party. Amidst these religious contentions it is pleasant to note the peaceful progress of scientific research. During Cosin's collegiate career, the use of logarithms, the microscope, and the thermometer were invented; and in the very year in which Smart poured forth his abusive diatribe in Durham Cathedral, Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood.

In 1634, Dr. Wren, Master of Peterhouse, was made Bishop of Hereford. Cosin succeeded him as Head of Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge. This appointment Cosin held for twenty-six years, although for sixteen of these years he was an exile in a foreign land, and a creature of the Parliament's, named Lazarus Seaman, occupied the Master's lodge, and enjoyed all the emoluments of the office. In the same year he was nominated by the crown to the Deanery of Peterborough. Charles had not summoned a Parliament for eleven years, as he had found by experience that each Parliament that had assembled from the commencement of his reign had displayed a more hostile spirit towards him than the preceding Parliament had done; he levied taxes, and established tyrannous courts by his own arbitrary will. To say that such conduct was unconstitutional is to make a doubtful statement. It ought to have been unconstitutional, as a free nation ought only to have been taxed and legislated for in its own duly elected assembly. But the constitution had not really been fixed upon any firm basis, and the imperious Tudor kings had done not merely with impunity but with general approval, arbitrary acts which when the more gentle and more vacillating Stuarts attempted to imitate them, cost one of those Stuarts his head, and another his kingdom. To pretend, therefore, that Charles I. was a tyrant who initiated fresh lawless methods of government is to ignore all the facts of history. Charles I. was a well-intentioned, lofty-souled, kindly but weak man, who for attempting to do what his predecessors had done with safety, lost his life, partly because the times were altered, and the people aroused to a love for liberty and power, and partly because he was too tender-hearted to adopt the motto, Thorough," of his chief counsellor, the Earl of Strafford, and to stamp out with relentless vigour, as a ruthless Henry Tudor would have done, the first symptoms of popular disaffection.

In the very same month of the very same year in which Cosin was installed in the Deanery of Peterborough, the Long Parliament met. Three days after his appointment to the Deanery, Peter Smart's

petition against him was read in the House of Commons. The Dean was brought before the house by the serjeant-at-arms, and a committee appointed to prepare a charge against him. Twenty-one articles of impeachment were taken up by a member of the house, named Rouse, to the House of Lords. The majority of these charges were frivolous and many of them were untrue. To all of them, both at the time and afterwards when an exile abroad, Cosin furnished satisfactory answers. Parliament, however, was in no humour to deal out justice to one who like Cosin was a friend of Laud and Strafford, and a supporter of the high views concerning the Divine right of kings, of which Dr. Overall was the chief advocate. He was bound in sureties to the sum of several thousand pounds to appear before the house when summoned. Without, however, attempting to summon him or to afford him any opportunity of defence the House of Commons proceeded in the January of 1661, to pass sentence upon him as if his guilt had been proved; he was by a vote of the whole house sequestrated from all his ecclesiastical benefices, being the first clergyman who was thus treated. Articles of impeachment were sent up against him to the House of Lords, but the evidence in support of them so entirely failed, and the Dean so thoroughly vindicated himself that Glanvil, Smart's own counsel, threw up his brief, and the Lords dismissed the Dean on bail, and never sent for him again. The high tide of the Great Rebellion had now, however, set in, and no man who was suspected of any attachment to his Church or his king could consider his life or his property safe. In the May of 1641, the famous Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, deserted by the weak monarch, in whose service he had earned his unpopularity, was beheaded. Four years later Archbishop Laud followed him on the path of death. In 1642, the University of Cambridge sent its plate to Charles who had then come to an open rupture with Parliament, and was stationed at York. Dr. Cosin, (he had a few years before taken out his doctor's degree,) was one of the chief instigators of this act of generosity and loyalty on the part of the University. He accordingly was especially marked out for attack. By a warrant from the mean-souled Earl of Manchester, who betraying his king and his noble order, had joined the parliamentary party, Cosin was ejected from the Mastership of Peterhouse on the 13th of March, 1643. In all the deprivations that he suffered he had the glory of being a proto-martyr. As he was the first of the clergy who were sequestrated, so he was the first of the

members of the University that were ejected. A long train of sufferers in both cases, however, speedily followed in his footsteps.

Having been now deprived of all his property and of all his offices in England, it seemed to him desirable to remove abroad, not merely for the preservation of his life which was in considerable jeopardy, but also for the purpose of affording his counsel and his services to the exiled and persecuted royalists who were gathered in France around the anxious and spirited consort of the illfated Charles. He officiated as chaplain to the Anglican members of Queen Henrietta Maria's household: He formed a congregation of English exiles at first in a private house at Paris, and afterwards in the chapel of the embassy. After a short time a small pension and lodgings in the Louvre were assigned to him. He was a zealous Anglican priest, preserving with minute care the forms of Anglican worship, and confirming the faith of those who were wavering in their allegiance to their own Church. On the validity of Anglican orders he had a lengthy controversy with a Roman Catholic priest, named Robinson, who was Prior of the English Benedictines at Paris. In this controversy, which Cosin afterwards submitted to Morley, Bishop of Winchester, Cosin had so much the best of the argument that Robinson slunk out of the discussion before it was concluded, while many offers of preferment were made to him by men of the Roman Catholic party if he would adopt their religious opinions or would abstain from contravening them. Despairing of ever obliging him to change his religion, they were so enraged at him, if we are to believe the testimony of Nalson, "as frequently to threaten him with assassination, and that he should not escape pistol or poignard; and in revenge, which I have heard him aver was the most sensible affliction that ever befel him in his whole life, they inveigled his only son from him to become a papist." Fuller also in his "Worthies" tells us that, "whilst he, Cosin, remained in France, he was the Atlas of the protestant religion, supporting the same with his piety and learning, confirming the wavering therein; yea, daily adding proselytes (not of the meanest rank) thereunto." Concerning his attitude towards the Huguenots at Charenton, near Paris, accounts differ. It seems most probable, however, that he strictly limited his ministrations at all events to those who were willing to use the liturgical services of the Church of England, and that from all bands of disorderly sectarians he rigidly abstained.

The dark tragedy of the Great Rebellion had meanwhile been played out in England to the bitter end. King, Church, and nobility had been all overwhelmed in ruin. The House of Commons that had promoted this destruction had itself been displaced by a military despotism, and a stern, gloomy, and conscience-stricken tyrant ruled over the country with a rod of iron: The democracy and the tradesfolk had objected to the rule of King Log, they were made to feel the rule of King Stork. Charles I. may have beaten his people with rods, Oliver Cromwell assuredly chastised them with scorpions. Carlyle has initiated the worship of a policy of "blood and iron." To him, Cromwell who murdered his king, and Frederick of Prussia who governed his subjects with a cat-of-nine-tails, are heroes. We cannot assent to this view. Coarseness, and hypocrisy, and treachery, and tyranny, are wrongs that are not made to be rights, because oceans of blood may have been shed in the support of them. For Cromwell there came a Nemesis even in this life. In the state of abject terror and utter desolation in which his last years were passed, we see the fitting and certain result of that course of conduct by which he had sacrificed his conscience to his ambition, and had destroyed all the sympathies of our common humanity in his lust for power. A solitary, worn out man, who wears armour continually for fear of assassination, and flies from one place of residence to another, to escape from the dagger of some modern Brutus, reproached for his guiltiness by his own children, denounced by his own relatives, hated by all the people of the land, haunted by the spectres of the many innocent victims that he had slain, filled with a dread of future punishment, what a miserable object the renowned Oliver is during the concluding years of his life! In alternate fits of causeless fear, of abject terror, and of unutterable gloom, he passed his days away, until on September 3rd, (a day that he considered to be one of especially good omen to him, for on that day he had gained the victories of Dunbar and Worcester,) death ended his troublous career. As we study his character it is difficult to discover what qualifications beyond a dogged perseverance and a real or pretended religious enthusiasm he had, that enabled him to attain amidst the anarchy caused by the Great Rebellion, to supreme power. He was not a brilliant thinker nor an astute politician, he was no orator and was but an indifferent military leader. He had none of the graces of manner or charms of person that attract followers. A coarse, illiterate, stammering, blundering, unprepossessing country bumpkin-what was it, we ask

with wonder, that led to his elevation in the state? It would actually seem as if in disturbed realms as in agitated water, the grossest bodies which during a state of quiescence move at the bottom rise necessarily to the surface. From the French Revolution we may learn the same lesson.

Cromwell's feeble and gentle son Richard could not long hold, nor did he desire to retain the Protectorship. Parties in the state were in confusion and disunion. The army was mutinous, disaffected, and dangerous to the public peace. Then Monk, marching with his united band of soldiers from Scotland, where he had been appointed commander in chief by Cromwell, advanced steadily towards London, keeping his ultimate views unexpressed. After a time the remnant of the Long Parliament expelled by Cromwell was called together. An invitation was sent to Charles Stuart to return to the throne of his ancestors, and thus on May 29th, 1660, the Restoration was effected. Amidst the flying of flags, the cheering of dense crowds, the running of fountains with wine, the strewing of flowers, the glad tears of old cavaliers, Charles Stuart entered London. In his train came the band of long banished exiles, many of whom for seventeen years had endured the severest poverty in foreign lands. Amongst those returned exiles was Dr. Cosin. In the July of 1660, he came to the deanery at Peterborough, and was the first that read the Liturgy of the Anglican Church in the Cathedral, where during his absence the Puritans had performed irregular and unseemly services.

In ecclesiastical matters puritanism had reigned rampant, as military despotism had in civil and political matters. In both cases the results were sad and terrible. As all civil and political rights were completely stamped out, so all reverence and decency in sacred things were disregarded. To their shame be it spoken, some of the clergy with Williams, Archbishop of York, at their head, lent themselves to promote the spirit of irreverence and of iconoclasm that swept over the country. The Presbyterian Assembly of Divines, that meeting at Westminster, issued their Directory for public worship, might be satisfied to avail themselves of such false brethren, but the more thorough going fanatics, Independents, Anabaptists, Millenarians, Fifth Monarchy men, and such like, who superseded the Assembly, did not value such half-hearted allies. Accordingly they gained little but contempt for their course of conduct. The great mass of the clergy remained however faithful to their principles, and when it was attempted, in order to please the