute men, who were pledged, to the death, against a continuance of the old, the vile, and irresponsible government of England; and, though having merely set his hand to the plough, every idea and purpose of his mind seemed, in that very instant, to have stretched forward to some prospect of a harvest time. Hampden's vade-mecum was "Davilas' History of the Civil Wars:"-Cromwell's was the already unceasing thought of the great motives that might be infused into mean men by the simple use of one tremendous passion, in whose presence pleasure should avail not, and suffering be as nothing — a glorious and elevating thought of all the possible vices and follies in even the basest, the weakest, and the most low-born, which might thus be entirely overmastered or subdued. In other words, Hampden studied how best to manage an army Cromwell, how best to raise one. From this time it was notorious he carried religious exercises to an infinitely higher pitch than he had yet attempted; and now it was that sir Philip Warwick was told by his physician, Dr. Simcott, of the splenetic man his patient was; and how he had "phansyes about the cross in that town;" and how that he, the doctor, had been "called up to him at midnight, and such unseasonable hours," so very many times, upon a 66 strong phansy, which made him believe he was then dying." No doubt, the good Dr. Simcott knew about as much of the disease his patient laboured under as the grave sir Philip Warwick himself. The thoughts that shook Oliver Cromwell then were far beyond the reaches of their souls; it is possible, nay almost certain, that

Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Cromwell, esq., of Upwood.

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they were even beyond the reach of the thinker's own. For therein consists, as our noblest philosopher has in a single line defined it, the whole pain of hypochondriacal metaphysics. Cromwell had already projected himself too far into the future.

And the process, thus commenced, seems to have gone regularly on during the brief interval he remained in Huntingdon. Had Shakspeare personally undergone the precise disease, he could not more finely have defined it, as by a prophetic forecast, in Cromwell's case, than by the description Polonius gives of Hamlet's suffering. For the young prince, observes that fine politic specimen of the Burleigh school,

Fell into a sadness; thence into a fast;

Thence to a watch; thence into a weakness;
Thence to a lightness;

and this was the very movement of hypochondriacal disease now traced in Cromwell. At one time

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plunged in sorrow now still more alarming the affectionate solicitude around him by refusing support that nature cried for-then starting from his bed in the Idead of night with fits of painful watching bled strangely afterwards with "phansies about the cross" of Huntingdon, - and then, after an interval, suddenly plunging into fantastic shapes of merriment, that showed most painful and dangerous of all, — thus did Cromwell, according to the traditions and records of the time, pass the three years that followed his return to Huntingdon from the parliament of 1628.

At last (perhaps moved to it by some desire to seek refuge in a change of scene) he resolved to leave that town. I should observe that, some days after his return from his parliamentary duties, he had been appointed, in conjunction with his old tutor, Dr. Beard, and one Robert Bernard, a justice of the peace, under the new charter granted about that time to the Huntingdon corporation; but this appointment, made with a probable view of softening the asperity of the late formidable member of parliament, had grown irksome to him from circumstances recently named, and

his discomforts were thought to have been increased by the neighbourhood of his very violent royalist uncle, sir Oliver- whose influence had already rendered hopeless his re-election for Huntingdon.

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that, in 1631, he prevailed with that uncle, his wife, and his mother*, to concur with him in the sale of certain lands and tithes of the family, out of which his small patrimony was at present derived. By this sale he realised 1800%. ; and having stocked a little farm at St. Ives with the money, he at once, leaving his mother at Huntingdon, in the midst of old associations too dear to her to be resigned, removed to St. Ives with his wife and children.

Nearly every local memorial of the residence of the Cromwells at Huntingdon has perished. The great old

*The industry of Mr. Noble furnishes us with an abstract of the conveyance, which I shall give (as probably interesting to the reader), premising that" the reason of sir Oliver and Mrs. Robert Cromwell joining in the deed is, that the latter had a small jointure out of it, and that, with reference to the former, sir Henry Cromwell had merely given or devised these premises to his son, Rob. Oliv., the protector's father, for a long term of years, as it was usual anciently." The following is Mr. Noble's abstract and description of the property:"On the 7th of May, 1631, he obtained that his uncle, sir Oliver Cromwell, alias Williams, of Ramsey, in the county, of Huntingdon, knt., his mother, Eliz. Williams, alias Cromwell, of Huntingdon, widow, should join with himself and his wife (who are described, Oliver Williams, alias Cromwell, of Huntingdon, esq., and Elizabeth, his now wife), to convey his estates in and near Huntingdon, and, at Hartford, to Richard Oakeley, of the city of Westminster, in the county of Middlesex, esq., and Rich. Owen, also of the county of Middlesex, esq. As it may be very acceptable to many of my readers, especially those of Huntingdon and its vicinity, I will give the parcels as they stand in the deed, omitting only the general words. All the capital messuage, called the Augustine Fryers, alias Augustine Friers, within the borough or town of Huntingdon and the messuages, &c. belonging to it, and one close, called the Dove-house close, and also all those three cottages or tenements, with a malt-house, and a little close, by estimation one acre, lying together in Huntingdon aforesaid, theretofore of Edm. Goodwyns; and also all those seven leas of pasture, containing by estimation two acres, called Toothill Leas, lying in Huntingdon; and also all those two acres and three roods of meadow, lying and being in Brampton, in the said county of Huntingdon, in a meadow there called Portholme; and also all those two acres of meadow, in Godmanchester, in the said county of Huntingdon; all the above premises are called either late, or now or late, in the possession of the said Eliz. Cromwell, widow; and all other the lands and tenements of the said Eliz. Cromwell, widow, Oliv. Cromwell, esq., or either of them in Huntingdon, Godmanchester, or Brampton aforesaid, or any of them. And also all the rectory and parsonage of Hartford, in the said county, and the tithes both great and small of the same, with all and singular the rights, members, and appurtenances thereof, to the late dissolved priory or monastery of the blessed virgin Mary, in Huntingdon aforesaid, heretofore belonging, or appertaining, and being sometime parcel of the possessions thereof. The sum," Mr. Noble adds, "that these estates were sold for was only 18007.; with this he did not think it beneath him to stock a grazing farm at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, whither he went, upon leaving the place of his birth."

family are extinct; their manor-houses and lands have passed to other proprietors; but, though no trace remains to tell of the old knightly fortunes and splendours of the chief representatives of the name, the memory of the selfraised brewer has clung fast to the soil-even to fragments of it—and will cling there immortally. A portion of land near Godmanchester is still called Oliver Cromwell's Swath; and two acres in the manor of Brampton still bear the name of Oliver Cromwell's Acres.

In the care of the St. Ives farm he now not only sought employment for some portion of the ill-subdued energy which always craved in him for action, but also put to the proof the value of those thoughts we have attributed to him after the disastrous dissolution of 1628. In the tenants that rented from him-in the labourers that took service under him-he sought to sow the seeds of his after-troop of Ironsides. He achieved an influence through the neighbourhood all around him, unequalled for piety and self-denying virtue. The greater part of his time, even upon his farm, was passed in devotional exercises, and expositions, and prayer. Who prays best will work best-who preaches best will fight best —all the famous doctrines of his later and more celebrated years, were tried and tested on the little farm at St. Ives. His servants were taught that, however inferior to the lords of the earth they might be in worldly circumstances, there were yet claims of loftier concern in which they had equal share, and in the right understanding of which their humanity might exalt itself to the level of the proudest. He did not drudge them from rising to setting sun, as if they had been merely beasts of burden; he left them time, at intervals, to ponder on the momentous fact, that even they had immortal souls. Before going to their field-work in the morning they knelt down with their master in the touching equality of prayer; in the evening they shared with him again the comfort and exaltation of divine precepts, and were taught the inexpressible vaiue of the religion that is practical, and tends to elevate, not to depress, the soul. In St. Ives, to this day, significant memorials of Crom