MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 289 



To answer this question in the negative it is only necessary to recall to mind 

 the state of parties, royalist, presbyterian, and republican, the temper of his 

 very army, upon which he must have mainly depended, and the short and 

 troubled period of only five years from his usurpation to his death. 



" Even from expressions which fell from him, and which have been before 

 alluded to, it may be inferred that he entertained great designs, which should 

 redeem his usurpation and reconcile him to his country. There are strong 

 glimpses of them visible in his administration. It is obvious, even in his 

 violences to parliaments and his nomination of that called Barebones', that 

 it was his purpose to arrive gradually at a system of government by free 

 parliaments regenerated. There are in his various institutes of government 

 many just and profound views of civil and parliamentary liberty, and the 

 sacred principle of religious liberty was carried by him as far as it could have 

 been carried in his age. 



"It is true that prelacy and popery were excluded from the pale of legal 

 toleration. But Whitelock, Baxter, and Bates have borne indisputable testi- 

 mony to Cromwell's reluctance in complying with the ordinances of parlia- 

 ment against the observance of religious festivals and the reading of the book 

 of Common Prayer, and to the indulgence with which he more than connived 

 at other proscribed forms and observances. To catholics, who were more 

 obnoxious and feeble, and therefore more open to be oppressed, he was singu- 

 larly tolerant. He received Sir Kenelm Digby, a catholic, with distinction at 

 Whitehall ; he rescued many catholics from imprisonment and confiscations ; 

 he gave protections under his hand and seal to Romish priests an unchris- 

 tian scandal, according'to the presbyterian Prynne ; and he contemplated an 

 arrangement with the pope for the residence of a bishop of the church of 

 Rome in England to preside over the religious communion of the catholics. 

 His principles of toleration were so far in advance of his age as to embrace 

 the Jews. Menasseh Ben Israel, a trading Jew of Amsterdam, came over to 

 solicit from Cromwell freedom both of religion and trade, and was received 

 with the utmost liberality. The protector summoned an assembly of divines, 

 lawyers, and merchants, to consider how the religion, laws, and commerce of 

 England would be affected by giving Jews a legal toleration. The assembly 

 could not come to an agreement, the business was abandoned, and the 

 rabbi deputy was dismissed by Cromwell with a present of 200Z. 



" To make the lawyers subservient to his ambition through their grovelling 

 interests he sacrificed his designs of law reform, but would doubtless have 

 resumed them had he lived. A mind so vigorous as his, untrammelled by 

 authority or prescription, would have conferred benefits beyond calculation, 

 by the fearlessness with which he would have touched abuses and obliquities 

 in that branch of social economy, into which so many interests and passions 

 conspire to introduce obliquity and abuse, and upon which, notwithstanding, 

 social virtue and civilization are most dependent. 



" Cromwell is said to have wanted not only eloquence, but common facility 

 and propriety of expression. His speeches and letters are, it is true, mystical, 

 obscure, and involved, but only in situations where he used words for the 

 concealment, not for the communication, of his thoughts. He who was able 

 by his conversation to mould to his purposes such men as Broghill, Ludlow, 

 and Lambert, must have possessed the art of persuasion in the highest de- 

 gree ; and his letters to the governor of the castle of Edinburgh prove that, 

 when he would express frankly what he really felt, his style was not deficient 

 in vigour or perspicuity. 



" But, supposing him to have neglected personally the accomplishments 

 and graces of cultivation, he yet appreciated and encouraged genius and 

 merit in literature, philosophy, and the fine arts. He rescued the two uni- 

 versities and the general course of the education of youth from being over-run 

 by the fanaticism and Judaism of those who looked upon the Mosaic law as 

 the only requisite rule of conduct, and the :v '~ +>IP only book which 



