our Committee of Church and State," contrary to the judgment of Leslie, was a little too eager to beat him. We solace the national vanity, too, by remembering that he himself was half a Scotchman: we can still point out, from the burgh of Queensferry, the old house on the opposite side of the Frith, in which his mother, Elizabeth Stewart, first saw the light; and, farther, we call to mind that the blood of the Bruce flowed as purely in the veins of the plebeian Cromwell as in those of the Royal Martyr himself, and that he represented the indomitable hero of Bannockburn immensely better. Above all, we remember how very different the treatment which we received from the man we fought against, from that which we received from the man we fought for. And so we at least deem ourselves impartial, and marvel how there should live Englishmen in the present age who could so much as dream of excluding the record of the Protector from the general record of the country, as exhibited in its house of representatives. Save for Puseyism, High Churchism, and the rather equivocal service in our most excellent PrayerBook," the question could never have been mooted. We have seen it virtually decided in children's toy-books that were written half a century ago. Some thirty years since, when we kept our library in a chip-box six inches square by five inches deep, we were in the proud possession of two tall volumes, four inches high by three inches across,—the one of which, for the use of good boys and girls, contained notices and wood-cuts of all the Scottish monarchs, from the Davids down to James VI.; and the other, notices and wood-cuts of all the English ones, from William the Conqueror down to George III. And each little book, we well remember, had its single uncrowned figure, and its single notice pertaining to a great monarch that wanted the kingly title. The figure in the one case was that of a mailed warrior trampling on a lion; and the figure in the other, that of a warrior, also

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in mail, with a marshal's truncheon in his hand. The legend affixed to the one was "Sir William Wallace, Protector of Scotland;" and that borne by the other, "Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England:" and such was the interest attached to the prints and the notices, that the little books at length learned to open of themselves at the pages which exhibited the uncrowned warriors; for the one, with scarce a single exception, was the greatest and noblest of the Scotchmen, as the Bruce, though of a heroic nature, was less disinterestedly a patriot; and the other, with scarce a single exception, was, as far as we know, the greatest and noblest of the Englishmen; for, though the figure of Alfred looms large in the distance, the exaggerating mists of the past close thick around him, and we fail to ascertain his true proportions through the cloud. Here, we contend, in the child's books, and by the child, the grave question at issue, of statue or no statue, was fairly decided. The child's books found

fitting space in their pages for the effigies of the two Protectors; and the child soon learned to give unwitting evidence that the effigies of none of the others had at least a better right to be there.

But Cromwell, it is urged, was not a king: he said no, though he might have said yes, when offered the crown; and his statue ought to be excluded on the strength of the monosyllable. We would be inclined to sustain the objection had it been proposed to erect Cromwell's statue, not in the British House of Commons, but in the Herald's Office. But history is a thing of veritable facts, not of heraldic quibbles. King is a simple word of four letters, and Lord Protector a compound word of thirteen; but, translated into their historic meaning, their import is exactly the same. They just mean,

The

and no more, the supreme governor of the country. only real difference between Cromwell and the Charleses on either side is, that he was a great and good supreme governor,

and that they were little and bad ones. Ah! but Cromwell, it is urged further, has no legal existence in our chronicles. A statute, still enforced, effaced his name from the constitutional annals, by giving his years and his acts to his successor. History, we reply, is no more a thing of legal fictions than of heraldic quibbles. By a legal fiction Cromwell may be merely a bit of Charles II., and we know that by a legal fiction husband and wife are but one person : but we also know that the historian who should represent George IV. and his wife Caroline as merely the two halves of a single individual, would make sadly perplexed work of the "Queen's Trial." If Charles II. was also Cromwell, he was assuredly the most extraordinary character that ever lived,-much more emphatically than Bacon, as described by Pope,

"The wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind;"

and his statue, if that of the Protector is to be excluded, should by all means indicate the fact. Let him be represented as an eastern sept represent one of their gods,—the "man lion," as a compound monster, half-brute, half-man, with double fore-arms articulated at his elbows; or let his effigy be placed astride that of a tall figure in a cloak, like the Old Man of the Sea astride the shoulders of Sinbad; or, to render the allegory complete, let there be no human form placed on the pedestal at all, but simply a good representation in stone of Æsop's live ass and dying lion. For the sake of truth, however, the lion would require to be exhibited, not as dying, but dead. Cromwell was dead, and, as if to make all sure, cold, for considerably more than a twelvemonth ere a monarch or lawyer dared to raise the assinine heel against him. "They hung your father, lady," was the ungenerous taunt dealt, many years after the event, to one of his daughters. "Yes," was the proud reply, "but he was dead first."

We do think the statue of Cromwell should be assigned its proper niche, were it but for the sake of the associations which it is fitted to awaken, and the lesson in behalf of supreme governors in general which it is suited to teach. Quivedo, in one of his Visions of Hell, as quoted by Cowper, requested his black conductor to show him the jail in which they kept their kings. "There," said the guide, “there you have the whole group full before you." "Indeed!" exclaimed Quivedo, "they seem but few!" "Few, fellow!" replied the indignant guide, "few!-they are all that ever reigned though." Cowper objects to the undiscriminating severity of the wit, and names one or two kings, such as Alfred and Edward VI, who could hardly be regarded as inmates of Quivedo's prison; but certainly, were all kings of the type of the Royal Martyr, his father, and his two sons, the British kings of nearly an entire century, be it remembered,the objection would scarce have been lodged. It would be of importance, surely, as suited to produce the moral effect of Cowper's exception, to have inserted full in the middle of the line one supreme governor who was not a scoundrel, and who was not a fool. Very different indeed would be the associations that would hang on the central effigy, from those which the two effigies on either side must of necessity suggest. The smell of blood rises rank from these miserable. Stuarts, and it is invariably the blood of the best of their land,—the blood of honest patriots and of godly men. We find the insensate marbles associated with a dark record of 'crime, and cruelty, and monstrous infatuation: they are suggestive of the melancholy of protracted exile, the gloom of dungeons, the agonies of torture, and the pangs of death,of the blood of God's saints shed on the hills like water, or flooding the public scaffolds, of Scottish maidens tied to stakes under flood-mark, to perish amid the rising waters, and of venerable English matrons burnt alive. It speaks of

national degradation and impotency,-of ever-recurring defeats, and inefficient, disastrous wars,—of unavenged insults to the British flag,-of English fleets chased into the Thames by the victorious enemy,—and of English towns burnt unavenged on its shores. Surely it were well to have some means of relief at hand from such thick coming forces. The antidote of the central marble is imperatively required. It opens up, amid the darkness on either hand, a vista of surpassing glory. We see England throned in the midst of the nations, her armies victorious in all their battles,-her navies sweeping the seas, invincible,-her voice of thunder resounding all over the world in behalf of religious liberty and the rights of man, and all over the world feared, respected, and obeyed,-good men everywhere living in peace, however little friendly to the magnanimous Cromwell,—and the sword of persecution dropping from the terror-palsied hand of the Papacy.-October 1, 1845.

THE THIRD FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Was there ever an age of the world like the present! The painted scenes in a theatre do not shift before the eyes of the spectators more suddenly, or apparently more on that principle of strong contrast on which the poet and the artist rely for their most striking effects, than dynasties and forms of government in the times in which we live. The biography of Louis Philippe could belong to but one period in the history of the species.

It will be eighteen years first July since the writer was employed, on a clear, beautiful evening, in the immediate neighbourhood of a busy sea-port of the north of Scotland, all alive at the time with the turmoil and bustle of the her