Having named various imaginary qualities, he proceeded thus: "To these I added a study of letters, by which nature should be cultivated, the mind polished and subdued, and reason sharpened. Yet this, in a person instructed for the commonwealth, and trained up for political affairs, I wished might be moderate. For, as the art of governing a commonwealth, for the most part, is active and practical, it should rather consist of counsel and prudence, than of speculative and theoretical knowledge and wisdom. It is necessary therefore for him who is brought up to the art of ruling and commanding to be tinged indeed with a study of letters, which may reasonably inform him, and banish ignorance and unskilfulness from his mind; yet not to be so deeply tutored, as to comprehend them absolutely and exactly in every point. For, I know not by what means, this thorough knowledge of the sciences, at the same time that it sharpens the intellect, dulls the soul, and interrupts its close attention to the administration of public affairs perhaps because it wastes the spirits necessary for action, and, by gradually consuming them, causes the mind, in proportion as it is deprived of them, to grow languid. These applications of the wit and mind are tender things; they do not fancy the sun and the crowd, but delight in shade and retirement; noise and business disturb them; they shrink up at the horror of arms, and are even affrighted at the bawling of the forum. Like noble and delicate maidens, they must rather be kept safe at home, than brought forth into engagements and perils. Wherefore the most celebrated generals of antiquity have so addicted themselves to the instructions of their preceptors, as rather to adorn, than to profess, those studies; they have applied themselves just so much to them as might serve to nourish, not to overwhelm, their minds. It was this course that the hero Achilles held under Chiron and Phoenix; Alexander, under Aristotle; Epaminondas, under Lysias; Scipio, under Panoetius. And tho' Pericles among the Greeks, and Julius Cæsar among the Romans, may

have passed for scholars, yet certainly their praise (whereof both obtained a very great share) is comprised chiefly in their eloquence, which consists more in force and nature, than in art and precept. For this reason it is delivered down to us, that the one thundered when he spoke, and that the other pronounced every thing with the same spirit he fought with. You, O most excellent Cromwell! have applied your mind to the study of letters in this manner, copying exactly what I had observed in these and other famous captains of antiquity. You have gathered up the literary dust at Cambridge, without deepening the tracts of learning. You have garnished your understanding with those arts which become a liberal nature; you have rubbed off the rust of your mind; you have sharpened the edge of your wit; you have gained such a character, as not to be reckoned an ill scholar; and fitted yourself, by the rudiments of the sciences, to manage the highest offices of the commonwealth. You have given us, in fact, such a specimen of your capacity, that you may make it appear, if you were disposed to go on in the pursuit of learning, how very able you are to equal the greatest masters; just as Julius Cæsar did, whose steps you so nearly tread in, according to the testimony of Cicero himself, that prince in every kind of learning. And in conducting the commonwealth, you have chose to imitate that Cæsar rather than Cicero, by preferring the harsh, incessant, and laborious employment of a general, to the delicate and sedentary office of a senator. It did not become that hand to wax soft in literary ease, which was to be inured to the use of arms, and hardened with asperity; that right hand to be wrapt up in down among the nocturnal birds of Athens, by which thunderbolts were soon after to be hurled among the eagles which emulate the sun."

In June, 1617, Robert Cromwell died, and it is probable, since his widow found herself obliged to continue the brewery after his decease, that a consideration of family circumstances, (for the disagreement with

sir Oliver appears to have still continued,) withdrew her son from the university immediately afterwards. It is certain that, before half his college term had expired, he returned to Huntingdon, and was passed from thence to London; where, in accordance with the almost universal practice with young men of any family in that age, he was entered as a member of Lincoln's Inn.* But, if the general tradition is trustworthy, he now utterly rejected every habit of study; carried his practices of school and college to the very highest pitch of dissolute recklessness; and, after some little time, returned to Huntingdon a finished London rake, with a strong tendency in his rakishness to the coarse and the low. Heath's account of this cannot possibly be omitted.

"It was not long after his father's death ere Oliver, weary of the muses, and that strict course of life (though he gave latitude enough to it in his wild salleys and flyings out) abandoned the university, and returned home, saluted with the name of young Mr. Cromwell, now in the room and place of his father; which how he became, his uncontrouled debaucheries did publickly declare. For drinking, wenching, and the like outrages of licentious youth, none so infamed as this young Tarquin, who would not be contraried in his lust, in the very strain and to the excess of that regal ravisher. . . . These pranks made his mother advise with herselfe and his friends what she should do with him, to remove the scandal which had been cast upon the family by his means; and therefore it was concluded to send him to one of the inns of court, under pretence of his studying the laws; where, among the mass of people in London, and frequency of vices of all sorts, his might pass in the throng, without that par

* His name does not appear now in the books of that society, but his having entered of it was a fact notorious to his contemporaries, and no doubt, therefore, the name was erased in the new and base born loyalties of the restoration. Anthony Wood tells us distinctly, "his father dying whilst he was at Cambridge, he was taken home and sent to Lincoln's Inn to study the common law; but making nothing of it, he was sent for home by his mother, became a debauchee, and a boisterous and rude fellow." This is corroborated, too, by almost every contemporaneous record.

ticular neer reflection upon his relations, and at worst the infamy should stick only on himself. . . . Lincoln's Inn was the place pitched upon, and thither Mr. Cromwell in a suitable garb to his fortunes was sent, where but for a little while he continued; for the nature of the place, and the studies there, were so far regretful beyond all his tedious apprentiship to the more facile academick sciences, that he had a kind of antipathy to his company and converse there, and so spent his time in an inward spight, which for that space superseded the enormous extravagancy of former vitiousness,-his vices having a certain kind of intermission, succession, or transmigration, like a compleat revolution of wickedness into one another, so that few of his feats were practised here. And it is some kind of good luck for that honourable society, that he hath left so small and so innocent a memorial of his membership therein. . . . His next traverse was back again into the country to his mother, and there he fell to his old trade, and frequented his old haunts, consumed his money in tipling, and then run on score per force. In his drink he used to be so quarrelsome as few (unless as mad as himself) durst keep him company. His chief weapons in which he delighted, and at which he fought several times with tinkers, pedlars, and the like (who most an end go armed therewith) was a quarter-staff; in which he was so skilful, that seldom did any overmatch him. A boysterous discipline and rudiment of his martial skill and valour, which with so much fierceness he manifested afterwards in the ensuing war!... These and the like strange, wild, and dishonest actions, made him every where a shame or a terrour, insomuch that the ale wives of Huntingdon and other places, when they saw him a coming, would use to cry out to one another, 'Here comes young Cromwell, shut up your dores:' for he made it no punctilio to invite his roysters to a barrel of drink, and give it them at the charge of his host, and in satisfaction thereof either beat him, or break his windows, if he offered any shew, or gave any look or

sign of refusal or discontent. . . . His lustful wantonnesses were no less predominant than the other unruly appetites of his mind; it being now his rude custom to seize upon all women he met in his way on the road, and perforce ravish a kiss, or some lewder satisfaction from them; and if any resistance were made by their company, then to vindicate and allay this violence and heat of his blood, with the letting out of theirs, whose defence of their friend's honour and chastity innocently ingaged them. And the same riots was he guilty of against any who would not give him the way; so that he was a rebel in manners, long before he was a Belial in policy. . . . I am loath to be too large in such particulars, which may render me suspect of belying him, out of prejudice or revenge; but I have heard it confirmed so often from knowing persons, and the stories made use of by his party who did thereby magnify his conversion making him thus dear and precious unto God, that I was obliged to mention them."

These coarse details are given here in the persuasion, that they may represent, making allowance for the natural exaggeration of the writer, the wild course and current of Cromwell's irregular youth -a youth how common in that age, how common in every age, but how seldom followed by those wonderful fortunes which have burnt into these records of this life things that are held of no account in the lesser fortunes of meaner men, yet are in truth less pardonable in them than here, where they must be taken to express some portion of that amazing energy of temperament which is afterwards destined to force out for itself a nobler outlet on a grander theatre of action. Nor will the reflecting reader hold, that even such experiences, so wild and so unworthy, were altogether without their use in the after-chances of a career like Cromwell's, wherein power was to be achieved by practising upon the weakness, no less than by guiding the strength, of all classes of the humanity around him. It is said of him by a professed panegyrist, who sought to explain, and not unsuccessfully, the sort of