THE WATCHERS OF EARTH.

O earth, our mother, wearyful and old!
Now, in thy dotage, thy poor children keep
Their vigils o'er thy waking and thy sleep,
Alike through sunshine and the hours of cold.

Soon as the morning tricks the east in gold,

Forth from sweet slumber doth the light heart leap, And busy through the day all pleasures reap,

That hopes triumphant to young life unfold;

But when the wan moon sadly gleams on high,
She sees the toil of other guards begun-
The mourner pale, the sick man hot and dry,
The student dreaming of fresh honours won;
These watch the stars out in that weary sky,
And pray the speedy coming of the sun.

CARLYLE'S CROMWELL."

THESE Volumes are a valuable addition to the original sources from which any true knowledge of the history of England during a period of the most momentous interest, can be derived. The story of the Civil Wars of England in the seventeenth century has yet to be written. It was absolutely impossible that any thing like a just account of facts, each of which involved, or seemed to involve, the admission of a principle, could be expected soon after convulsions, in which every question of civil government, that can suggest itself to the mind, was agitated in closet, and council, and

*

battle-field. To us the surprise is that we have so many original works, wholly trustworthy, as far as anxious regard to truth on the part of the authors entitles them to the reader's confidence; and among these, first and best is to be placed Lord Clarendon's.† Of the early days of the Long Parliament we have May's history-a work of considerable power, and in which the most intelligible account of the state of England, immediately antecedent to the calling of that parliament, is given with a precision that exhibits more distinctly than any single cotemporary exposition that we know, the

Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidation, by Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols. 8vo. London: Chapman and Hall. 1846.

"Clarendon, a name never to be mentioned without deep respect. Before his beautiful narrative appeared, English history-in its high and lofty characteristics-was not. Milton wrote a history; so did Lord Herbert, of Cherbury; so did Bacon; but it is, perhaps, enough to say of each of them, that their minds were pre-occupied with other things, and that, for all the effect these productions of theirs have had, they might almost as well have never been composed. But Clarendon had both the natural caste of mind, and the practical education of a great historian. I have no idea that a mere literateur-no matter what his industry, power of language, or force of sympathy-can write history well. Look back at the illustrious names we have been recalling. Are they not all, with hardly an exception, men of action, men of the world, men of great and, for the most part, of sorrowful experience? These men were at their manly post so long as duty needed. When they came back they wrote, even as they were moved,' they knew not how or why, save that they thought the things they had witnessed were memorable. And lo! they have been remembered. And why is it that so many others have been so soon forgotten? Not so much, I do believe, from any literary incompetence, or blundering in the mechanical construction of their works, as because they sat down to recite rather what others had said before them, than to set forth either new facts, or new aspects of old facts.

"Clarendon had much to say. He was one of the most influential men of his generation; and having outstood the whips and scorns of time' right manfully, lived to enjoy the thorough triumph of his principles, and to give us the benefit of his fifty years' experience. My friends, this is the sort of man we want to get acquainted with. At the hazard of tautology, I must repeat, what I have already more than once observed to you-it is of comparatively no importance what party notions such a man as Clarendon entertained. He had the head of a great man, and, I do believe, the heart of a just man. I am not used to swear by him; in a thousand opinions I consider him wholly astray. But what of that? He can do for me what no other man whatsoever can-put me, as by enchantment's spell, back into the midst of that Puritan springtide, which for a season washed over all the bulwarks of English church and crown, and then subsided muddily again, leaving the old landmarks much as they were, till another storm arose, and permanently changed them. The great thing for me is, not whether Hyde should have joined the royalists at the time he did, or whether he might not have further reined in the perfidious vengeance of the Restoration, but to see the royalist camp, as it lay dissolute and confident, and the long-winded parliament, as it sat in solemn cabal, and to feel that if stammering Oliver, or headlong Rupert, or the noblehearted Vane, were now to walk the earth again, I should know and recognise them. This, as I take it, is the good of having a History of the Great Rebellion, written well."-M'Cullagh's Use and Study of History, page 179, &c.

May's History of the Parliament is a just composition, according to the rules of history. It is written with much judgment, penetration, manliness, and spirit, and with a candour that will greatly increase your esteem, when you understand that he wrote it by the order of his masters, the Parliament."-Warburton to Hurd. "I desired you some time since to read Lord Clarendon's History of the Civil Wars. I have lately read a much honester and more instructive book of the same period of history. It is the History of the Parliament, by Thomas May, Esquire. I will send it to you as soon as you return to Cambridge."-William Pitt (Lord Chatham) to his nephew.

trary, we consider him as having saved the country from anarchy. The writers who have most relentlessly persecuted his memory were the disappointed republicans. To them the establishment of the protectorate was treason to all their expectations; and the assertion of the monarchical principle, as an indispensable element of government, which provoked their enmity, ought to plead for him with royalists. It is easy to speak of Cromwell's selfishness and ambition: such passions lurked in his as in all other hearts; but we think the true bearing of all credible evidence that we have on the subject is, that, almost to the last, Cromwell's

anxiety was to have facilitated a treaty between the nation and the King-that while the trial and execution of Charles cannot, as far as we see, be justified on any principle,* we yet believe that it was wholly impossible for Cromwell to have averted that catastrophe; and that he and the others who sate in judgment on the king, did, in real truth, believe they were performing a severe and painful duty. We believe, too, that in seizing the abandoned throne of England, Cromwell, at great personal sacrifice, did that which was alone possible to save the country. As to recalling, at that moment, the son of

* We cannot, of course, discuss questions involving the elementary principles of human society. We ourselves think that, in all imaginable cases, the life of the monarch, in a country adopting the law of hereditary succession, should be sacred. The moment that we admit considerations of expediency to influence a decision on such a question, as to whether the sovereign can, by political crime, forfeit his life, a principle is introduced, with the application of which we do not think man can be safely intrusted. In the early stages of the contest, the answers of the king to the parliamentary documents, admitted "that the legislative power was in King, Lords, and Commons, and that the government was mixed, and not arbitrary." This the parliament affirmed was inconsistent with the doctrine of the court lawyers, who held that royal commissions could dispense with acts of parliament. Resistance, in such circumstances, they insisted must be lawful; and added, that "the war was not against the king, but his delinquent subjects." It was impossible, in the crisis to which affairs had arrived, to avoid the question of the lawfulness of resistance; and the opinions of Hooker and other jurists of a class whose authority is more often quoted by the advocates of arbitrary power than by their adversaries, were cited by the popular party as early as 1641. Among others, Grotius was quoted to sustain the proposition that, "if several parties have a share in the Summa Potestas (of which legislation is a chief act), each part hath naturally the power of defending its own interest in the sovereignty against the other, if they invade it; and that if, in such a war, they conquer, the conquered party loseth to them his share; and that this is so true, that it holdeth though the law expressly say that one of the parties shall have the power of the militia; it being to be understood that he shall have it against foreign enemies and delinquents, and not against the other part."-(Calamy's Abridgment of Baxter's Life and Times.) We do not believe that this passage has been referred to by any of the writers who have examined this period of history; nor indeed does Baxter's account of the transactions of his time seem to have been examined at all with reference to these matters; but it is quite impossible that, if such passages from Grotius were familiarly cited in the early stages of the controversy, that their application should not have been felt in its later stages. The question is not, whether we think these persons justified in any thing or in all that they did; but whether they, without violation to their own sense of right, could have acted otherwise. Wrong, undoubtedly, we think they were; but can we, without being ourselves guilty of the falsehood we would impute to them, say that their statements are to be dismissed as hypocritical pretencethe short way in which indolent or dishonest men terminate the inquiry? Any reader who has the opportunity of referring to Mr. Fox's reasoning on the subject, in his history of James the Second, will be amply repaid for his trouble. We have not room to transcribe the passage, and can barely give a sentence:-"The imprisonment or even banishment of Charles might have given to the republic such a degree of security as any government ought to be contented with. It must be confessed, however, on the other side, that if the republican government had suffered the king to escape, it would have been an act of justice and generosity wholly unexampled; and to have granted him even his life, would have been one among the more rare efforts of virtue."

See account of Harrison's execution.-Trial of the Regicides. See also Mrs. Hutchinson's account of her husband's feelings. The fact is, that such sel

Charles, and endeavouring, with him as King to act in the spirit of the Revolution of 1688, it might well have seemed a hopeless experiment. To Cromwell's act in accepting the protectorate, England owed the honour of her triumphs over all her enemies at home and abroad, and the more glorious victory of ultimately herself re-adjusting, on a secure basis, the rights of her people and her monarch.

But whatever view may be taken of the Civil Wars of England-and the contest will, of course, be still viewed with the party biasses of each person who examines the subject-it will be from henceforth impossible to disregard the letters and speeches of Cromwell himself. Let us differ, or let us agree with him, here are his own letters and speeches-every one letter a businessletter-every one speech a businessspeech-most of them being not afterwritten statements of facts, but letters and speeches, themselves constituting very material parts of the transactions

on which they throw light. Hitherto these have been, for the most part, disregarded, the feeling of Cromwell's hypocrisy having been so engrafted on the minds of the historians who have written of his times, that these, the most important records of a period of perhaps unexampled interest, have been neglected.

This never again can be their fate. Of modern writers, Mr. Forster alone seems to have at all approached to an appreciation of their true value. They are now edited with extreme care. All authentic information calculated to illustrate them, that diligent study could glean from existing memoirs of the time, is supplied; and it appears to us certain, that where they are inconsistent with received views, such views must be modified, not alone with reference to the facts contained or implied in these letters and speeches, but that henceforth Cromwell must be regarded as a plain-spoken, strait-forward man-in his habitual feelings, and affections kindly-and who, in peaceful

fish motives of expediency as are suggested by later writers as those on which the king's judges acted, are not the true ones. In the course of the trial, when evidence was given of the blood spilt in many of the battles where he was in person, Charles listened "with disdainful smiles, and looks, and gestures," and declared in words, that "no man's blood spilt in this quarrel troubled him but one, meaning the Earl of Strafford." The gentlemen appointed his judges, and divers others, saw in him a disposition, so bent on the ruin of all that opposed him, and of all the righteous and just things they had contended for, that it was on the consciences of many of them, that if they did not execute justice on him, God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which should ensue by their suffering him to escape, when God had brought him into their hands. Although the advice of the malignant party [the Royalists] and their apostate brethren seemed to threaten them, yet they thought they ought to cast themselves on God, while they acted with a good conscience for him and the country. Mrs. Hutchinson adds, that of this court all the members were, whatever they might afterwards pretend, left to their "free liberty of acting, neither persuaded nor compelled." Some declined to act-some acted for awhile then ceased to sit; and both these classes of persons were afterwards admitted to "places of more trust and benefit, than those who ran the greatest hazard." She mentions that these persons retreated, for fear and worldly prudence, foreseeing that "in the event of a restoration, they should be given us as victims"-that this danger was also distinctly present to Colonel Hutchinson's mind is also stated. In fact, it could not but have presented itself; and Burke has stated the way in which, on the restoration, the regicides were sacrificed by all. "The king did not in reality grant an act of indemnity; the prevailing power, then in a manner the nation, granted an indemnity to him. The idea of a preceding rebellion, was not at all admitted in that convention and that parliament. The regicides were a common enemy, and as such were given up."Burke Remarks on the Policy of the Allies. "Although Mr. Hutchinson," (we again quote his wife's narrative,) did not then believe but it might one day come to be disputed again among men, yet both he and others thought they could not refuse it without giving up the people of God, whom they had led forth, and engaged themselves unto by the oath of God, into the hands of God's and their enemies, and therefore, he cast himself upon God's protection, acting according to the dictates of a conscience, which he had sought the Lord to guide, and accordingly the Lord did signalize his favour afterwards to him.” -Memoirs of Hutchinson.