ened by prejudices, partly for, partly against, the Man of that
century--a man in whom we recognise a union of Roman, Hebrew, and
English qualities--the faith of the Jew, the firmness of the Roman, and
the homespun simplicity of the Englishman of his own age--in purpose and
in powers "an armed angel on a battle-day;" in manners a plain blunt
corporal; and in language always a stammerer, and sometimes a buffoon;
the middle-class man of his time, with the merits and the defects of his
order, but touched with an inspiration as from heaven, lifting him far
above all the aristocracy, and all the royalty, and all the literature
of his period; who found his one great faculty--inflamed and consecrated
commonsense--to be more than equal to the subleties, and brilliancies,
and wit, and eloquence, and taste, and genius, of his thousand
opponents--whose crown was a branch of English oak, his sceptre a strong
sapling of the same, his throne a mound of turf--who economised matters
by being at once king and king's jester, and whose mere _clenched fist_,
held up at home or across the waters, saved millions of money, awed
despots, encouraged freedom in every part of the world, and had nearly
established a pure form of Christianity over Great Britain--who gave his
country a model of excellence as a man, and as a ruler, simple, severe,
ruggedly picturesque, and stupendously original, and solitary as one of
the primitive rocks--whose eloquence was uneven and piercing as the
forked lightning, which is never so terrible as when it falls to pieces
--and highest praise of all, whose deeds and character were so great in
their sublime simplicity, that the poet, who afterwards sung the
hierarchies of heaven, and the anarchies of hell, was fain to sit a
humble secretary, recording the thoughts and actions of Cromwell, and
felt afterwards that he had been as nobly employed when defending his
grand defiance of evil and arbitrary power, as when he did

"Assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."

We have seen pictured representations of Cromwell and Milton seated
together at the council-table, in which the painter wished more than to
insinuate that Milton was the superior being; but in our judgment the
advantage was on the other side, and the poet seemed to bear only that
relation and proportion to the Protector which the eloquent Raphael, the
"affable archangel," the bard of the war in heaven, does to the Gabriel
or the Mic