We have already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no
means consider it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of
infamy to the names of those who participated in it. It was an
unjust and injudicious display of violent party spirit; but it
was not a cruel or perfidious measure. It had all those features
which distinguish the errors of magnanimous and intrepid spirits
from base and malignant crimes.

From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in
almost perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book.
The times which followed the Restoration peculiarly require that
unsparing impartiality which is his most distinguishing virtue.
No part of our history, during the last three centuries, presents
a spectacle of such general dreariness. The whole breed of our
statesmen seems to have degenerated; and their moral and
intellectual littleness strikes us with the more disgust, because
we see it placed in immediate contrast with the high and majestic
qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the great civil
war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable
by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends
displayed. Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends
was disgraced by means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of
faction succeeded to the love of liberty. Loyalty died away into
servility. We look in vain among the leading politicians of
either side for steadiness of principle, or even for that vulgar
fidelity to party which, in our time, it is esteemed infamous to
violate. The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness, which the
leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended, and
which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with
little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost