A Lecture on the Life and Character of Oliver Cromwell: Delivered Before the Young Men's Literary Association of Cleveland; On Thursday Evening, Jan, 28, 1847 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Lecture on the Life and Character of Oliver Cromwell: Delivered Before the Young Men's Literary Association of Cleveland; On Thursday Evening, Jan, 28, 1847

Gentlemen, -the lecture of which you request a copy for the press, was prepared amid pressing engagements and with no expecta tion or thought oi' its publication. Had I wished to publish my views of the life and character of Oliver Cromwell, at all, I should have preferred to exhibit them more fully than the limits of a single lecture would permit, and With a larger space for the presentation of the facts and arguments on which those views are based. The lecture was prepared and delivered in thet hope rather of exciting inquiry than of gaining the immediate assent to my views of all who might happen to hear me. It was not to be expected that all minds would be pre pared at once to admit the correctness of a picture of Cromwell, so unlike the horrid caricature - drawn by political and ecclesiastical pm'tisans - from which alone not a few Americans as well as English men have received their impressions of that extraordinary man. But it seemed proper, in a lecture intended solely for the audience to which this was delivered, to ask in behalf of the man who was inti mately associated, in the cause of' civil and religious liberty, with Hampden and who, by his liberal and magnanimous policy, as well as by his pre-eminent abilities, won the confidence, the friendship, and the admiration of Milton, a rehearing - a re-examination of his history in the light of all the facts which have now been made acces sible, and with a proper scrutiny of the statements of prejudiced writers.

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