d long ago out of
wider studies, and pleasantly connects things individual and present
with the dim universal crowd of things past,--may as well be inserted
here as thrown away.

This Colonel Robert designates himself Sterling "of Glorat;" I believe,
a younger branch of the well-known Stirlings of Keir in Stirlingshire.
It appears he prospered in his soldiering and other business, in
those bad Ormond times; being a man of energy, ardor and
intelligence,--probably prompt enough both with his word and with his
stroke. There survives yet, in the Commons Journals, [2] dim notice of
his controversies and adventures; especially of one controversy he had
got into with certain victorious Parliamentary official parties,
while his own party lay vanquished, during what was called the Ormond
Cessation, or Temporary Peace made by Ormond with the Parliament in
1646:--in which controversy Colonel Robert, after repeated applications,
journeyings to London, attendances upon committees, and such like, finds
himself worsted, declared to be in the wrong; and so vanishes from the
Commons Journals.

What became of him when Cromwell got to Ireland, and to Munster, I
have not heard: his knighthood, dating from the very year of Cromwell's
Invasion (1649), indicates a man expected to do his best on the
occasion:--as in all probability he did; had not Tredah Storm proved
ruinous, and the neck of this Irish War been broken at once. Doubtless
the Colonel Sir Robert followed or attended his Duke of Ormond into
foreign parts, and gave up his management of Munster, while it was yet
time: for after the Restoration we find him again, safe, and as was
natural, flourishing with new splendor; gifted, recompensed with
lands;--settled, in short, on fair revenues in those Munster regions.
He appears to have had no children; but to have left his property to
William, a younger brother who had followed him into Ireland. From this
William descends the family which, in the years we treat of, had Edward
Sterling, Father of our John, for its representative. And now enough of
genealogy.

Of Edward Sterling, Captain Edward Sterling as his title was, who in the
latter period of his life became well known in London political society,
whom indeed all England, with a curious mixture of mockery and respect
and even fear, knew well as "the Thunderer of the Times Newspaper,"
there were much to be said, did the present task and its limits permit.
As perhaps it might, on