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proof that these sentiments were not held by them in perfect sincerity; if there were schemes of private aggrandisement in the minds of some of the parliamentarians, if there were deep plans of a selfish and dangerous ambition which eventually absorbed and directed to base ends, the energies which had been called forth originally to high and noble designs of patriotism, that crime must be charged on others than the soldiers of the commonwealth in their collective capacity. All their printed documents are fraught with the purest political wisdom, and wisdom expressed in a strain of nervous eloquence which abundantly proves the justice of the language by which Clarendon and

Burnet characterise them.

Sir Harry Vane was intrusted by the parliament with the important office of joint commissioner for naval affairs to the commonwealth at that most critical juncture, when his country was about to cope with the most powerful nation of the world on that element, since destined to be the peculiar theatre of England's triumphs. It is in this view, perhaps, that Vane's character will most secure the gratitude of every Englishman, for it is scarcely possible to conceive of any man bearing that name, who can look with other feelings than those of enthusiastic veneration on that page of our country's history which records the naval glories of his native land. Mr. Forster informs us, that

"The commencement of hostilities with Holland furnished a great occasion for the display of the genius of Vane in the affairs of government. It had already shone in the pre-eminent success of his naval administration, in the matter of Prince Rupert's expedition; and left foreign nations, repeating the names of Vane and Blake, to wonder where lay the secret of English success, whether in the genius of the council chamber of the commonwealth, or the bravery of her sons upon the waves. During a portion of the Dutch war, Vane was not only at the head of naval affairs but also president of the council, and his exertions were almost incredible. When the war began the Dutch were lords of the ocean. They were in the full vigour of their strength, and had never on the sea, felt the breath of a calamity. They looked with contempt and impatience on the proud style the commonwealth had assumed. Our navy was comparatively nothing; theirs covered the ocean with their sails. Before the war was concluded, the united powers of Vane and Blake had nevertheless struck down the pride of the united provinces, and conferred on their beloved country that glorious title of mistress of the seas, which to the present day she has so gloriously maintained.

66

'A temporary reverse, which was deeply felt at the time, only served to set off more brilliantly the subsequent exertions of Vane, and the success which crowned them. Blake, with only thirty-seven ships under his immediate command, had encountered Van Tromp in the Downs, with a fleet of eighty sail, on the 29th of November, 1652. The fleet of the English admiral, imperfect as it was in number, was not even in fighting order; but it was Blake's great creed, that the English fleet should never decline the challenge of an enemy, whatever his advantages; and the advice of his officers coinciding with his own, determined him to engage. The battle was fought with the utmost gallantry on both sides for about five hours, when night came on, and enabled Blake to abandon the fight and escape into harbour, with the loss of two ships, and others in a shattered state. Blake's ship was the most forward and fiercely engaged, and he was himself wounded. The victorious Dutchman, drunk with his triumph, after

wards paraded his fleet up and down the English Channel, with a broom fixed to his mast-head, in derision of having swept the English navy from the sea.

"For this he was soon punished, by the unparalleled efforts of Vane. The difficulty was a disastrous one at the moment, but his energies rose to the occasion. On the 29th the battle had been fought. Not many days after, Vane reported the navy estimates to the house, and it was at once resolved, that £40,000 per month should be devoted to the navy. The next and most difficult point was to raise the revenue to meet such an appropriation; but Vane's energy and capacity surmounted it. He brought in a bill, and had it at once read a first and second time, to sell Windsor Park, Hampton Court, Hyde Park, the Royal Park at Greenwich, Enfield Castle, and Somerset House, the proceeds of the whole to be for the use of the navy. In the beginning of February, Blake was put to sea by Vane, with eighty ships of war, and soon fell in with Tromp, at the head of a squadron of equal size, convoying 200 merchantmen. A battle commenced on the 18th of February, off the island of Portland, which for the weight of the armaments engaged, the determined bravery of the combatants, the length of time during which it lasted, and the brilliancy of its results, far transcended every previous action on record, and has never perhaps been since surpassed. It was fought and renewed through three successive days, and at the end of the third day Blake conquered. He captured or destroyed eight ships of war and thirty merchantmen, slew 2000 men and took 1500 prisoners. His own ships suffered severely, but only one was sunk, and after her crew had been brought away; but his number slain is stated as nearly equal to that of his enemy. Thus splendidly did Vane and Blake close the battles of that republican commonwealth whose own termination was now near at hand."-pp. 144, 147.

About this period our immortal bard addressed that beautiful sonnet to Vane, which has been so generally and justly admired for its terse and nervous delineation of the character of the great statesman. This sonnet was originally printed in Sikes's Life of Vane, and was not included in the early editions of Milton's works. It is delightful to observe that two such elevated geniuses as Milton and Vane could rightly appreciate each other. Indeed such men alone, lifted far above the usual little jealousy of mere literary men, can duly esteem superiority of mind, and by the very altitude of their own mental stature are best enabled to judge of others as eminent as themselves. Milton himself could revere the genius of Vane. It is reserved for Clarendon and such men of earthborn souls to speak of him as a crazy enthusiast.

"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old,

Than whom a better senator ne'er held

The helm of Rome, when gowns, not arms, repelled
The fierce Epirot and the African bold;

Whether to settle peace, or to unfold

The drift of hollow States, hard to be spell'd.
Then to advise how war may be best upheld,
Moved by her two main nerves, iron and gold,

In all her equipage: Besides, to know

Both spiritual pow'r and civil, what each means,

What severs each, thou hast learn'd, which few have done :

The bounds of either sword to thee we owe;
Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans
In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son."

Vane had for some time laboured to procure a new parliament, in order to secure the perpetuity and prosperity of the republican government, but Cromwell having at this critical juncture, brought his ambitious views to the exact point when secrecy was no longer needful, he at once threw off the mask which had hitherto obscured his ultimate designs except to the piercing insight of such men as Vane; the general became the protector, or in more intelligible language, the tyrant of England. The strange procedure by which the parliamentary power was abrogated, and the military dominion of Cromwell was established, has been dwelt on at length by the several histories of that eventful period: Vane fell with that parliament whose interests he had so successfully advocated. We extract from a passage of Roger Coke (quoted by Mr. Forster) his reflections on the fall of the rump parliament, a testimony which coming from no friendly pen, will at least possess the excellence of impartiality. "Thus by their own mercenary servants, and not a sword drawn in their defence, fell the haughty and victorious rump, whose mighty actions will scarcely find belief in future generations. And, to say truth, they were a race of men, most indefatigable and industrious in business, always seeking for men fit for it, and never prefering any for favour, nor by importunity; you scarcely ever heard of any revolting from them, no murmur or complaint of seamen and soldiers. Nor do I find that they ever pressed any in all their wars, and as they excelled in the management of civil affairs, so it must be owned they exercised in matters ecclesiastic no such severities as either the Covenanters, or others before them, did upon such as dissented from them, nor were they ever the less forward in reforming the abuses of common law." From this time Vane mingled no longer with the Protector's councils: he retired from public life. He had long suspected Cromwell's sincerity; facts had now irrefragably proved the justness of the suspicions which he had indulged. Refusing to act in connexion with those whom he considered as accessary to the slavery of that country over whose interests he had so affectionately and solicitously watched, and viewing in his own nervous language, that the civil war had indeed but changed the tyrant and still left the servitude unmitigated, he withdrew altogether to a sphere more accommodated to the natural bias of his genius: he retired to his closet and communed with God. The fruit of that retirement we possess in quarto volume, entitled "The Retired Man's Meditations." Of this most extraordinary book we fear that in the short space here allotted us we can scarcely speak at sufficient length nor with sufficient precision to denote its real value. It is altogether unique, and to use a phrase of Shakspear, "caviar to the multitude." The superficial glance of an uninitiated reader would not scruple to characterise it as a specimen of Behmenitish enthusiasm, which might even defy the optic faculties, and gold-beating explications of Alexander Ross to make it intelligible; and often, we confess, have

we in the early part of our acquaintance with "The Retired Man's Meditations," pored over its mystic syllables through many a long hour in vague and indefinite wonder, that a man, who knew the use of words so well, could pile them together in so beautiful a form of unintelligible sublimity; until fatigued with long journies, through stately porticos and winding colonnades which apparently opened into nothing, we have sat down in utter despair. Oft have we been reminded of Sir Benjamin Rudyard's sarcasm, that Vane's religion "was too high for this world, and too low for the other;" and of Baxter's bitter critique of this very book of the noble author, that here "his opinions are so expressed, as will make but few men his disciples." A longer acquaintance has instructed us better. Vane was an enthusiast, but an enthusiast of such an order that it would be well for most of his readers to copy him in his reveries if they could by such a step copy him also in the elevation of his genius, the amiableness of his spirit, and the expansion of his love. The fifth monarchy of Vane was not the reign of voluptuaries in the unbridled enjoyment of sensual pleasure, but the supremacy of Christian truth, the universal and complete dominion of the principles of the Gospel over that spirit of selfishness, ignorance, and wickedness, which has for so many years acted as an obstacle to the progress of the Gospel amongst the sons of men: a dominion of truth, which was in his mind to succeed not the personal appearance, but the clearer and more glorious spiritual manifestation of Christ in the minds of his people in short that glorious manifestation in which we all believe, and for which we all earnestly and constantly pray. The promised glory of gospel times, that of which the prophets of the Old Testament had spoken so much, and so poetically, appeared to the mind of Vane to be a very different thing, a thing of a far higher, and more spiritual nature, than any representation of it which has yet been seen exhibited in this world, and so truly it appears to us. We cannot believe that the solemn mockery which we see daily obtruded before our eyes-that the monstrous system compounded of worldly policy, acts of parliament, penal laws, coercive enactments, unintelligible articles, metaphysical creeds, and mechanical prayers is any thing like the Gospel of Christ. We never could understand by what power the acts of a king or legislature, could authenticate, or authorize a system of divine truth, nor believe in the capability of those who often show a complete destitution of any religion in their own case, to point out the best religion for their subjects. We could never yet see the cogency of a sword to convert an unbeliever, nor understand how the claims of the religion of peace could be enforced by thrusting the bayonet into the breast of an adversary. It is to us, as well as to Vane, perfectly unintelligible by what mysterious influence the water poured on the face of an unconscious babe, can possibly change and renew its soul; how the millions of ignorant, debased, and as to their moral capabilities scarcely

rational beings, inhabiting the rural districts of our country, can be in any conceivable grammatical sense the children of God and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven; or how it can be imagined that they who die in a state of awful, and entire, and unrepented of alienation from God, can leave behind in those who know them, a sure and certain hope of their resurection to eternal life. Surely it must require, to say the least, a most entire ignorance of what the holy Scriptures assert respecting the righteousness and holiness which characterise the Christian church, to think for a moment, that a system which permits of the purchase of a cure of souls on the very same conditions as that of a piece of land, or a yoke of oxen, can be in any respect the undefiled bride of the Lord. If it be enthusiasm to look for a different kind of Christianity, we also must be enthusiasts.

But such conceptions as these are assuredly not amongst the usual subjects of thought to the men who have criticised Sir Harry Vane's writings. Clarendon, in one of his numerous tirades against a work of this amiable enthusiast, says, and it is a remark true in a sense, and to a degree of which its author had no consciousness, "I perceived that it required another kind of preparation of mind, and it may be another kind of diet, than men are ordinarily supplied with to understand it." Is Clarendon then, amongst the prophets? Yes, there are lucid intervals-certain mysterious moments in men's history, when the least prepared, the most unlikely, give utterance to truths beyond their own ken; and as the ancient physicians say of those on the borders of another life, begin almost to prophecy.

We are happy to say, that Mr. Forster shows, for the most part, the greatest respect for the talents and character of the great man whose life he has undertaken to write. Indeed, throughout his whole volume, Mr. F. evidences a laudable desire to place the conduct and principles of Sir Harry Vane in the best and most favourable light, and may be considered as his admirer. Still we are not convinced that Mr. Forster has succeeded in the developement of those peculiarities of Vane's character his religious opinions, which were his more prominent, and, in fact, his most valuable traits. We might almost presume to say, that no person could adequately and fully depict the religious features of his character, except he were himself connected with that body of Christians of which Vane was so distinguished a member, at least, were well skilled in their early writings, and in their present habits of thinking, which, we presume, from this volume, is not the case with its very respectable author. Had this been the case, Mr. Forster would never have intimated a doubt whether Vane and several of his associates were, in the distinct sense of the words, Independents, as he does at page 69. Mr. F. might have known, that Vane was throughout an Independent, and that, in the opinions referred to, he in no point differed from the views of modern Independents:

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