who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but
always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have
been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and
no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is
like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet's
Pigeon? No proof!--Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as
chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man; they are
distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very
different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his
earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it
not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His
nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too
deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in
broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are
not bound to believe much;--probably no more than of the other black
Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom the Officer _saw_ him sell
himself before Worcester Fight! But the mournful, over-sensitive,
hypochondriac humour of Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise
indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick
himself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full
of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had fancies about
the Town-cross." These things are significant. Such an excitable
deep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength of his, is not
the symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite other
than falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have
fallen, for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth;
but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty,
he is married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. 'He
pays-back what money he had won at gambling,' says the story;--he does
not think any gain of that kind could be really _his_. It is very
interesting, very natural, this 'conversion,' as they well name it;
this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see
into the awful _truth_ of things;--to see that time and its shows all
rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold
either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St Ives or Ely, as a
sober industrious Farmer