should often wish, either that there had been no Hell, or that I had been a devil, supposing they were only tormentors; that if it must needs be that I went thither, I might be rather à tormentor than be tormented myself."

These feelings, when he approached towards manhood, recurred, as might be expected, less frequently and with less force; but though he represents himself as having been what he calls a town-sinner, he was never so given over to a reprobate mind as to be wholly free from them. For though he became so far hardened in profligacy, that he could "take pleasure in the vileness of his companions," yet the sense of right and wrong was not extinguished in him, and it shocked him if at any time he saw those who pretended to be religious act in a manner unworthy of their profession. Some providential escapes, during this part of his life, he looked back upon afterwards as so many judgments mixed with mercy. Once he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse near Bedford, and each time was narrowly saved from drowning. One day an adder crossed his path; he stunned it with a stick, then forced open its mouth with a stick, and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers; "by which act," he says, "had not God been merciful unto me, I might by my desperateness have brought myself to my end." If this indeed were an adder, and not a harmless snake, his escape from the fangs was more remarkable than he was himself aware of. A circumstance which was likely to impress him more deeply occurred in the eighteenth year of his age, when, being a soldier in the Parliament's army, he was drawn out to go to the siege of Leicester:* one of the same company wished to go in his stead; Bunyan consented to exchange with him; and this volunteer substitute, standing sentinel one day at the siege, was shot through the head with a musket ball.

Some serious thoughts this would have awakened in a harder heart than Bunyan's; but his heart never was hardened. The self-accusations of such a man are to be received with some distrust, not of his sincerity, but of his sober judgment. It should seem that he ran headlong into the boisterous vices which prove

[Leicester was surrendered to Fairfax on the 17th of June, 1645. Whitelock, ed. 1732, p. 152.]

fatal to so many of the ignorant and the brutal, for want of that necessary and wholesome restrictive discipline which it is the duty of a government to provide; but he was not led into those habitual sins which infix a deeper stain. "Had not a miracle of precious grace prevented, I had laid myself open," he says, "even to the stroke (of those laws which bring some to disgrace and open shame before the face of the world." That grace he had; he was no drunkard, for if he had been, he would loudly have proclaimed it: and on another point we have his own solemn declaration, in one of the most characteristic passages in his whole works, where he replies to those who slandered him as leading a licentious life with women. "I call on them," he says, "when they have used to the utmost of their endeavours, and made the fullest inquiry that they can, to prove against me truly, that there is any woman in Heaven or Earth or Hell, that can say I have at any time, in any place, by day or night, so much as attempted to be naught with them. And speak I thus to beg mine enemies into a good esteem of me? No, not I! I will in this beg belief of no man. Believe or disbelieve me in this, 't is all a-case to me. My foes have missed their mark in this their shooting at me. I am not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would be still alive and well. I know not whether there be such a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of Heaven, but by their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife." And, "for a wind up in this matter," calling again not only upon men, but angels, to prove him guilty if he be, and upon God for a record upon his soul that in these things he was innocent, he says, "Not that I have been thus kept because of any goodness in me more than any other, but God has been merciful to me, and has kept me.”

Bunyan married presently after his substitute had been killed at the siege of Leicester, probably therefore before he was nineteen. This he might have counted among his mercies, as he has counted it that he was led "to light upon a wife" whose father, as she often told him, was a godly man, who had been

[* Her maiden name is unknown. She was dead before the period of Bunyan's long imprisonment.]

the people of God when he was amongst us, now he will be much more so, being ascended to Heaven to sit at the right hand of Jesus Christ, there to intercede for us, and to be mindful of us on all occasions!"*

The life of this most fortunate and least flagitious of usurpers might hold out a salutary lesson for men possessed with like ambition, if such men were capable of learning good as well as evil lessons from the experience of others. He gained three kingdoms; the price which he paid for them was innocence and peace of mind. He left an imperishable name, so stained with reproach, that notwithstanding the redeeming virtues which adorned him, it were better for him to be forgotten than to be so remembered. And in the world to come,- -but it is not for us to anticipate the judgments, still less to limit the mercy, of the All-merciful.

Let us repeat, that there is no portion of history in which it so much behoves an Englishman to be thoroughly, versed as in that of Cromwell's age. There it may be seen to what desperate lengths men of good hearts and laudable intentions may be drawn by faction. There may be seen the rise, and the progress, and the consequences of rebellion. There are to be found the highest examples of true patriotism, sound principles, and heroic virtue, with some alloy of haughtiness in Strafford, of human infirmities in Laud, pure and unsullied in Falkland, and Capel, and Newcastle, and in Clarendon, the wisest and the best of English statesmen, the most authentic, the most candid, the most instructive of English historians. From the history of that age, and more especially from that excellent writer, the young and ingenuous may derive and confirm a just, and generous, ennobling love for the institutions of their country, founded upon the best feelings and surest principles; and the good and the thoughtful of all ages will feel in the perusal, with what reason that petition is inserted in the Litany, wherein we pray

and

[* Cromwell died in a whirlwind on the 3rd September, 1658. On the 23rd November he was buried in Henry VII.'s chapel with more than regal solemnity. At the Restoration his body was taken up and hung at Tyburu. Forty years afterwards Dryden alludes to the storm in which the Protector died, in a letter to his cousin, Mrs. Steward. Many of the large trees in St. James's Park were torn up by the roots.

He was taken ill at Hampton Court, and died at Whitehall.]

he Lord to deliver us "from all sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion: from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism: from ardness of heart and contempt of his word and commandments," sins which draw after them, in certain and inevitable consequence, the heaviest of all chastisements upon a guilty nation.*

[* After the murder of the king change followed change, but no change brought stability to the state, or repose to the nation, not even when the supreme and absolute authority was usurped by a man who of all others was the most worthy to have exercised it, had it lawfully devolved upon him. Cromwell relieved the country from Presbyterian intolerance; and he curbed those fanatics who were for proclaiming King Jesus, that, as his saints, they might divide the land amongst themselves. But it required all his strength to do this, and to keep down the spirit of political and religious fanaticism, when his own mind by its own strength had shaken off both diseases. He then saw and understood the beauty, and the utility, and the necessity of those establishments, civil and ecclesiastical, over the ruins of which he had made his way to power; and gladly would he have restored the Monarchy and the Episcopal Church. But he was deterred from the only practicable course less by the danger of the attempt than by the guilty part which he had borne in the king's fate; and at the time when Europe regarded him with terror and admiration as the ablest and most powerful potentate of the age, he was paying the bitter penalty of successful ambition, consumed by cares and anxieties, and secret fears, and only preserved from all the horrors of remorse by the spiritual drams which were administered to him as long as he had life.-SOUTHEY, Book of the Church, ed. 1841, p. 509.]

THE END OF THE LIFE OF CROMWELL.'