Speaker. Speaker Lenthall,3 more an ancient Roman than anything else, declares, He will not come till forced. "Sir," said Harrison, "I will lend you a hand;" on which Speaker Lenthall came down, and gloomily vanished. They all vanished; flooding gloomily, 'clamorously out, to their ulterior businesses and respective places of abode: the Long Parliament is dissolved !4 8. "It's you that have forced me to this," exclaims my Lord General: "I have sought the Lord night and day, that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work." At their going out, some say the Lord General said to young Sir Harry Vane, calling him by his name, "That he might have prevented this; but that he was a juggler, and had not common honesty." "Oh, Sir Harry Vane,5 thou with thy subtle 'casuistries and abstruse 'hairsplittings, thou art other than a good one, I think! The Lord deliver me from thee, Sir Harry Vane!" All being gone out, the door of the House was locked, and the Key with the Mace, as I heard, was carried away by Colonel Otley-and it is all over, and the unspeakable Catastrophe has come, and remains. 9. Such was the destructive wrath of my Lord General Cromwell against the Nominal Rump Parliament of England. Wrath which innumerable mortals since have accounted extremely diabolic; which some now begin to account partly divine. Divine or diabolic, it is an indisputable fact; left for the commentaries of men. The Rump Parliament has gone its ways;--and truly, except it be in their own, I know not in what eyes are tears at their departure. They went very softly, softly as a Dream, say all witnesses. “We did not hear a dog bark at their going!" asserts my Lord General elsewhere. 10. It is said, my Lord General did not, on his entrance into the House, contemplate quite as a certainty this 66 strong measure; but it came upon him like an irresistible 'impulse, or inspiration, as he heard their Parliamentary eloquence proceed. Perceiving the spirit of God so strong upon me, I would no longer consult flesh and blood." He has done it, at all events; and is responsible for the results it may have. A responsibility which he, as well as most of us, knows to be awful: but he fancies it was in answer to the English Nation and to the Maker of the English Nation and of him; and he will do the best he may with it. THOMAS CARLYLE: Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. bau-ble, play-thing; gewgaw. col-la-tions, comparing of documents. du-bi-tat-ing-ly, with hesitation. hair-split-tings, fine-drawn tions. im-pulse, influence. in-cred-u-lous, doubting; not in- in-dig-na-tion, wrath, anger. snap-hanç-es, firelocks. distinc-un-ap-peas-a-ble, unable to be paci fied. firm as brass or 1 Sid'ney, Algernon, a colonel in | honesty, that he was the Parliamentary army, and one of the King's judges, but was not present when Charles was sentenced. Having gone abroad at the Restoration, he returned in 1667, on obtaining a pardon. In 1683 he was tried for being concerned in the Rye House Plot, and was condemned and executed. oak timber." He died in Switzerland in 1693. 2 Lud/low, Edmund, one of the most extreme of the Parliament men. He joined with Ireton in 1648 in demanding the blood of the King, and counselled Pride's Purge of the Parliament. He was one of the King's judges, and approved of his condemnation. In 1650 he went to Ireland as commanderin-chief there. He protested against Cromwell's elevation to the Protectorship. Carlyle says, of his sterling 3 Speaker Lenth'all, William Lenthall, a lawyer, member for Woodstock, and Speaker of the Long Parliament, and afterwards of the Rump: died 1662. 4"Is dissolved," rather, "Is dismissed." The Long Parliament assembled again in 1660, and dissolved itself. 5 Sir Harry Vane, son of Sir Henry Vane, Secretary of State to Charles I. In the Civil War he sided with the Parliament, but he opposed the elevation of Cromwell. After the Restoration he was tried on a charge of high treason, and was condemned and beheaded (1662). 9. WHAT ENGLAND GAINED BY THE REVOLUTION. 1688 A.D. [The Revolution of 1688 consisted in a change of dynasty, and was accomplished without a civil war, and indeed without any bloodshed. Leading men of all parties were agreed that the arbitrary proceedings of James II. had become intolerable. They therefore invited William, Prince of Orange, who was married to Mary, daughter of James II., to come and occupy the throne. William and Mary came. James fled. The throne was declared vacant. The Declaration of Right was drawn up, and William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen, February 13, 1689. The most important reforms which England owes to the Revolution are said by Lord Macaulay to have been, the Toleration Act, the establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland, the alteration in the mode of granting the supplies, and the purification of justice. Of the last, the historian writes as follows.] 1. The next great blessing which we owe to the Revolution is the 'purification of the administration of justice in political cases. Of the importance of this change no person can judge who is not well acquainted with the earlier volumes of the State Trials. Those volumes are, we do not hesitate to say, the most frightful record of baseness and depravity that is extant in the world. Our hatred is altogether turned away from the crimes and the criminals, and directed against the law and its ministers. We see 'villanies as black as ever were imputed to any prisoner at any bar daily committed on the bench and in the jurybox. 2. The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old parliaments of France,—the condemnation of Lally,1 for example, or even that of Calas,2-may seem praiseworthy when compared with the atrocities which follow each other in endless succession as we turn over that huge chronicle of the shame of England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse were blinded by prejudice, passion, or bigotry. But the abandoned judges of our own country committed murder with their eyes open. The cause of this is plain. In France there was no constitutional opposition. If a man held language offensive to the govern ment, he was at once sent to the Bastille or to Vincennes.4 But in England, at least after the days of the Long Parlia ment, the king could not, by a mere act of his prerogative, rid himself of a troublesome politician. He was forced to remove those who thwarted him by means of perjured witnesses, packed juries, and corrupt, hard-hearted, browbeating judges. 3. The Opposition naturally 'retaliated whenever they had the upper hand. Every time that the power passed from one party to the other there was a 'proscription and a massacre, thinly disguised under the forms of judicial procedure. The tribunals ought to be sacred places of refuge, where, in all the 'vicissitudes of public affairs, the innocent of all parties may find shelter. They were, before the Revolution, our unclean public shambles, to which each party in its turn dragged its opponents, and where each found the same 'venal and ferocious butchers waiting for its custom. Papist or Protestant, Tory or Whig, priest or alderman-all was one to those greedy and savage natures, provided only there was money to earn and blood to shed. 4. Of course these worthless judges soon created around them, as was natural, a breed of informers more wicked, if possible, than themselves. The trial by jury afforded little or no protection to the innocent. The juries were nominated by the sheriffs; the sheriffs were in most parts of England nominated by the crown. 5. In London, the great scene of political contention, those officers were chosen by the people. The fiercest parliamentary election of our time will give but a faint notion of the storm which raged in the city on the day when two infuriated parties, each bearing its badge, met to select the men in whose hands were to be the issues of life and death for the coming year. On that day nobles of the highest descent did not think it beneath them to canvass and marshal the livery,5 to head the procession, and to watch the poll. On that day the great chiefs of parties waited in an agony of suspense for the messenger who was to bring from Guildhall the news whether their lives and estates were for the next twelve months to be at the mercy of a friend or of a foe. 6. In 1681 Whig sheriffs were chosen; and Shaftesbury 6 defied the whole power of the government. In 1682 the sheriffs were Tories. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. The other chiefs of the party broke up their councils and retired in haste to their country seats. Sidney, on the scaffold, told those sheriffs that his blood was on their heads. Neither of them could deny the charge, and one of them wept with shame and remorse. 8 7. Thus every man who then meddled with public affairs took his life in his hand. The consequence was, that men of gentle natures stood aloof from contests in which they could not engage without hazarding their own necks and the fortunes of their children. This was the course adopted by Sir William Temple," by Evelyn, and by many other men who were in every respect admirably qualified to serve the State. On the other hand, those resolute and enterprising men who put their heads and lands to hazard in the game of politics, naturally acquired from the habit of playing for so deep a stake a reckless and desperate turn of mind. It was, we seriously believe, as safe to be a highwayman as to be a distinguished leader of Opposition. 8. This may serve to explain, and in some degree to excuse, the violence with which the factions of that age are justly 'reproached. They were fighting, not merely for office, but for life. If they reposed for a moment from the work of agitation, if they suffered the public excitement to flag, they were lost men. 9. Hume, in describing this state of things, has employed an image which seems hardly to suit the general simplicity |