ise Regained, we trust our
hurried sketch has not been altogether without interest; and that,
whatever may be the religious views of our readers, they have not failed
to recognize a good and true man in Thomas Ellwood.

JAMES NAYLER.

"You will here read the true story of that much injured, ridiculed
man, James Nayler; what dreadful sufferings, with what patience he
endured, even to the boring of the tongue with hot irons, without a
murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had
fallen into, which they stigmatized as blasphemy, had given place to
clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error in a strain of the
beautifullest humility."--Essays of Elia.

"Would that Carlyle could now try his hand at the English Revolution!"
was our exclamation, on laying down the last volume of his remarkable
History of the French Revolution with its brilliant and startling word-
pictures still flashing before us. To some extent this wish has been
realized in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Yet we confess
that the perusal of these volumes has disappointed us. Instead of giving
himself free scope, as in his French Revolution, and transferring to his
canvas all the wild and ludicrous, the terrible and beautiful phases of
that moral phenomenon, he has here concentrated all his artistic skill
upon a single figure, whom he seems to have regarded as the embodiment
and hero of the great event. All else on his canvas is subordinated to
the grim image of the colossal Puritan. Intent upon presenting him as
the fitting object of that "hero-worship," which, in its blind admiration
and adoration of mere abstract Power, seems to us at times nothing less
than devil-worship, he dwarfs, casts into the shadow, nay, in some
instances caricatures and distorts, the figures which surround him. To
excuse Cromwell in his usurpation, Henry Vane, one of those exalted and
noble characters, upon whose features the lights held by historical
friends or foes detect no blemish, is dismissed with a sneer and an
utterly unfounded imputation of dishonesty. To reconcile, in some
degree, the discrepancy between the declarations of Cromwell, in behalf
of freedom of conscience, and that mean and cruel persecution which the
Quakers suffered under the Protectorate, the generally harmless
fanaticism of a few individuals bearing that name is gravely urged. Nay,
the fact that some weak-brained enthusi