etness owes;
Nothing could make the river be
So crystal pure but only she,--
She, yet more pure, sweet, strait, and fair,
Than gardens, woods, meals, rivers are
Therefore, what first she on them spent
They gratefully again present:
The meadow carpets where to tread,
The garden flowers to crown her head,
And for a glass the limpid brook
Where she may all her beauties look;
But, since she would not have them seen,
The wood about her draws a screen;
For she, to higher beauty raised,
Disdains to be for lesser praised;
She counts her beauty to converse
In all the languages as hers,
Nor yet in those herself employs,
But for the wisdom, not the noise,
Nor yet that wisdom could affect,
But as 't is Heaven's dialect."

It has been the fashion of a class of shallow Church and State defenders
to ridicule the great men of the Commonwealth, the sturdy republicans of
England, as sour-featured, hard-hearted ascetics, enemies of the fine
arts and polite literature. The works of Milton and Marvell, the prose-
poem of Harrington, and the admirable discourses of Algernon Sydney are a
sufficient answer to this accusation. To none has it less application
than to the subject of our sketch. He was a genial, warmhearted man, an
elegant scholar, a finished gentleman at home, and the life of every
circle which he entered, whether that of the gay court of Charles II.,
amidst such men as Rochester and L'Estrange, or that of the republican
philosophers who assembled at Miles's Coffee House, where he discussed
plans of a free representative government with the author of Oceana, and
Cyriack Skinner, that friend of Milton, whom the bard has immortalized in
the sonnet which so pathetically, yet heroically, alludes to his own
blindness. Men of all parties enjoyed his wit and graceful conversation.
His personal appearance was altogether in his favor. A clear, dark,
Spanish complexion, long hair of jetty blackness falling in graceful
wreaths to his shoulders, dark eyes, full of expression and fire, a
finely chiselled chin, and a mouth whose soft voluptuousness scarcely
gave token of the steady purpose and firm will of the inflexible
statesman: these,