s hardly to be found in the pages of history, but that even
Washington himself might not have been able to act his most glorious of
all parts without the existence of circumstances uncommonly favourable,
and almost peculiar to the country which was to be the theatre of it.
Virtue like his depends not indeed upon time or place; but although in no
country or time would he have degraded himself into a Pisistratus, or a
Caesar, or a Cromwell, he might have shared the fate of a Cato, or a De
Witt; or, like Ludlow and Sidney, have mourned in exile the lost
liberties of his country.

With the life of the protector almost immediately ended the government
which he had established. The great talents of this extraordinary person
had supported during his life a system condemned equally by reason and by
prejudice: by reason, as wanting freedom; by prejudice, as a usurpation;
and it must be confessed to be no mean testimony to his genius, that
notwithstanding the radical defects of such a system, the splendour of
his character and exploits render the era of the protectorship one of the
most brilliant in English history. It is true his conduct in foreign
concerns is set off to advantage by a comparison of it with that of those
who preceded and who followed him. If he made a mistake in espousing the
French interest instead of the Spanish, we should recollect that in
examining this question we must divest our minds entirely of all the
considerations which the subsequent relative state of those two empires
suggest to us before we can become impartial judges in it; and at any
rate we must allow his reign, in regard to European concerns, to have
been most glorious when contrasted with the pusillanimity of James I.,
with the levity of Charles I., and the mercenary meanness of the two last
princes of the house of Stuart. Upon the whole, the character of
Cromwell must ever stand high in the list of those who raised themselves
to supreme power by the force of their genius; and among such, even in
respect of moral virtue, it would be found to be one of the least
exceptionable if it had not been tainted with that most odious and
degrading of all human vices, hypocrisy.

The short interval between Cromwell's death and the restoration exhibits
the picture of a nation either so wearied with changes as not to feel, or
so subdued by military power as not to dare to show, any care or even
preference with regard to the form of their government. Al