a compliment which cannot often be paid either to the writings or
to the actions of Laud.

Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within
the statute. Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a
proper subject for a retrospective ordinance of the legislature.
His mind had not expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme,
good or bad. His oppressive acts were not, like those of the
Earl of Strafford, parts of an extensive system. They were the
luxuries in which a mean and irritable disposition indulges
itself from day to day, the excesses natural to a little mind in
a great place. The severest punishment which the two Houses
could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty
and send him to Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by
his own diabolical temper, hungering for Puritans to pillory and
mangle, plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to
plague with his peevishness and absurdity, performing grimaces
and antics in the cathedral, continuing that incomparable diary,
which we never see without forgetting the vices of his heart In
the imbecility of his intellect minuting down his dreams,
counting the drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching
the direction of the salt, and listening for the note of the
screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it
became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot.

The Houses, it must be acknowledged, committed great errors in
the conduct of the war, or rather one great error, which brought
their affairs into a condition requiring the most perilous
expedients. The parliamentary leaders of what may be called the
first generation, Essex, Manchester, Northumberland, Hollis,