the north. These successes, applied to a nature too elate and haughty of itself, and a quicker progress into the greatest employments and trust, made him more transported with disdain of other men, and more contemning the forms of business, than happily he would have been, if he had met with some interruption in the beginning, and had passed in a more leisurely gradation to the office of a statesman.

He was, no doubt, of great observation, and a piercing judgment, both in things and persons; but his too good skill in persons made him judge the worse of things: for it was his misfortune to be in a time wherein very few wise men were employed with him; and scarce any (but the Lord Coventry, whose trust was more confined), whose faculties and abilities were equal to his : so that upon the matter he relied wholly upon himself; and discerning many defects in most men, he too much neglected what he said or did. Of all his passions his pride was most predominant; which a moderate exercise of ill fortune might have corrected and reformed; and which was by the hand of Heaven strangely punished, by bringing his destruction upon him by two things that he most despised-the people and Sir Harry Vane. In a word, the epitaph which Plutarch records that Sylla wrote for himself, may not be unfitly applied to him: "That no man did ever exceed him, either in doing good to his friends, or in doing mischief to his enemies;" for his acts of both kinds were most notorious.

CLARENDON.

PRESIDENT BRADSHAW.

JOHN BRADSHAW (a name which Liberty herself, wherever she is respected, has commended for celebration to everlasting memory) was sprung, as is well known, from a noble family; and hence, spent the early part of his life in the diligent study of the laws of his country. Becoming afterwards a skilful and eloquent pleader, a zealous defender of liberty and of the people, he was admitted to the higher offices in the state, and several times discharged the function of an incorrupt judge. At length, on a request from the parliament that he would preside on the trial of the king, he refused not the dangerous office; for to skill in the law, he added a liberal mind, a lofty spirit, with manners unimpeached, and obnoxious to no man. This office, therefore, which was great and fearful, almost surpassing all example, marked out as he was by the daggers and threats of so many ruffians, he executed and filled with such steadiness, such gravity, with such dignity and presence of mind, that he seemed destined and created by the Deity himself for this particular act-an act which God in his stupendous providence had preordained should be exhibited among this people; and he so far surpassed the glory of all tyrannicides, as it is more humane, more just, more full of majesty, to try a tyrant, than to put him to death without a trial. He was otherwise neither gloomy nor severe, but mild and gentle. Yet, at all times equal to himself the consul, as it were, not of a single

year, he supported the high character which he took upon him with a becoming gravity; so that you would think him sitting in judgment upon the king, not on the tribunal only, but every moment of his life. He is above all men indefatigable in counsel and in exertions for the public-he alone is equal to a host. At home he is, according to his means, hospitable and splendid; the most faithful of friends, and, in every change of fortune, the most to be relied upon, No one sooner or more willingly discovers merit, wherever it is to be seen, or acts towards it with greater favour. At one time he aids the pious, at another the learned, or men known for any species of skill; now he relieves, from his private fortune, brave men of the military profession who have been reduced to want; and if they are not in want, he yet receives them with a willing courtesy, a friendly welcome. It is his constant practice to proclaim the praises of others, and to conceal his own: and among his political enemies, if any has happened to return to his right senses, which has been the case with many, no man has been more ready to forgive. But if the cause of the oppressed is to be openly defended; if the favour and the power of the mighty is to be resisted; if the public ingratitude against any meritorious character is to be reproved; then indeed, no one could find in this man any want of eloquence or of firmness; no one could even desire an advocate or a friend more intrepid, more eloquent: for he has found one, whom no threats can turn aside from rectitude, whom neither intimidation nor bribes can

bend from his duty and virtuous purpose, can move from an unshaken steadiness of mind and of countenance. By these virtues he has made himself deservedly dear to most men, and not to be despised by his greatest enemies.

MILTON.

MR. HAMBDEN.

MR. HAMBDEN was a man of much greater cunning, and it may be of the most discerning spirit, and of the greatest address and insinuation to bring any thing to pass which he desired, of any man of that time, and who laid the design deepest. He was a gentleman of a good extraction and a fair fortune, who, from a life of great pleasure and licence, had on a sudden retired to extraordinary sobriety and strictness, and yet retained his usual cheerfulness and affability; which, together with the opinion of his wisdom and justice, and the courage he had showed in opposing the ship money, raised his reputation to a very great height, not only in Buckinghamshire, where he lived, but generally throughout the kingdom. He was not a man of many words, and rarely began the discourse, or made the first entrance upon any business that was assumed; but a very weighty speaker, and after he had heard a full debate, and observed how the House was like to be inclined, took up the argument, and shortly, and clearly, and craftily, so stated it, that he commonly conducted it to the conclusion he desired; and if he found he could not do

that, he was never without the dexterity to divert the debate to another time, and to prevent the determining any thing in the negative, which might prove inconvenient in the future. He made so great a show of civility, and modesty, and humility, and always of mistrusting his own judgment, and esteeming his with whom he conferred for the present, that he seemed to have no opinions or resolutions, but such as he contracted from the information and instruction he received upon the discourses of others, whom he had a wonderful art of governing, and leading into his principles and inclinations, whilst they believed that he wholly depended upon their counsel and advice. No man had ever a greater power over himself, or was less the man that he seemed to be, which shortly after appeared to every body, when he cared less to keep on the mask.

He was a gentleman of good family in Buckinghamshire, and born to a fair fortune, and of a most civil and affable deportment. In his entrance into the world, he indulged to himself all the licence in sports and exercises and company, which were used by men of the most jolly conversation. Afterwards he retired to a more reserved and melancholy society, yet preserving his own cheerfulness and vivacity, and, above all, a flowing courtesy to all men; though they who conversed nearly with him, found him growing into a dislike of the ecclesiastical government of the church, yet most believed it rather a dislike of some churchmen, and of some introduce