brought by the maddest among malignants against the first living writer of the world.
Time was when England herself might have claimed and approved her claim to this noblest of human rights: when to establish it she had but to speak as a Republic through the lips of a republican secretary of state, whose name in eternity was John Milton. 'Inutilité des poëtes,' as the living master of them all has pertinently remarked. But the hard-working and high-minded biographer of our Protector can shew no sign or birthmark of spiritual kinship, as to her loftiest and most precious quality, with the England of that deathless day. All men know with what a noble love and reverence he has paid a good man's homage and done a great man's service to the memories and the names of John Knox and Oliver Cromwell. But no man who has eyes can doubt, and no man who has honesty can deny, that had he lived in such an age as theirs, his natural place, by every law of logic and of likelihood, would hardly have been found beside such men as these. For these in their time were the champions of change and progress, lovers of all the light then possible to them, men of revolution and advance towards new stages of thought and government; more helpful servants of freedom than they knew, and furtherers of a truth more fruitful than they conceived: but the place of a latter-day Puritan, how strong soever be his genius, would assuredly in their age have been a seat of state or office beside or beneath Archbishop Laud or Cardinal
