and the most substantial portion of the middle class. Even in the minor matters of dress and personal appearance the Puritan gentry of the time of James and the first Charles ruffle it as bravely as the Cavalier in velvet and lace, while the flowing curls which appear to us in the portraits of Colonel Hutchinson and in many of the famous Vandykes remind us that Roundhead was a term used to describe the London apprentice; it was reserved for a later day to apply this as a term of opprobrium to all members of a great political and religious party.

Among those who first opposed the tyranny of the crown, John Hampden stands pre-eminent: a student of Oxford and the Inner Temple, he made himself master of the principles of English law. Even his enemies have allowed that, with the morals of a Puritan, he had the manners of an accomplished courtier; Clarendon tells us he had great natural cheerfulness and vivacity, and above all a flowing courtesy to every man.

One can only mention his resistance to the unjust tax of shipmoney, at the cost of a long imprisonment, and the futile attempt of King Charles to seize him with the other members in the House of Commons. In his subsequent service in the army he spared neither fortune nor his person, receiving a mortal wound in a skirmish near Oxford in 1643. He indeed left none his like behind him; for in Hampden alone were united all the qualities which at such a crisis were necessary to save the State. Others might possess the ability to preserve the popular party in danger, he alone had both the power and inclination to restrain its excesses in the hour of triumph. When the vices and ignorance which the old tyranny had produced threatened the new freedom with destruction, then England missed the sobriety, the self-command, the perfect soundness of judgment, to which the history of revolutions furnishes no parallel or furnishes a parallel in Washington alone.' One of his political opponents bas left on record that his speeches in Parliament were always ready, weighty and condensed, his perception of the feeling of the House exquisite, his manner eminently dignified and courteous. The influence which he exerted over his countrymen was unbounded. In the dark and troubled times when a direct attack was made by an arbitrary ruler on the liberties of England, Hampden withstood the unjust demand, refused to pay a farthing, and defied the whole power of the Government. At the scene of intense excitement when the Grand Remonstrance was passed, only his calmness and able speech prevented bloodshed in the House itself. The greatest debt his country owes to him, a debt whose influence has been felt by every great statesman from his own day to that of Gladstone, is that resulting from his defence of Constitutional Law: in that he was the first of the long and splendid line of Parliamentary leaders, and all that this means for the England of his time and of ours we would claim for this heroic Puritan gentleman of the seventeenth century.

John Pym was another brilliant illustration of the truth that culture and refinement, added to the most intense and ardent patriotism, were not confined to the Cavalier side in the great Civil War. He was almost the only survivor of the band of patriots with whom he fought against the earlier despotism of Charles. Sir John Eliot had died in the Tower of lingering consumption; Strafford had become the Great Apostate; but Pym remained, and those who hoped for better things clung to the man who by his patience had shown that he knew how to wait. Few natures have been wider in their range of sympathy or action; he was no fanatic and no ascetic, his manners were genial and courtly, and he turned easily from the deepest and most vexed questions of the day to a chat with Lady Carlisle'; his enemies indeed held him up to the hatred of the more extreme among the Puritans as a man of pleasure. He displayed from the first meeting of the Long Parliament an immense faculty for labour, a genius for organisation, patience, tact, an immovable courage and an iron will.

No English ruler of men has ever shown equal nobleness of natural temper or a wider capacity for government than this Somersetshire squire, whom his enemies greeted truly enough as King Pym. His speeches were sustained by the fervour of ftrong conviction, though they had nothing of the poetic imagination of Sir John Eliot or, in earlier days, Strafford. One can only allude to his famous speeches at the impeachment of Strafford and Laud-to the Grand Remonstrance manifestly drawn up by him-to the baffled attempt of the King to arrest him in the House.

After the death of Hampden, his second self, Pym's cares and responsibilities increased; but all this told upon him as work tells upon the sensitive organisations of men of genius-he was taken ill, and after a few days the end came.

The King of the Commons was buried with the greatest pomp and magnificence in the resting-place of kings, but his body was not suffered to remain in the Abbey; for at the Restoration, under a royal warrant, it was torn from its tomb and thrown with others into a pit in the adjoining churchyard. The visitor to St. Margaret's, standing in the nave, has under his feet the dust of Pym, Blake, and other heroes. The influence of this leader of men did not die with him: he was the first great English statesman who saw that as an element of constitutional life the Parliament was of higher value than the Crown; he saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essential part was the House of Commons; and thus the work of Pym brought about a greater political revolution than England has seen since his day. In the light of the modern method of writing history, and in the wealth of evidence submitted to us by the genius of Carlyle and others, it is now no longer necessary to enter into an argument to show that John Hampden is on the whole the finest representative of the English gentleman, John Pym one of the greatest, as he was one of the earliest, in the splendid line of English Parliamentary leaders, and Oliver Cromwell the greatest soldier and statesman combined that England has ever produced.

In the eighteenth century there were many theories as to Cromwell's hypocrisy and Machiavellianism, but the men of that day were too near to see events in their proper perspective, as well as, in many instances, too prejudiced. His Puritanism had been from the first what the best of English Puritanism was, not a preference of . one form of Church government to another, but a life of spiritual, personal religion, an intense realisation of the presence of God. We can but sketch his career with rapid touches: from the first he rightly conceived the conditions of success-a soldiery of yeomen fearing God and fearing nothing else. John Fiske truly says: 'If ever there were men who laid down their lives in the cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise.' The victories of Marston, Naseby, and Worcester made him general of the Commonwealth; he conquered Ireland, conquered Scotland, and after a little was made Protector. The violence of the manner in which Cromwell expelled the Long Parliament is not to be justified-it leaves a stain upon his character as man and statesman, nor is it much excuse that his attitude towards Ireland was that of the average Englishman of his time. Carlyle's defence of the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford seems to us unsatisfactory. His attempt to govern constitutionally failed, but even when placed by violence at the head of affairs, he did not assume unlimited power, but gave the country a Constitution far more perfect than any which had at that time been known in the world. It is to the foreign policy of Cromwell that his country has often looked back with a wistful eye-he would have made England the head at once of Protestantism and of Christendom : he succeeded in raising her from a condition of abject abasement abroad to a commanding position in the civilised world. Robert Blake established once more her Daval supremacy, new colonies were added to the empire, and Puritan soldiers won the admiration of Europe.

Exaggerated claims are sometimes made on his behalf as regards his tolerance; his dealings with the Episcopalians and the Romanists did not breathe the spirit of toleration, but in his treatment of other bodies, the Quakers, Jews, and various Protestant sects, he was greatly in advance of his age. Cromwell has sometimes been unjustly compared with Richelieu; but the early history of the English people had not been wasted upon him-He was of the race which had looked up to a Simon de Montfort and Edward the First, not of the race which had looked up to Charles the Fifth or Louis the Twelfth.' For all that, he was aiming at the impossible; he had placed his standard too high for those who were living with him to follow; the day would come when the nation would appreciate his greatness, for the time it refused to be transformed after his ideal. The question has been asked— How far is it true to say that the cause of the Puritan died with Oliver Cromwell? One can surely answer that in its seeming fall its real victory began-it laid down the sword to attempt a higher and nobler work, to bring about a purer morality and

a more enduring righteousness in the consciences of men. The influence of Oliver Cromwell in accomplishing this was great and enduring, though even to this day unacknowledged by many.

The conflict of the seventeenth century from which he brought out his country victorious has placed free England in such a position of moral importance that within another century the English idea of political life was able to react most powerfully on Continental Europe: all that is represented by the noblest type of European statesmanship was influenced by the same Puritan spirit which animated John Fiske, Milton, Hampden, Pym and Cromwell.'

It may seem, perhaps, that too much prominence has been given to the historical sketch and representative Puritans, but it is impossible to trace the far-reaching influence of such a current upon the stream of national life without finding its source, following its windings, and finally attempting to show the effect it has wrought upon the English character as illustrated in Literature, the State, and the Church; for the spirit which asserted and defended that religious, political, and civil liberty which is the great gift of England to the world-far beyond that of all her lofty literature, her endless enterprise, her material prosperity, and her boundless empirewas Puritanism. In tracing the influence of this spirit on literature and in turn its effects, we notice that during the early years of Charles the Second's reign, and at the time of the most marked literary dearth, there was a great literature, though it was not of the Court nor of the Restoration. It was at that time that two immortal works were given to the world; from Bedford Gaol came The Pilgrim's Progress, and from a sordid house in an obscure London Street Paradise Lost, the greatest of English epics. The Puritans rose to power by hard fighting, and during the conflict and after their ascendency was assured they produced little or nothing in either prose or poetry: but it was from the beaten adherents of a fallen cause that the true poetry and the great literature of the time emanated, full of imaginative fire and religious

fervour.

The writings of two Puritans born in obscurity, and shadowed by contempt and defeat, have thriven and grown from their birth, and struck their roots deep down into the hearts of all English-speaking people. When Puritanism fell, the imaginative side of its character was no longer hidden and repressed, but found expression in the works of Milton and Bunyan. The Puritan poet might be expected to show us more of Puritanism than any other man, for the poet is in deepest sympathy with the spirit of his generation. Milton had the gift of poetic genius, enabling him to extract the finest essence of Puritan nobleness and preserve it for posterity, married to immortal verse' and almost equally immortal prose, for his two books on Reformation in England might be arranged in line and stanza as a poem. The influence of his political pamphlets can scarcely be measured, not only for the time in which they were issued, but for all time-the glory of the battle for which he fought, the freedom of the human mind, is all his own. The far-reaching effects of his wonderful poem are greater than are always conceded or understood: shortly after its publication in its present form it was paraphrased into prose, and thus found its way into many a home in England, its glowing imagery and majestic language becoming a part of English thought. Especially is its influence to be clearly traced in theology: as the offer of redemption in Christ was the inspiring impulse of the whole religious movement which originated with Luther and Calvin, and sent its last great tidal wave over Puritan England, so, as salvation is mainly future, the idea of reprobation is of supreme importance in Paradise Lost, and into the greatest poem of Protestantism, as into the greatest poem of Catholicism, enters the horror which for centuries has lain heavily upon the heart of Christendom. The teachings of the pulpit and the writings of the great divines of the English and Nonconformist Churches have been permeated with it, and the ideas of heaven and hell which have come down to our own day are largely those of Milton, so that more of the popular theology can probably be traced to Paradise Lost than to any other single book beside the Bible. Read by those unknown thousands whose faith was both unquestioning and absorbing, the doctrines set forth in the great Puritan epic became a living and vital part of their belief, so that one cannot err in claiming for it a great influence upon the English mind and character-second only to the sacred writings.

One of the books very largely read in England, and indeed in the English-speaking world, is The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's writings have formed the subject of commentaries and essays far exceeding themselves in bulk, and their favour among middle classes and the poor has grown steadily from their author's day to our own. The Pilgrim's Progress is now the most popular and most widely known of all English books, even though Cowper did think it needful to apologise for mentioning it to ears polite'! One is especially struck by the absence of all fanaticism-the book is simple, Christianity of the primitive type, almost as unadulterated by secular learning or science as it was in its Galilean birthplace. Bunyan's religion is thoroughly moral and practical-knowledge without doing is naught. To know is a thing which pleaseth talkers and boasters; but to do is that which pleaseth God.' This homely English,' to quote Green, 'is the English of the Bible.' His imaginative power was great, and he tells his tale with such a simple naturalness that his allegories become living things. If Puritanism had first discovered the poetry which contact with the spiritual world awakens in the meanest souls, Bunyan was the first of the Puritans who revealed this poetry to the outer world.

In his marvellous dream of 'A pilgrimage from this world to the next' he forgot the misery of his surroundings-like Milton in blindness, loneliness and poverty, he looked within and found that

One of the most striking modern instances of the Puritan spirit among literary men has been in Thomas Carlyle, whose Scotch blood seethed with its temper, and in whom sternness rather than sweetness was certainly the prevailing trait. 'It appeared,' said Leigh Hunt, 'as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by German philosophy and his own intense reflections and experience.'

'There was a thread of connection between the religion of Carlyle's father's house and Carlyle's character as a man of letters: the fervour of Puritanism passed into the heart of Scotland, and has lived and throbbed in the moral intensity of a Burns, a Chalmers, and a Carlyle. In preaching the gospel of earnestness, in smiting cant and affectation, in tearing to rags amidst sardonic laughter all the flimsy sentimentalities which mimic the realities of feeling, he has been a true Puritan. This has been one of the essential elements in his success; without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. It was by the sympathy of genius that he was able to thoroughly comprehend the great Protector, and give to the world, what no previous writer had been able to afford him-the sympathetic interpretation of a kindred spirit. His narrative resembles that of an eye-witness, and we feel ourselves face to face with the real Cromwell.' One notices in his writings the Puritan contempt for æsthetic enjoyments as well as for the vain speculations of human wisdom when he is himself conscious of an inner light guiding him through the world. In his Heroes and Hero-worship he has shown us a new fashion of writing history-since the heroic sentiment is the cause of the other sentiments, it is to this the historian must devote himself, for men have not done great things without great emotions. And so to Carlyle we owe more than any other man of his time the teaching that the success of any system of thought, the permanent influence of any great man or great institution, must be due to the truth it contained or to its real value to mankind.'.

This doctrine has become so much of a commonplace that we are apt to overlook the service done by Carlyle in asserting it again and again; the influence of Puritanism itself would long ago have died out of the world had it not been for its enduring ethical element, for the strength and fervour of its appeal to some of the noblest and most spiritual emotions of our natures. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle cries: There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, instead thereof find blessedness,' and in this grandest counterblast to the materialism of our age, this doctrine of renunciation, we find the very spirit of the Puritan. If, then, this spirit animated the Scottish seer even amidst all the tumults and changes of a feverish time, we must acknowledge the debt which the England of to-day owes to him, nor hesitate to place him with Milton among the mor kings of literature.

We have given but a few illustrations of the influence of this great moral force upon literature and, through it, upon our own age-time would fail us to even enumerate those writers in whose teachings the spiritual and ethical element predominates, even if we may not claim their influence as directly due to Puritanism. In Wordsworth's sublime Ode and in his noble sonnet to Milton, in Cowper, in the pathetic pages of George Eliot's earlier books, when, in Janet's Repentance and Adam Bede, she describes the influence of Evangelicalism upon the dull and petty life even of a village; in the inspiring poetry of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, in Ruskin and Kingsley, as reformers, and in a host of minor writers, we notice not only the appeal to the loftier element in man's nature, but the serious fashion in which the great problems of the day are dealt with, not evaded-the constant ardent desire of poet and novelist and reformer alike to do his part in bringing about the true brotherhood of man and the Kingdom of God. This ethical and moral influence in our modern literature we feel it is not too much to claim, in part at least, as the survival of the Puritan spirit-in speech very different we admit from Milton's stately periods or Bunyan's quaint phraseology of the seventeenth century, and yet are not the immortal principles underlying all the same?

Puritanism in its intense individualism always appealed strongly to the deeper and more serious side of the English character. Its simplicity and self-restraint were strengthened by the sense of a personal call and a personal mission; but it would have remained locked up in the hearts of a few, like other religious motives, had it not been for the political crisis through which England was passing. When men who loved right and hated wrong, above all things, had come to think that bishops were corrupt and worldly, and the king's government false and arbitrary, they were not to be restrained by any timorous scruples of changing the political constitution, from revolution. Milton was the best exponent of this spirit, and its most ardent defender. To the theory of the Divine origin of the kingship he opposed that of the Divine origin of the popular will; the office of the monarch exists for the benefit of the nation. An unjust government, he said, was in no sense God-ordained. His political writings are very voluminous, and exerted an enormous influence, as did also those of Locke, Algernon Sidney and Sir Henry Vane. What the Long Parliament in its earliest and best years, and afterwards the Protectorate, represented was State Puritanism; in other words, the spirit of English constitutional freedom; and it was after the Restoration that England and the world came to know what was the real value of the work which it had wrought.

Thanks to the influence which had thus become a vital part of the nation's life, the English Parliaments then held on tenaciously to some of the political ideas of their opponents, thus laying the foundations of English liberty. They no longer inclined to Puritanism on its religious side, but had no intention of giving up what it had won in the civil field; all the laws passed by the Long Parliament limiting the royal power were retained, and before the death of Charles the Second they passed the famous Habeas Corpus Act, one of the bulwarks of liberty; the great Declaration of Right changed the whole character of the government; the sceptre was wielded not by the king but by a portion of his subjects.

It is sometimes said that 'the Puritan died at the Restoration when that mould of character was broken,' but he cannot be said to have died without heirs; perhaps his line can be traced to Havelock, Lawrence and Gordon. His political tradition has animated the body of middle-class Nonconformists, who have been called the 'Old Guard of English Liberalism,' and to whom even their opponents cannot deny attachment to the cause of liberty and progress. Statesmanship of the higher and more brilliant kind was hardly within the reach of those who lay, not only under political disabilities, but a social ban. We find the influence of the Puritan spirit in the great changes of our own century; the abolition of the slave trade, the reforms in the prisons and penal code, the introduction of popular education, a free press, the Reform Bill of 1832, and the public-spirited and enlightened statesmanship represented by a Gladstone. It is interesting to notice that, though circumstances have greatly changed, the nation in its political history has now reached a point where it is necessary to discuss the very questions which the Puritans tried to answer, and one can compare