had been a king." England ought
to write the name of Cromwell in letters of gold, when she remembers
that, within a space of four or five years, he avenged all the insults
that had been lavishly flung upon her by every country in Europe
throughout a long, disastrous, and most perplexing civil war.
Gloriously did he retrieve the credit that had been mouldering and
decaying during two weak and discreditable reigns of nearly fifty years'
continuance--gloriously did he establish and extend his country's
authority and influence in remote nations--gloriously acquire the real
mastery of the British Channel--gloriously send forth fleets that went
and conquered, and never sullied the union flag by an act of dishonour
or dissimulation. Not a single Briton, during the protectorate, but
could demand and receive either reparation or revenge for injury,
whether it came from France, from Spain, from any open foe or
treacherous ally; not an oppressed foreigner claimed his protection but
it was immediately and effectually granted. Were things to be compared
to this in the reign of either Charles? England may blush at the
remembrance of the insults she sustained during the reigns of the first
most amiable, yet most weak--of the second most admired, yet most
contemptible--of these legal kings. What must she think of the treatment
of the elector palatine, though he was son-in-law to king James? And let
her ask herself how the Duke of Rohan was assisted in the Protestant war
at Rochelle, notwithstanding the solemn engagement of king Charles under
his own hand! But we are treading too fearlessly upon ground on which,
in our humble capacity, we have scarcely the right to enter. Alas! alas!
the page of history is but a sad one; and the Stuarts and the Cromwells,
the roundheads and the cavaliers, the pennons and the drums, are but
part and parcel of the same dust--the dust we, who are made of dust
animated for a time by a living spirit, now tread upon! Their words,
that wrestled with the winds and mounted on the air, have left no trace
along that air whereon they sported:--the clouds in all their beauty cap
our isle with their magnificence, as in those by-gone days; the rivers
are as blue, the seas as salt; the flowers, those sweet things! remain
fresh within our fields, as when God called them into existence in
Paradise, and are bright as ever. But the change is over us, as it has
been over them: we, too, are passing. O England! what should this