held up at home or across the waters, saved millions of money, awed
despots, encouraged freedom in every part of the world, and had nearly
established a pure form of Christianity over Great Britain--who gave his
country a model of excellence as a man, and as a ruler, simple, severe,
ruggedly picturesque, and stupendously original, and solitary as one of
the primitive rocks--whose eloquence was uneven and piercing as the
forked lightning, which is never so terrible as when it falls to pieces
--and highest praise of all, whose deeds and character were so great in
their sublime simplicity, that the poet, who afterwards sung the
hierarchies of heaven, and the anarchies of hell, was fain to sit a
humble secretary, recording the thoughts and actions of Cromwell, and
felt afterwards that he had been as nobly employed when defending his
grand defiance of evil and arbitrary power, as when he did

"Assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."

We have seen pictured representations of Cromwell and Milton seated
together at the council-table, in which the painter wished more than to
insinuate that Milton was the superior being; but in our judgment the
advantage was on the other side, and the poet seemed to bear only that
relation and proportion to the Protector which the eloquent Raphael, the
"affable archangel," the bard of the war in heaven, does to the Gabriel
or the Michael, whose tremendous sword mingled in and all but decided
the fray. And we thought what a junction were that of the two powers--of
the sword and the pen, the actor and the recorder, the man to do, and
the poet to sing! Waller in his panegyric sees and shews in a few lines
Cromwell's relation to Britain, and that of both to the world:--

"Heaven that has placed this island to give law,