the Fenn district. In the more early part of his life he fell into
a state of profound and prolonged melancholy; and it is plain from the
few and disjointed documents which have come down to us, that his mental
faculties were

[Footnote 1: May, 214. Journals, July 18, 19, 27; Aug. 3, 7, 9, 15, 26.
Lords', vi. 149, 158, 175, 184.]

[Sidenote a: A.D. 1643. August.]

impaired, that he tormented himself with groundless apprehensions of
impending death, on which account he was accustomed to require the
attendance of his physician at the hour of midnight, and that his
imagination conjured up strange fancies about the cross in the market-place
at Huntingdon,[1] hallucinations which seem to have originated in the
intensity of his religious feelings, for we are assured that "he had spent
the days of his manhood in a dissolute course of life in good fellowship
and gaming;"[2] or, as he expresses it himself, he had been "a chief, the
chief of sinners, and a hater of godliness." However, it pleased "God the
light to enlighten the darkness" of his spirit, and to convince him of
the error and the wickedness of his ways; and from the terrors which
such conviction engendered, seems to have originated that aberration of
intellect, of which he was the victim during great part of two years.
On his recovery he had passed from one extreme to the other, from the
misgivings of despair to the joyful assurance of salvation. He now felt
that he was accepted by God, a vessel of election to work the work of God,
and bound through gratitude "to put himself forth in the cause of the
Lord."[3] This flattering belief, the

[Footnote 1: Warwick's Memoirs, 249. Warwick had his information from Dr.
Simcott, Cromwell's physician, who pronounced him _splenetic_. Sir Theodore
Mayerne was also consulted, who, in his manuscript journal for 1628,
describes his patient as _valde melancholicus_.--Eliis, Orig. Letters, 2nd
series, iii. 248.]

[Footnote 2: Warwick, 249.]

[Footnote 3: In 1638 he thus writes of himself to a female saint, one of
his cousins: "I find that God giveth springs in a dry barren wilderness,
where no water is. I live, you know where, in Meshec, which they say
signifies prolonging,--in Kedar, which signifies blackness. Yet the Lord
forsaketh me not, though he do prolong. Yet he will, I trust, bring me to
his tabernacle, his resting place." If the reader wish to understand this
Cromwellian effusion, let him consult the Psalm cxix. in th