and
horses, "so that his wife cannot serve God with the congregation but
in frosty weather,"--when Vicars in "Jehovah Jireh" exults over the
horrible maiming and butchery wrought by the troopers upon the officers'
wives and female camp-followers at Naseby,--it is useless to attribute
exaggeration to the other side. In civil war, even the humanest, there
is seldom much opening for exaggeration,--the actual horrors being
usually quite as vivid as any imaginations of the sufferers, especially
when, as in this case, the spiritual instructors preach, on the one
side, from "Curse ye Meroz," and, on the other side, from "Cursed be he
that keepeth back his sword from blood."

We mention these things, not because they are deliberately denied by
anybody, but because they are apt to be overlooked by those who take
their facts at secondhand. All this does not show that the Puritans had,
even at the outset, worse men or a cause no better; it simply shows
that war demoralizes, and that right-thinking men may easily, under its
influence, slide into rather reprehensible practices. At a later period
the evil worked its own cure, among the Puritans, and the army of
Cromwell was a moral triumph almost incredible; but at the time of which
we write, the distinction was but lightly drawn. It would be easy to go
farther and show that among the leading Parliamentary statesmen there
were gay and witty debauchees,--that Harry Marten deserved the epithet
with which Cromwell saluted him,--that Pym succeeded to the regards of
Stafford's bewitching mistress,--that Warwick was truly, as Clarendon
describes him, a profuse and generous profligate, tolerated by the
Puritans for the sake of his earldom and his bounty, at a time when
bounty was convenient and peers scarce. But it is hardly worth while
farther to demonstrate the simple and intelligible fact, that there were
faults on both sides. Neither war nor any other social phenomenon can
divide infallibly the sheep from the goats, or collect all the saints
under one set of staff-officers and all the sinners under another.

But, on the other hand, the strength of both sides, at this early day,
was in a class of serious and devoted men, who took up the sword so
sadly, in view of civil strife, that victory seemed to them almost as
terrible as defeat. In some, the scale of loyalty slightly inclined,
and they held with the King; in others, the scale of liberty, and they
served the Parliament; in both cas