mates to us how much he suffered. He was oppressed with dreadful consciousness of sin and defect. He groaned in spirit like Paul, like later saints-Bunyan, for instance. A flat, level country is it about St. Ives, and then probably much more like the fen country of Norfolk than the quiet, lovely seclusion its neighborhood wears at the present day; but there, in the experience of this man, powers of heaven, earth, and hell were struggling for masterdom. The stunted willows and sedgy watercourses, the flags and reeds, would often echo back the mourning words, "Oh, wretched man that I am!" What conception had he of the course lying before him? What knowledge had he of the intentions of Providence concerning him? Life lay before him all in shadow. For fifteen years he appears to have had no other concern than " to know Christ and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings." But, then, it would be scarcely other than possible to hear, from news and scattered report, how one and another of God's faithful ser vants were shut up in prison, fined, pilloried, and persecuted to banishment and death, without additional anguish to the severe torture of the mind crying for salvation; nor would it be possible to hear of successive tyrannic exactions and impositions, of libidinousness, intemperance at Court and throughout the country, without wonder, too, where all this should end. Men called and ordained by God to great actions have strong presentiments and mental foreshadowings; and Cromwell would be probably visited by mysterious intimations that he was, in some way, to solve the mighty riddle of the kingdom's salvation. But how? What madness to dream it! How?

Nor must we forget that during these years Cromwell had many times renewed the joys and anxieties of a father; indeed all his children were born before he emerged from the fen country into public life. They were as follows:

Robert, his first-born, baptized 13th October, 1621.

Oliver, baptized 6th of February, 1623. He was killed in battle early in the civil war. The Protector alluded to him on his death-bed: "It went to my heart like a dagger; indeed it did."

Bridget, baptized 4th of August, 1624. She was married to Ireton, and after Ireton's death to Fleetwood; and died at Stoke Newington, near London, 1681.

Richard, born 4th of October, 1626. Him Carlyle calls "a poor idle triviality."

Henry, baptized 20th July, 1628.
Elizabeth, baptized 2d July, 1629.

All the above children were born at Huntingdon; the fol lowing at St. Ives and Ely:

James, baptized 8th January, 1631; died next day.

Mary, baptized at Huntingdon, 3d February, 1636.

Francis, baptized at Ely, 6th December, 1638. "Preaching there, praying there, he passed his days solacing persecuted ministers, and sighing in the bitterness of his soul."

In all, five sons and four daughters; of whom three sons, and all the daughters, came to maturity at Ely; for about 1638 Cromwell, probably, removed to Ely. His uncle, Sir Thomas, resided there. His mother's relatives-those of them who were left were there; and now his mother herself removed there, probably with the idea of there terminating her days in the presence of first impressions and associations. The time draws nigh for Oliver to leave his silence, his lonely wanderings to and fro, his plannings, and his doubtings. The storm is up in England, and Oliver has become a marked man; he probably knows that he will have to take a prominent part in the affairs of the kingdom. Halt we awhile to reflect on this. This obscure man, lone English farmer, untitled, unwealthy, no grace of manner to introduce himself, ungainly in speech and in action, unskilled in war, unused to the arts of courts and the cabals of senates and legislators-this man whose life was passed altogether with farmers and religious-minded men seemed at almost a bound, to leap to the highest place in the people's army, grasping the baton of the marshal. This man was to strike the successful blows on the field, shivering to pieces the kingly power in the land-himself was to assume the truncheon of the Dictator; was to sketch the outline of laws, of home and foreign policy, which all succeeding legisla tors were to attempt to embody and imitate; was to wring concessions to his power from the most haughty monarchies of ancient feudal Europe, and to bear up, in arms, England, fast dwindling into contempt, to the very foremost place among the nations; was to produce throughout the world homage to the Protestant religion, making before his name the fame and terror of Gustavus, of Henry IV., of Zisca, to dwindle and look pale. And this with no prestige of birth or education. Is it too much, then, to call him the most royal actor England, if not the world, has produced?

Notice, also, that when he was at Cambridge he won some money at gambling: £20, £50, £100. All these sums now

were returned as moneys upon no principle his own.

Here, too, is a letter of this Huntingdon time, just before the busy world called him away, giving a glimpse of the man:

"To my beloved cousin, Mrs. St. John, at William Masham, his house, called Otes, in Essex.-Present these. "ELY, 13th October, 1638.

"DEAR COUSIN,-

"I thankfully acknowledge your love in your kind remembrance of me upon this opportunity. Alas! you too highly prize my lines and my company. I may be ashamed to own your expressions, considering how unprofitable I am, and the mean improvement of my talent.

"Yet to honor my God by declaring what he hath done for my soul, in this I am confident, and I will be so. Truly, then, this I find, that He giveth springs in a dry, barren wilderness, where no water is. I live, you know where-in Meshec, which they say means prolonging-in Kedar, which signifies blackness; yet the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will, I trust, bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with the congregation of the firstborn; my body rests in hope; and if here I may honor my God, either by doing or by suffering, I shall be most glad.

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Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth in the cause of God than I. I have had plentiful wages beforehand; and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite. The Lord accept me in His Son, and give me to walk in the light, as He is the light! He it is that enlighteneth our blackness, our darkness. I dare not say He hideth His face from me. He giveth me to see light in His light. One beam. in a dark place hath exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine! You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness and hated light! I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. Oh, the richness of His mercy ! Praise Him for me-pray for me, that He who hath begun a good work would perfect it in the day of Christ."

Notice, also, that those latest years of James and first years of Charles were the period when the cruel persecution proceeding in England drove the first emigrants away into the American wilderness, there to found the old Massachusetts Colony; they left their homes and country, willing to encounter the

privations and dangers of the distant wilderness, hoping there to find a rest and refuge for outraged religion and humanity. Those were the days commemorated by the Plymouth Rockthe first settlers in Salem and the growth of Lynn.

We refer

to this especially, because tradition says that on the 1st of May, 1638, eight ships, bound for New England, and filled with Puritan families, were arrested and interrupted in the Thames by an order from the king, and that among their passengers in one of those vessels were Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Hazelrig. Mr. John Forster doubts this, but can not disprove it. Our own impression is that these master patriots were probably on board; that they did not intend to desert their country, in whose existence and future they had too large an interest, but that they were on a voyage of discovery, partly to sympathize with the exiles, and partly to obtain some knowledge for future possibilities. The rumor seems to be too extended to be altogether unfounded.

CHAPTER III.

CROMWELL'S CONTEMPORARIES: SIR JOHN ELIOT.

WE are desirous to set before our readers, not only the character of Cromwell himself, but of those contemporaries who also wrought out with him the work of national salvation; among these, and especially those who may be termed the great heralds and precursors of what may be called more strictly the Cromwell period, no name is more eminent than that of John Eliot. He is really the Elijah of the Revolution, and his was the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way." His bold, courageous, and ardent spirit went before, and he anticipated the great impeachments of Pym and the great victories of Cromwell. It is only recently that he has been restored to the high place in popular regard and memory, from whence he had passed almost into obscurity, until Mr. John Forster first published his brief life, more than thirty years since, in his "Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and afterward expanded the sketch into the two handsome volumes which now so pleasantly embalm the name and memory, the words and works and sufferings, we may add, the martyrdom, of John Eliot. He was born in 1590, a Cornishman, but on the banks of the Tamar, in the town of St, Ger

mains, which, however, does not appear to have been more than a poor little straggling village of fishermen. Traveling on the Continent, he made the acquaintance of the Duke of Buckingham the favorite of James I. Perhaps the acquaintance was not very intimate or very deep; it seems likely, however, that to it Eliot owed his position of Vice-Admiral of Devon. When, however, Eliot entered into public life, the opinions and careers of the two men were so divergent, that it is probable that, by his great impeachment of the Duke, Eliot would have taken away his head had not Felton's lance anticipated the headsman's stroke.

Eliot entered Parliament in his twenty-fourth year as member for the borough of St. Germains, and he found himself in company with some of the men whose names were to be allied with his own in working out the English redemption. John Hampden, three or four years younger than Eliot, had not yet finished his studies in the Inner Temple; but there were Pym, Philips, Sir Edward Joel, Sir Edward Sands, and Whitelock, and, amphibiously bowing about, but scarcely giving a hint of the vast space he was to fill by his power in the future, Sir Thomas Wentworth, soon afterward created Earl of Strafford. Buckingham was the favorite-the most unprincipled of favorites, but Lord High Admiral of England. And here we are most likely to discover the cause of Eliot's elevation to the Vice-Admiralty of Devon. The Duke, probably, soon found that he had made a mistake in the appointment of Eliot to this post. The western coast was ravaged by pirates, and Eliot does not appear to have understood that it was quite possible for, perhaps almost expected that, the admiral and the pirate, especially if he were an English pirate, should understand each other. Not only Turkish rovers swept round our seas, but wild, lawless, dissolute Englishmen, bold bravadoes capable of every crime, who, when they were wearied and foiled in their adventures upon Spanish dollars and doubloons, varied the pleasantry of their occupation by more homely and less toilsome endeavors, seizing our own merchant ships, surprising and pouncing upon villages and small towns along the coast, and, in innumerable ways, creating a fear and a dread on the land and on the sea. What seems most marvelous to us now, is that such men should be frequently shielded and patronized by Government, or Government favorites, for their own ends and purposes!

This was the case, just then, with one who had obtained the most infamous distinction, Captain John Nutt, one of the most

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