cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there
cannot be assigned a truer than your own mild and free and humane
government; it is the liberty, lords and commons, which your own
valorous and happy counsels have purchased us; liberty which is the
nurse of all great wits: this is that which hath rarified and
enlightened our spirits like the influence of Heaven; this is that
which hath enfranchised, enlarged, and lifted up our apprehensions
degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less
knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make
yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our
true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal, and
slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye
cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom
ye have freed us. {30} That our hearts are now more capacious, our
thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and
exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye
cannot suppress that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless
law, that fathers may despatch at will their own children. And who
shall then stick closest to thee and excite others? Not he who takes
up arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of Danegelt.
Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet love my
peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, to utter,
and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

(_Areopagitica_.)

EARL OF CLARENDON 1609-1674

DEATH OF FALKLAND

In this unhappy battle was slain the Lord Viscount Falkland, a person
of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable
sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and obliging a
humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and
integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious
and accursed civil war than that single loss, it must be most infamous
and execrable to all posterity.

Before this parliament his condition of life was so happy that it was
hardly capable of improvement. Before he came to be twenty years of
age, he was master of a noble fortune, which descended to him by the
gift of a {31} grandfather, without passing through his father or
mother, who were then both alive, and not well enough contented to find
themselves passed by in the descent.