Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

"We have not been now four years and upwards in this government," says the Protector, in one of his speeches, "to be totally ignorant of what things may be of the greatest concernment to us." No; this man has not been an idle scholar. Since the Lord General took the reins of civil government, and became Lord Protector, he has thought and learned much of statemanship. But as a statesman, he is still first of all the Puritan. It is worth while to observe how his foreign policy, which has been justly admired, took its turn and direction from his religious feelings. He made alliances with the Protestant powers of the north, and assumed a firm attitude of hostility towards Spain—and reasons of state may have had some sway in determining him to these measures; but his great motive for hostility with Spain was, that she stood "at the head of the antichristian interest"—"was described in the Scriptures to be papal and antichristian."

"Why, truly your great enemy is the Spaniard. He is a natural enemy. He is naturally so throughout, by reason of that enmity that is in him against whatever is of God.... Your enemy, as I tell you, naturally, by that antipathy which is in him,—and also providentially, (that is, by special ordering of Providence.) An enmity is put in him by God. 'I will put an enmity between thy seed and her seed,' which goes but for little among statesmen, but is more considerable than all things. And he that considers not such natural enmity, the providential enmity as well as the accidental, I think he is not well acquainted with the Scripture, and the things of God,"—(Speech 5.)

In fine, we see in Cromwell, every where and throughout, the genuine, fervid Puritan—the Puritan general, the Puritan statesman. He was a man, and, therefore, doubtless ambitious; he rose through a scene of civil as well as military contest, and, doubtless, was not unacquainted with dissimulation; but if we would describe him briefly, it is as the Great Puritan that he must, ever be remembered in history.

In parting company with the editor of these letters and speeches, we feel that we have not done justice to the editorial industry and research which these volumes display. Our space would not permit it. For the same reason we have been unable to quote several instances of vivid narrative, which we had hoped to transfer to our own pages. And as to our main quarrel with him—this outrageous adoption of Puritanical bile and superstition,—we have been haunted all along by a suspicion we have occasionally expressed, that the man cannot be in earnest. He could not have been so abandoned by his common sense. He has been so accustomed to mingle sport, and buffoonery, and all sorts of wilful extravagance, with his most serious mood, that he perhaps does not know himself when, and how far, he is in earnest. In turning over the leaves of his work, we light, towards the end of the second volume, upon the following passage, which may, perhaps, explain the temper of the writer, when he is abetting and encouraging his fanatical heroes. He is uttering some sarcasms upon the poor "art of speech."

"Is there no sacredness, then, any longer in the miraculous tongue of man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence, with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up that; or by the Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou blasphemous scandalous misbirth of Nature, is not even that the kindest thing I can do for thee, if thou repent not, and alter in the name of Allah?'"

To this sort of satirical humour—to "the truth of a song,"—not Dryasdust himself would call upon him to swear. And may not all his rhapsodies upon his "sword-in-hand" Puritans be little more than an amplification of this one passage? And, if we insist upon it, that a reform by the pen, or even by speech-making, is better than one by pike and musket—if we should suggest that matters of civil government are better decided by civil and political reasoning than by metaphorical texts of Scripture, interpreted by prejudice and passion—if we contend for such truisms as these, shall we not be in danger of occupying some such position as the worthy prelate whose sagacity led him to discover that some facts in Gulliver's Travels had surely been overcharged?

LAYS AND LEGENDS OF THE THAMES

Part III

-–On passing the little village of Erith, once one of the prettiest rustic spots in Kent, where the parson and the surgeon formed the heads of the community, and its only intelligence of the living world depended on the casual arrival of a boat from the Margate Hoy in search of fresh eggs for the voyage, a small house was pointed out to me, embosomed in a dell, which would have completely suited the solitary tastes of a poet weary of the world:

"Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness,Where rumour of oppression and deceit,Of unsuccessful, or successful war,Might never reach me more!"

Fifty years ago, a weekly newspaper was the only remembrancer to either parson or doctor, of the world which they had left, and that one only sent by the member for the county, when he thought it desirable to awake the general gratitude on the approach of a general election. The Thames certainly might remind the village population that there were merchants and mariners among mankind; but what were those passing phantoms to them? John the son of Thomas lived and died as Thomas the father of John had lived and died from generation to generation. The first news of the American war reached it in the firing of the Woolwich guns for peace; and the original tidings of the French Revolution, in similar rejoicings for the Battle of Waterloo.

"O happy ye, the happiest of your kind,Who leave alike life's woes and joys behind!"

says the philosophic Cowley; and with Cowley I perfectly agree.

But Erith is this scene of philosophy no more. It has now shared the march of mind: it has become almost a watering-place; it has a library, a promenade, lodgings for gouty gentlemen, a conventicle, several vigorous politicians, three doctors, and, most fatal of all, four steam-boat arrivals every day. Solitude has fled, and meditation is no more.

But, to my story. In that lonely house, lived for several years, in the beginning of the century, a singular character, of whom nothing more was known, than that he had come from some distant place of abode; that he never received a letter; and that he never hunted, shot, or fished with the squiredom of the country. He was of large form, loud voice, had a sullen look, and no trust in her Majesty's ministers for the time being. At length, on some occasion of peculiar public excitement, the recluse had gone to Gravesend, where, tempted by the impulse of the moment, he had broken through his reserve, dashed out into a diatribe of singular fierceness, but of remarkable power, accused England of all kinds of oppression to all kinds of countries, and finished his speech by a recapitulation of all the wishes, wants, woes, and wrongs, as he called them, of Ireland,

"First flower of the west, and first gem of the ocean."

Within the next twelve hours, a pair of Bow Street officers were seen galloping into the village in a post-chaise and four. They brought a warrant from the Secretary of State to arrest the Irish orator, as a leader of the late Rebellion returned from transportation, on his own authority. He was captured, and conveyed to the Tower. And this was the last intelligence of the patriot; except that he appealed to the government against all repetition of his Australian voyage, and swore that he preferred the speedier performance of the law to the operations on the Coal-mine river. A remarkable tempest, which broke all the windows, and threw down half the chimneys of the city, a few weeks after; was supposed by the imaginative to be connected with his disappearance. At all events, he was heard of no more.

THE VISIONThunder pealed and lightning quivered,Gusts a prison's casements shivered.From its dungeon rose a scream,Where, awakened by the gleam,From his pallet rose and ran,Wild with fear, a stalwart man.Saw he in his tortured sleep,Things that make the heart-veins creep?Swept he through the world of flame,Chased by shapes that none may name?Still, as bars and windows clanged,Still he roared—"I will be hanged."Sleep had swept him o'er the seas,To the drear antipodes;There he saw a felon band,Chains on neck, and spade in hand,Orators, all sworn to dieIn "Old Ireland's" cause—or fly!Now, divorced from pike and pen,Digging ditch, and draining fen,Sky their ceiling, sand their bed,Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed."Operatives!" he harangued;"Ere I'm banished—I'll be hanged."Now, he strove to strike a light,But, a form of giant heightThrough the crashing casement sprang;Shattered stanchions round him rang,From his eyes a light withinShowed the blackness of his skin;In his lips a huge cigarSmouldered, like a dying star;Holding to the culprit's eyes,Writ in flame, a scroll of lies,Champing jaws with iron fanged,"Friend," cried he, "you shall be hanged."'Twixt the tempter and the rogue,Then began the dialogue:—"Master—shall I rob the state?""Not, unless you'd dine off plate."—"Shall I try my hand at law?""You'll be sure to make a flaw."—"Shall I job in Parliament?""You'll be richer, cent per cent."—"Shall I truckle, or talk big?""You'll but get a judge's wig,Blockheads may be conscience-panged,Knaves are pensioned, but, not hanged!"—"Master, must I then escape?""No," exclaimed the knowing shape,"You shall perish by Lynch-Law."Through his skull he struck a claw,On the tempest burst a wail,Through the bars a serpent-tail,Flashing like a lightning spire,Seemed to set the cell on fire;Far and wide was heard the clang,Through the whirlwind as they sprang.Many a year the sulphurous fumeStung the nostril in that room.

The river widens, and we sweep along by the rich slopes and deep wooded vales of the Kentish shore. From time to time little pastoral villages emerge, from plantations of willows and poplars, and all water-loving trees. Before coming to Purfleet, we had passed a noble hill, looking over a vast expanse of country, on which stands a princely mansion,—Belvedere, with its battlements glittering above groves as thick as the depths of the Black Forest. This was once the mansion of Lord Eardley, one of the greatest humorists of the age,—the companion of George the Fourth, before he ceased to be a wit and became a king.

How many delightful things are lost to the world, by the world's own laziness. Why have we not a Boswell in every city? Her majesty pays a laureate, who writes nothing but the annual receipt for his pension. Why not transfer the office to a Boswell? why not establish a Cabinet-dinner Boswell? a Buckingham-palace Boswell? a Windsor Boswell? with orders to make their weekly returns of gaiety and gossipry to the Home Department; to be thence issued by instalments of anecdote, in volumes, like "Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors," or in columns, like the protocols of the Montpensier marriage, for the laughter of mankind?

But the report of a heavy gun, and all eyes turned to a huge shell, making its curve a mile above our heads, reminded us that the artillery had a field-day as we passed Woolwich, and that there was every possibility that this vagrant messenger of destruction, might plump into our midships. The consternation on board grew, as it descended, looking bigger and blacker every instant. If it had come on board, it must have torn us up like paper. The catastrophe would have been invaluable to the journals of the empire, at this moment of a dearth of news, enough to make bankrupts of all the coffee-houses in London, and close every club from Charing Cross to Hyde Park Corner. We should all have been immortal in paragraphs without number. Coroners, surgeons, poets, and special juries, would have made their reputation out of us; and for a month of hot weather, we should have been a refreshing topic in the mouths of mankind. But it was otherwise decreed: the shell dropped within a foot of the steamer, and we were quittes pour la peur.

I fired a poetic shot at Woolwich in return.

THE ROYAL ARSENALWoolwich—Woolwich,The Thames is thy ditch,And stout hearts are thy fortification.Let come who come may,All is open as day,Thy gates are as free as thy nation.Let the King of the FrenchBuild wall, or dig trench,Though he has no more princes to marry,Our trench is the sea,And our walls are the free,And we laugh at thy "grande enceinte, Paris."Deep and dark on their quay,Like lions at bay,Stand the guns that set earth at defiance;With mountains of ball,Which, wherever they fall,With their message make speedy compliance.Along the ParadeLies the brisk carronade,With Wellington's joy, the twelve-pounder.And the long sixty-eight,Made for matters of weight,The world has no arguments sounder.There stands the long rocket,That shot, from its socket,Puts armies, pell-mell, to the rout, sir;At Leipsic, its tailMade Napoleon turn pale,And sent all his braves right about, sir.And there gapes the mortar,That seldom gives quarter,When speaking to ship or to city;For, although deaf and dumb,Its tongue is a bomb—And so, there's an end of my ditty.

The sun had now overcome the mists of the morning, and was throwing a rich lustre over the long sheets of foliage which screened, but without concealing, a large and classic villa on the Essex side. The park reached to the water's edge, in broad vistas, green as the emerald; deer were moving in groups over the lawn, or on standing still to gaze on the wonder of our flying ship. A few boats were slowly passing near the shore, along with the tide; the water was without a ripple,—the air was soft and fragrant, as it flowed from grove and garden; and the whole was a scene of sylvan and summer beauty. The thought suddenly shot across my mind, what a capital prize this would be, in a revolution! How handsomely it would repay a patriot for his trouble in uprooting lords and commons! What a philosophic consummation of a life of husting harangues, and league itinerancy, it would be, to lie on the drawing-room sofa of a mansion so perfectly Greek, railing at the tyranny of thrones, the bigotry of bishops, and the avarice of aristocracies; lamenting the privations of the poor, over a table of three courses, and drinking confusion to all monopolies in Vin de Comete!

But, who was the present possessor? I asked the name and heard it. But, from the captain to the cabin-boy, not a soul could give me another syllable of information. Like the gravedigger in Hamlet, they might "cudgel their brains," but all came to the gravedigger's confession at last,—"Mass, I cannot tell."

Such, thought I, are the chances of the world. The owner of this marine palace,—of these gardens, groves, deer, and dovecotes,—cannot have less than £10,000 a-year; yet his name has never reached the auricular sensibilities of man, beyond the fence of his own park. Was he philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, historian? inventor of steam-engine, of spinning jenny, of gunpowder, or of gun-cotton? No, I searched every cell of memory for some "trivial fond record" which might justify his title to a mansion and grounds fit for Sophocles, Schiller, or Shakspeare, the master of them all. I could not find, in all the rolls of the court of reminiscences, a single scrape of the pen to inform me; not so much as the commemorative smoke of a candle on the ceiling of the alcove of Mnemosyne; not a vestige of the "light fantastic toe," of those sylphs who treasure the flippancies of noble pens, and live in the fragrance of albums, otto-perfumed. Still I was driven to the confession, "Mass, I cannot tell."

I had brought a volume of poor Tom Campbell in my pocket, and had been glancing over his chef-d'œuvre, "Ye Mariners of England," when this stately edifice first checked my inspiration. In the wrath of my spirit I tossed the volume overboard. "Psha!" I involuntarily exclaimed, "what is the use of being a genius? What is the gratitude of a country, where a cotton-spinner can purchase the fee-simple of a province, while the man who spreads its fame over the world is left to gather his contemplations over a stove in an attic, watch the visage of his landlady, and shudder at the rise of coals!

'England, with all thy faults I love thee still.'

But it must be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry, beggarly, blind—" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is exactly £1200 a-year! and this to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of the sons and daughters of the muse,—the whole "school of the prophets," the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! £1200 a-year for the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes by the generation to come. £1200 a-year, the salary of an Excise commissioner, of a manipulator of the penny post, of a charity inspector, of a police magistrate, of a register of cabs, of any thing and every body: and this, reduced to decimals, is to be the national prize, the luxurious provision, the brilliant prospect, the illustrious tribute of a treasury of fifty millions sterling a-year, to the whole literature of a land which boasts of its being the intellectual leader of the world!

I have found the poems of our living bards on the shores of Hudson's Bay, and heard men talking of them round a stove, while the thermometer outside the window was 30° below zero. I have found them in a plantain-thatched hovel on the banks of the Niger, and forgotten while I read them that the thermometer was 110° in the shade. I have found them in the hands of a learned pundit on the banks of the Ganges, whom they were seducing into dreams of dewy pastures and crystal rills. And one of the pleasantest evenings I ever remember to have spent, was, by the help of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," as I sat at a supper of rice milk, after a day of fire on the eastern branch of the Nile, a thousand miles above Tourists, sheltered under the wagon of a Moorish ambassador from Sultaun Abderahman to the monarch of Gondar. "England!" exclaimed this ebony-visaged worshipper of the Beaux Arts, as he displayed the volume before me. It was the only civilised word in his vocabulary. But I felt the compliment with patriotic fervency, and in spirit thanked the bard for the barbarian's acknowledgment of my poetic and penurious country.

I have not done with the theme yet. On returning from the equator, I saw Campbell's funeral. Westminster Abbey was a mob of dukes, statesmen, privy-councillors, and men of countless acres. Poor Tom's whole life had been thankless toil; wasting in meagre industry the powers which ought to have been cherished by his country for purposes of national honour. Such is always the course of things. The very stones of Burns' pillars would have made the great poet happy for life, if their price had been given to him to cheer his melancholy fireside. Why has the poetic spirit of England folded its wings, and been content to abandon its brilliant region to the butterflies of albums, but that the spirit of England has suffered itself to be fettered by the red tape of a peddling parsimony? Should we have had a Shakspeare without the smiles of an Elizabeth, and the generosity of a Southampton? No. He would have split his pen after his first tragedy; have thrown his ink-stand into the Thames; have taken the carrier's cart to Stratford, and there finished his days in writing epitaphs in the churchyard, laughing at Sir Thomas Lucy, and bequeathing deathless scoffs, to the beggary of mankind.

I was growing into what the dramatists call a "towering passion," and meditating general reforms of Civil Lists, Chancellors of the Exchequer, and Lord Chamberlains, when my attention was turned to a very animated scene going on between a pair who seemed perfectly unconscious of all the external creation. One of the parties was a showy-looking fellow, with the mingled expression of rouéism and half-pay, which is so frequent and so unmistakeable in the neighbourhood of St James's. The lady was a calm and composed personage, whom, on a second glance, I remembered to have seen wherever the world could bow down to the fair possessor of countless "consols." But the passion for a handsome mansion, a handsome stud, and a handsome rental, is indefatigable, and the ex-staff man poured his adorations into her ear with all the glow of a suitor ten thousand pounds worse than nothing.

Poesy! sweetest of all the maids of Parnassus! it is thou that givest thy votary power to read the soul: it is thou that canst translate the glance into a speech, and give eloquence to the clasp of a hand. It is thou alone to whom the world is indebted for this true version of the pleadings of the Guardsman.

TRUE LOVE

Exquisite Miss Millionaire!Hear a lover's genuine prayer:Let the world adore your charms,Swan-like neck, or snowy arms,Rosy smile, or dazzling glance,Making all our bosoms dance;For your purse alone I care,Exquisite Miss Millionaire!Ringlets blackest of the black,Ivory shoulders, Grecian back,Tresses so divinely twined,That we long to be the wind,Waiting till the lady's faceTurns, to give the coup de grace.All those spells to me are air.Truth is truth, Miss Millionaire.Let them talk of finger-tips,Pearly teeth, or coral lips,Cheeks the morning rose that mock,Still there is a charm in Stock!Solid mortgage, five per cent,Freehold with "improving" rent,Russia bond, and railroad share,Steal my soul, Miss Millionaire.Let your rhymers (all are crackt)Rave of cloud or cataract;On the Rhine, or Rhone, or Arve,Let romancers stroll and starve.Cupid loves a gilded cage,(Let me choose your equipage,)Passion pants for Portman Square,(Be but mine,) Miss Millionaire.There you'll lead a London life,More a goddess than a wife;Fifty thousand pounds a-yearMaking our expenses clear;Giving, once a-week, a fête,Simply to display our plate.Never earth saw such a pair,Exquisite Miss Millionaire!

But a steeple starts up from its green thickets; not one of the hideous objects which the architects of our district churches perpetrate, to puzzle the passer-by as to the purpose of its being,—whether a brewer's chimney, or a shot-tower,—a perch for city pigeons, or a standing burlesque on the builders of the nineteenth age of the fine arts in England. This steeple is an old grey turret, ivy-mantled, modest, and with that look of venerable age which instinctively makes us feel, that it has witnessed memorable things in its time.

And it has witnessed them. On the slope of the hill above this church once waved the banners of a king, and the opposing banners of his nobles: the one receiving the lesson, that kings have duties as well as their subjects; and the others enforcing the lesson by the sight of lines and columns of the stout bowmen and billmen of the Norman chivalry.—On this spot, just this day six hundred and thirty years ago, was held the grand conference between John and the Barons.

Further inland, but rising on the view, is Swainscomb, the hill on which the Danish armies encamped, in their pirate rovings of the British seas, and their invasions of the Thames.

What a contrast between the green landscape of this moment, and the camp of Sweno. All before me was the luxury of cultivation, the yellowing crop, the grazing cattle, the cottage smoke curling slowly upward on the back-ground of noble beech, ash, and sycamore. On the summit, the sun gleamed on a rectory house, half buried in roses, where the most learned of our Orientalists perused the Koran in the peace of a Mahometan paradise, and doubtless saw, on the dancing waters of the mighty river at his feet, perpetual visions of houris.

Yet those pastures once echoed with the barbarian cries of the Cimbric warriors; tents of seal-skin and white bear fur covered the hill; the smokes of savage feasting and Scandinavian sacrifice clouded the skies; and on the summit, surrounded by iron guards and spectral-looking priests, stood the magic standard of the north, the image of the Raven, which flapped its wings on the coming of battle, and gave the oracular cry of victory.