the whole reign of our late king (till the beginning of the war), in which no drop of blood was ever drawn but from two or three ears, I think the longest time of our worst princes scarce saw many more executions than the short one of our blessed reformer. And we saw, and smelt in our open streets (as I marked to you at first), the broiling of human bowels as a burnt-offering of a sweet savour to our idol; but all murdering, and all torturing (though after the subtilest invention of his predecessors of Sicily), is more humane and more supportable, than his selling of Christians, Englishmen, gentlemen; his selling of them (oh monstrous! ohi incredible!) to be slaves in America. If his whole life could be reproached with no other action, yet this alone would weigh down all the multiplicity of crimes in any of our tyrants; and I dare only touch, without stopping or insisting upon, so insolent and so execrable a cruelty, for fear of falling into so violent (though a just) passion, as would make me exceed that temper and moderation which I resolve to observe in this discourse with you.

"These are great calamities: but even these are not the most insupportable that we have endured; for so it is, that the scorn, and mockery, and insultings of an enemy are more painful than the deepest wounds of his serious fury. This man was wanton and merry (unwittily and ungracefully merry) with our sufferings: he loved to say and do senseless and fantastical things, only to shew his

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power of doing or saying any thing. It would ill befit mine, or any civil mouth, to repeat those words which he spoke concerning the most sacred of our English laws, the Petition of Right, and Magna Charta *. To-day, you should see him ranting so wildly, that nobody durst come near him; the morrow, flinging of cushions, and playing at snow-balls, with his servants. This month, he assembles a parliament, and professes himself with humble tears to be only their servant and their minister; the next month, he swears by the living God, that he will turn them out of doors, and he does so, in his princely way of threatening, bidding them, Turn the buckles of their girdles behind them.' The representative of a whole, nay of three whole nations, was in his esteem so contemptible a meeting, that he thought the affronting and expelling of them to be a thing of so little consequence, as not to deserve that he should advise with any mor tal man about it. What shall we call this? boldness or brutishness? rashness or phrensy? There is no name can come up to it; and therefore we must leave it without one. Now a parliament must be chosen in the new manner, next time in the old form, but all cashiered still after the newest mode, Now he will govern by major-generals, now by one house, now by another house, now by no house; now the freak takes him, and he makes seventy

peers of the land at one clap (extempore, and stans pede in uno); and to manifest the absolute power of the potter, he chooses not only the worst clay he could find, but picks up even the dirt and mire, to form out of it his vessels of honour. It was said anciently of Fortune, that, when she had a mind to be merry and to divert herself, she was wont to raise up such kind of people to the highest dignities. This son of Fortune, Cromwell (who was himself one of the primest of her jests), found out the true haut goust of this pleasure, and rejoiced in the extravagance of his ways, as the fullest demonstration of his uncontrollable sovereignty. Good God! what have we seen? and what have we suffered? what do all these actions signify? what do they say aloud to the whole nation, but this (even as plainly as if it were proclaimed by heralds through the streets of London), You are slaves and fools, and so I will use you !'

"These are briefly a part of those merits which you lament to have wanted the reward of more kingdoms, and suppose that, if he had lived longer, he might have had them: which I am so far from concurring to, that I believe his seasonable dying to have been a greater good-fortune to him, than all the victories and prosperities of his life. For he seemed evidently (methinks) to be near the end of his deceitful glories; his own army grew at last as weary of him as the rest of the people; and I never passed of late before his palace (his, do I call it? I

ask God and the king pardon), but I never passed of late before Whitehall, without reading upon the gate of it, Mene Mene, Tekel Upharsin*.' But it pleased God to take him from the ordinary courts of men, and juries of his peers, to his own high court of justice; which being more merciful than ours below, there is a little room yet left for the hope of his friends, if he have any; though the outward unrepentance of his death afford but small materials for the work of charity, especially if he designed even then to entail his own injustice upon his children, and, by it, inextricable confusions and civil wars upon the nation. But here's at last an end of him. And where's now the fruit of all that blood and calamity, which his ambition has cost the world? Where is it? Why, his son (you will say) has the whole crop. I doubt, he will find it quickly blasted. I have nothing to say against the gentleman †, or any living of his family on the contrary, I wish him better fortune than to have a long and unquiet possession of his master's inheritWhatsoever I have spoken against his father, is that which I should have thought (though decency, perhaps, might have hindered me from saying it) even against mine own, if I had been so unhappy, as that mine, by the same ways, should have left me three kingdoms."

ance.

* Dan. v. 25.

† A remarkable testimony to the blameless character of Richard Cromwell.

Here I stopped; and my pretended protector, who, I expected, would have been very angry, fell a-laughing; it seems, at the simplicity of my discourse, for thus he replied: "You seem to pretend extremely to the old obsolete rules of virtue and conscience, which makes me doubt very much whether from this vast prospect of three kingdoms you can shew me any acres of your own. But these are so far from making you a prince, that I am afraid your friends will never have the contentment to see you so much as a justice of peace in your own country. For this, I perceive, which you call virtue, is nothing else but either the frowardness of a Cynic, or the laziness of an Epicurean. I am glad you allow me at least artful dissimulation and unwearied diligence in my hero; and I assure you, that he, whose life is constantly drawn by those two, shall never be misled out of the way of greatness, But I see you are a pedant and Platonical statesman, a theoretical commonwealth's-man, an Utopian dreamer. Were ever riches gotten by your golden mediocrities? or the supreme place attained to by virtues that must not stir out of the middle ? Do you study Aristotle's Politics, and write, if you please, comments upon them; and let another but practise Machiavel: and let us see then which of you two will come to the greatest preferment. If the desire of rule and superiority be a virtue (as sure I am it is more imprinted in human nature than any of your lethargical morals; and what is