1634.

In the end of this the third year of Oliver's abode at St. Ives, came out the celebrated Writ of Shipmoney. It was the last feat of Attorney-General Noy: a morose, amorphous, cynical Law-Pedant, and invincible living heap of learned rubbish; once a Patriot in Parliament, till they made him Attorney-General, and enlightened his eyes: who had fished up from the dust-abysses this and other old shadows of 'precedents,' promising to be of great use in the present distressed state of the Finance Department. Parliament being in abeyance, how to raise money was now the grand problem. Noy himself was dead before the Writ came out; a very mixed renown following him. The Vintners, says Wood, illuminated at his death, made bonfires and drank lusty carouses' to them, as to every man, he had been a sore affliction. His heart, on dissection, adds old Anthony, was found all shrivelled up like a leather penny-purse,' which gave rise to comments among the Puritans.* His brain, said the pasquinades of the day, was found reduced to a mass of dust, his heart was a bundle of old sheepskin writs, and his belly consisted of a barrel of soap. Some indistinct memory of him still survives, as of a grisly Law Pluto, and dark Law Monster, kind of Infernal King, Chief Enchanter in the Domdaniel of Attorneys; one of those frightful men, who, as his contemporaries passionately said and repeated, dare to decree injustice by a law.'

The Shipmoney Writ has come out then; and Cousin Hampden has decided not to pay it !—As the date of Oliver's St. Ives Letter is 1635-6, and we are now come in sight of that, we will here close our Chronology.

• Wood's Athenæ (Bliss's edition, London, 1815), ii., 583. † Rushworth.

CHAPTER V.

OF OLIVER'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES.

LETTERS and authentic Utterances of Oliver lie scattered, in print and manuscript in a hundred repositories, in all varieties of condition and environment. Most of them, all the important of them, have already long since been printed and again printed; but we cannot in general say, ever read: too often it is apparent that the very editor of these poor utterances had, if reading mean understanding, never read them. They stand in their old spelling; mispunctuated, misprinted, unelucidated, unintelligible,-defaced with the dark incrustations too well known to students of that Period. The Speeches above all, as hitherto set forth in The Somers Tracts, in The Milton State-Papers, in Burton's Diary, and other such Books, excel human belief: certainly no such agglomerate of opaque confusions, printed and reprinted; of darkness on the back of darkness, thick and three-fold; is known to me elsewhere in the history of things spoken or printed by human. creatures. Of these Speeches, all except one, which was published by authority at the time, I have to believe myself, not very exultingly, to be the first actual reader for nearly two Centuries past.

Nevertheless these Documents do exist, authentic though defaced; and invite every one who would know that Period, to study them till they become intelligible again. The words of Oliver Cromwell, the meaning they had, must be worth recovering in that point of view. To collect these Letters and authentic Utterances, as one's reading yielded them, was a comparatively grateful labor; to correct them, elucidate and make them legible again, was a good historical study. Surely a wise memory' would wish to preserve among men the written and spoken words of such a man;-and as for the 'wise oblivion,' that is already by Time and Accident, done to our hand. Enough is already

lost and destroyed; we need not, in this particular case, omit farther.

Accordingly, whatever words authentically proceeding from Oliver himself I could anywhere find yet surviving, I have here gathered; and will now, with such minimum of annotation as may suit that object, offer them to the reader. That is the purport of this Book. I have ventured to believe that, to certain patient earnest readers, these old dim Letters of a noble English Man might, as they had done to myself, become dimly legible again; might dimly present, better than all other evidence, the noble figure of the Man himself again. Certainly there is Historical instruction in these Letters :-Historical, and perhaps other and better. At least, it is with Heroes and god-inspired men that I, for my part, would far rather converse, in what dialect soever they speak! Great, ever fruitful; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. I will advise serious persons, interested in England past or present, to try if they can read a little in these Letters of Oliver Cromwell, a man once deeply interested in the same object. Heavy as it is, and dim and obsolete, there may be worse reading, for such persons in our time.

For the rest, if each Letter look dim, and have little light, after all study; yet let the Historical reader reflect, such light as it has cannot be disputed at all. These words, expository of that day and that hour, Oliver Cromwell did see fittest to be written down. The Letter hangs there in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost extinct, yet like a real star; fixed; about which there is no cavilling possible. That autograph Letter, it was once all luminous as a burning beacon, every word of it a live coal, in its time; it was once a piece of the general fire and light of Human Life, that Letter! Neither is it yet entirely extinct; well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Heaped embers which in the daylight looked black, may still look red in the utter darkness. These letters of Oliver will convince any man that the Past did exist! By degrees the combined small twilights may produce a kind of general feeble

VOL. I.

5

twilight, rendering the Past credible, the Ghosts of the Past in some glimpses of them visible! Such is the effect of contemporary letters always; and I can very confidently recommend Oliver's as good of their kind. A man intent on forcing for himself some path through that gloomy chaos called History of the Seventeenth Century, and looking face to face upon the same, may perhaps try it by this method as hopefully as by another. Here is an irregular row of beacon-fires, once all luminous as suns; and with a certain inextinguishable erubescence still, in the abysses of the dead deep Night. Let us look here. In shadowy outlines, in dimmer and dimmer crowding forms, the very figure of the old dead Time itself may perhaps be faintly discernible here!

I called these Letters good, but withal only good of their kind. No eloquence, elegance, not always even clearness of expression, is to be looked for in them. They are written with far other than literary aims; written, most of them, in the very flame and conflagration of a revolutionary struggle, and with an eye to the despatch of indispensable pressing business alone: but it will be found, I conceive, that for such end they are well written. Superfluity, as if by a natural law of the case, the writer has had to discard; whatsoever quality can be dispensed with is indifferent to him. With unwieldy movement, yet with a great solid step he presses through, towards his object; has marked out very decisively what the real steps towards it are; discriminating well the essential from the extraneous;-forming to himself, in short, a true, not an untrue picture of the business that is to be done. There is in these letters, as I have said above, a silence still more significant of Oliver to us than any speech they have. Dimly we discover features of an Intelligence, and Soul of a Man, greater than any speech. The Intelligence that can, with full satisfaction to itself, come out in eloquent speaking, in musical singing, is, after all, a small Intelligence. He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. Cromwell, emblem of the dumb English, is interesting to me by the very inadequacy of his speech. Heroic insight, valor and belief, without words,-how noble is it in comparison to eloquent words without heroic insight !—

I have corrected the spelling of these Letters; I have punctuated, and divided them into paragraphs, in the modern manner. The Originals, so far as I have seen such, have in general no paragraphs: if the Letter is short, it is usually found written on the first leaf of the sheet; often with the conclusion, or some postscript, subjoined crosswise on the margin,-indicating that there was no blotting paper in those days; that the hasty writer was loath to turn the leaf. Oliver's spelling and pointing are of the sort common to educated persons in his time; and readers that wish it may have specimens of him in abundance, and of all due dimness, in many printed Books: but to us, intent here to have the Letters read and understood, it seemed very proper at once and altogether to get rid of that encumbrance. Would the rest were all as easily got rid of! Here and there, to bring out the struggling sense, I have added or rectified a word, but taken care to point out the same; what words in the Text of the Letters are mine, the reader will find marked off by single commas: it was of course my supreme duty to avoid altering, in any respect, not only the sense, but the smallest feature in the physiognomy, of the Original. And so 'a minimum of annotation' having been added, what minimum would serve the purpose,-here are the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell; of which the reader, with my best wishes, but not with any very high immediate hope of mine in that particular, is to make what he can.

Surely it was far enough from probable that these Letters of Cromwell, written originally for quite other objects, and selected not by the Genius of History, but by blind Accident which has saved them hitherto and destroyed the rest,-can illuminate for a modern man this Period of our Annals, which for all moderns, we may say, has become a gulf of bottomless darkness! Not so easily will the modern man domesticate himself in a scene of things every way so foreign to him. Nor could any measurable exposition of mine, on this present occasion, do much to illuminate the dead dark world of the Seventeenth Century, into which the reader is about to enter. He will gradually get to understand, as I have said, that the Seventeenth Century did exist; that it was not a waste rubbish-continent of Rushworth-Nalson Statepapers, of Philosophical Scepticisms, Dilettantisms, Dryasdust