Edinburgh; who cannonaded the Royal’ Hamilton ‘troops whenever they came in view of him!’[1]
Cromwell proceeds northward, goes at last to Edinburgh itself, to compose this strange state of matters.
Monro with the rearward of Hamilton’s beaten Army did not march ‘straight back’ to Scotland, as Turner told us, but very obliquely back; lingering for several weeks on the South side of the Border; collecting remnants of English, Scotch, and even Irish Malignants, not without hopes of raising a new Army from them,—cruelly spoiling those Northern Counties in the interim. Cromwell, waiting first till Lambert with the forces sent in pursuit of Hamilton can rejoin the main Army, moves Northward, to deal with these broken parties, and with broken Scotland generally. The following Thirteen Letters bring him as far as Edinburgh: whither let us now attend him with such lights as they yield.
Oliver St. John, a private friend, and always officially an important man, always on the Committee of Both Kingdoms, Derby-House Committee, or whatever the governing Authority might be, finds here a private Note for himself; one part of which is very strange to us. Does the reader look with any intelligence into that poor old prophetic, symbolic Deathbed-scene at Preston? Any intelligence of Prophecy and Symbol in general; of the symbolic Man-child Mahershalal-hashbaz at Jerusalem, or the handful of Cut Grass at Preston;—of the opening Portals of Eternity, and what last departing gleams there are in the Soul of the pure and just?—Mahershalal-
- ↑ Turner, ubi supra; Guthry’s Memoirs (Glasgow, 1748), p. 285.
