views had a greater tendency to promoting his own grandeur, than to encouraging godly purposes, of which he made such fervent professions. His eldest daughter, married to Fleetwood, had adopted republican principles so vehement, that she could not behold supreme power in the hands of a single person, even in those of her indulgent father. His other daughters were no less prejudiced in favor of the royal cause, particularly Mrs. Claypole, who had always been his greatest joy, and who in her last sickness had, before her death, several conferences with him, which so deeply perplexed him, that as she had been often heard mentioning in her pains the blood her father had spilt, it was concluded that she had presented his worst actions to his consideration.

Whatever it was, all peace was now for ever fled from the protector's mind. In the high situation he had attained by so much guilt and courage, he could not find the least shadow of that inward tranquillity which virtue alone and moderation can procure. Resting his title on no principle, seeing nothing around him but treacherous friends or enraged enemies, he distrusted all parties, and was equally distrusted by them. Impressed with the idea that he was incessantly surrounded with concealed poniards, ready for his assassination, death, which he had so intrepidly braved in the field, haunted day and night his terrified imagination. He wore armour under his clothes, and always kept pistols in his pockets. He never moved a step without strong guards attending him. He always travelled with hurry, and never returned by the same way which he went. He seldom slept above three nights together in the same chamber, and never let it be known before hand which he intended to choose, nor entrusted himself in any which was not provided with back-doors, at which centinels were carefully placed, His thoughts, as well as his dreams, being

always filled with daggers and poison, he surveyed, with a piercing and suspicious eye, every face to which he was not daily accustomed, and started at the least noise he heard around him. Solitude was no less horrible to him than society, as he was there equally pursued by his terrors, and tortured by excruciating remorses.

From that time, Cromwell's health seemed sensibly to decline; and about the middle of August he was seized by a common tertian ague. No dangerous symptoms appeared for a week: at length his fever grew stronger, his spirits much abated, and his physicians began to think him in danger, though his chaplains and preachers, who always prayed about him, declared, as from God, that he should recover. A favourable answer, it was pretended, had been returned by Heaven to the petitions of all the godly he himself was overheard offering up his addresses to the Lord; and so far the illusion of fanaticism still prevailed over his mind, that he assumed more the character of a mediator, in interceding for the interest of his people rather than for himself the favour of his recovery. But the symptoms taking every hour a more fatal appearance, the physicians declared that he could not survive the next fit. The council sent a deputation to receive his last commands concerning his succession. As his senses were almost gone, they asked him whether he did not mean that his eldest son Richard should succeed him in the protectorship. A simple affirmative was or seemed to be extorted from him, and soon after he died, on the 3d day of September, a day which he had always considered as the most fortunate for him, as his two most important victories, at Dunbar in 1650, and at Worcester in 1651, had been obtained on that same day. He died in the fifty-ninth year of his age, having enjoyed the title of protector four years, eight months, and

eighteen days. On the day of his death there happened the greatest storm of wind that was ever

known.

Oliver Cromwell was born at Huntingdon, on the 25th of April 1599. His family was of Clamorgan, in Wales, and had no other name than that of Williams, when one of them having married a daughter of Cromwell, the vicegerent under Henry VIII, assumed the name of his father-in-law, and transmitted it to his posterity. Oliver being the son of a second brother, inherited but a small estate from his father, whom he lost when very young. His mother's principal resource was a small brewery, which she continued to manage after the death of her husband.

In the course of his education, Cromwell had been sent to the university, but made no proficiency in learning. He consumed, in gaming, drinking, debauchery, and country riots, the earliest years of his life; and he had dissipated the greatest part of his patrimony, when, all of a sudden, he was seized by the spirit of reformation, and the most ardent zeal for the rigorous doctrines and practices of the puritans. The same vehemence of temper which had transported him in the extremes of licentiousness, now distinguished his religious habits, and he indulged his imagination in visions, illuminations, revelations, the great nourishment of that hypochondriacal temper to which he was subject. His house was the resort of all the zealous clergy of the party, and his hospitality, as well as his liberalities, involved him in farther debts and difficulties. Though he had acquired a tolerable fortune by a maternal uncle, he found his affairs so much injured by his expences, that he took a farm, and applied himself for some years to agriculture, as a profession. But the long prayers he said to his family in the morn. ing, and again in the afternoon, consumed all his

time, and that of his ploughmen, and left him no leisure for the care of his temporal affairs. Urged both by his wants and his piety, he had made a party with the famous Hambden, his near kinsman, to sail over to New England; but an order of council obliged them to disembark.

In quiet times, under a regular and well-ordered government, a man affecting or really experiencing such fits of insanity, would have been considered only as an object of ridicule in the former case, and of pity in the latter; and if those fits had continued to increase, he would probably have been confined in a madhouse: but the contagious puritanical spirit had so much infested the public mind at that period, that Cromwell, instead of being sent to a madhouse, was, by accident or intrigue, chosen member of the house of commons of the long parliament, by the town of Cambridge. As he had no sort of talents for such a situation, he was entirely overlooked in the house but Hambden, who knew the depth of his genius, and the boldness of his temper, foretold that if a civil war ensued, he would soon rise to distinction; and his prediction proved but too true.

Many writers, admiring the wonderful genius, abilities, and courage of Cromwell, and particularly his having raised, during his protectorship, the power and consideration of the English nation abroad nearly as high as it was in the most glorious years of Elizabeth's reign, have discovered a great propensity not to excuse his enormous offences, but to extenuate them as being rather the effects of the prejudices and errors of the times, than of criminal intentions. "The murder of the king," says Hume, "the most atrocious of Cromwell's actions, was to "him covered under a mighty cloud of republican fanaticism, and it is not impossible but he might "believe it, as many others did, the most meritorious action he could perform: his subsequent usurp

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"ation was the effect of necessity, as well as of "ambition," &c. &c.

Indulgence, when bestowed on faults, is a virtue; let us not dishonor it by extending it to the most execrable crimes, and none are more so than to promote a civil war in his own country, to overthrow its government, to murder the most benevolent and virtuous king and usurp his authority. Those clouds of fanaticism mentioned by Hume, are the less an excuse for Cromwell, that he himself raised and thickened them for the only purpose of blinding and deluding, more completely, both the accomplices and instruments of his regicide conspiracy.

It seems difficult to ascertain the nature and degree of his own fanaticism: on considering, however, first, the suddenness of its first appearance, and its extraordinary intensity at the very moment when Cromwell, engaged in a complete course of all kinds of licentiousness, had dissipated the greatest part of his fortune; secondly, that when he first sat in the house of commons, his fanaticism, which hitherto had not exceeded that of a zealous presbyterian, abruptly rose to a much higher degree, as soon as he perceived that the presbyterians, though ambitious of appropriating to themselves a great part of the sovereign power, intended to preserve the king as the chief magistrate in the government; thirdly, that he then adopted, and carried as far as he could, the frantic fanaticism, and all the extravagancies of the republican sect of the independents, openly aiming at the ruin of the presbyterians, and really effecting it, by propagating his new fanaticism among the army, which he soon employed to expel the presbyterians from the house of commons, when they had nearly concluded their peace with the king; fourthly, that when the house of commons, thus reduced to about sixty members, of the independent's sect only, had brought the king to his trial,