Saviour, and serve Thee in all those holy duties which most agree with His holy doctrine and most imitable example. The experience we have of the vanity and uncertainty of all human glory and greatness in our scatterings and eclipses, let it make us both so much the more ambitious to be invested in those durable honors and perfections which are only to be found in Thyself, and obtained through Jesus Christ. AN HORATIAN ODE UPON OLIVER CROMWELL'S RETURN FROM IRELAND IN 1650. BY ANDREW MARVELL. [ANDREW MARVELL, English poet and satirist, was born 1621, in Holderness; entered Trinity College, Cambridge, was captured by the Jesuits and taken to London, recaptured and returned to Trinity (1638); becoming unsettled (perhaps by his father's drowning in 1640), he was expelled in 1641; traveled for years on the Continent; in 1650 was tutor to Lord Fairfax's daughter, and wrote "Poems of the Country," and "Poems of Imagination and Love" (in part); in 1652, to Cromwell's nephew Dutton; 1657-1658, assistant Latin secretary to Milton; 1658, member of Richard Cromwell's Parliament, and remained in Parliament till death, almost through Charles II. 's reign, except when (1663-1665) he was secretary to Lord Carlisle's embassy to the Northern Powers. His correspondence is large and valuable. Politically he was a strong and open monarchist, but a loyal adherent to any de facto government. His chief satirical works were: "The Rehearsal Transprosed" (1672), against a bigoted clergyman who claimed the right of persecution for the State; a rejoinder to his reply (1673); "Mr. Smike, or the Divine in Mode" (1676); a mock "King's Speech" (1675). In 1678 he published a powerful pamphlet, "The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Power," which aroused great indignation. He died the same year. He was a man not only of great wit, charm, and scholarship, but of the loftiest integrity.] THE forward youth that would appear, Nor in the shadows sing "Tis time to leave the books in dust, The corselet of the hall. So restless Cromwell could not cease But through adventurous war And like the three-forked lightning, first Breaking the clouds where it was nurst, Did thorough his own side His fiery way divide. For 'tis all one to courage high, And, with such, to inclose, Is more than to oppose. Then burning through the air he went, And palaces and temples rent; And Cæsar's head at last Did through his laurels blast. "Tis madness to resist or blame Who, from his private gardens, where (As if his highest plot To plant the bergamot,) Could by industrious valor climb Though justice against fate complain, As men are strong or weak. Nature, that hateth emptiness, Allows of penetration less, And therefore must make room What field of all the civil war, And Hampton shows what part He to the commons' feet presents His fame to make it theirs : And has his sword and spoils ungirt, She, having killed, no more doth search But on the next green bough to perch, Where, when he first does lure, The falconer has her sure. What may not then our isle presume, As Cæsar, he, erelong, to Gaul; To Italy an Hannibal; And to all states not free The Pict no shelter now shall find Happy, if in the tufted brake But thou, the war's and fortune's son, And, for the last effect, Besides the force it has to fright OLIVER CROMWELL. BY THOMAS CARLYLE. [THOMAS CARLYLE, Scotch moralist, essayist, and historian, was born at Ecclefechan, December 4, 1795. He studied for the ministry at Edinburgh University, taught school, studied law, became a hack writer and tutor; in 1826 married Jane Welsh, and in 1828 removed to a farm in Craigenputtoch, where he wrote essays and "Sartor Resartus "; in 1834 removed to his final home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. His "French Revolution" was issued in 1837. He lectured for three years, "Heroes and Hero Worship" gathering up one course. His chief succeeding works were: "Chartism Past and Present," "Cromwell's Letters," "Latter-day Pamphlets," "Life of Sterling," and "Frederick the Great." He died February 4, 1881.] FROM of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been incredible to me. Nay, I cannot believe the like of any Great Man whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish men; but if we will consider it, they are but figures for us, unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have existed at all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye but for surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notions of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a conscience in it, the essence of all real souls, great or small? No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity: the longer I study him and his career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is no evidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as the very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. . . Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man: they are distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness. Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. |