at an end, he breathed his last words forth in a prayer of simple but affecting resignation, commending his own soul to mercy, but, with it, the never-neglected fortunes of a country whose gratitude had not kept pace with his immortal services.

Cromwell, at the beginning, probably sincere, was doubtless a dissembler from the hour at which he aspired to rule; but he had to deal with many bad men; and dissimulation was the weapon which they used. Cromwell took it up, and vanquished them. Cromwell was a tyrant; but, of his personal ambition, this is truly to be said, that it was never seen but identified with the greatness of his country.

Nor has the unfairness of party zeal been much less actively employed to defame as well as to extol the reputation of Pym, who may be called the colleague of Hampden in the government of the country party. For eight and twenty successive years after the Restoration, powerful pens were incessantly employed to desecrate the ashes of the great men of the generation which had just gone by; and as their descriptions have not un

naturally been taken as models upon which most of the later historians have formed their own, the character of Pym is not likely to have received favourable measure. With a courage that never quailed, a vigilance that never slept, a severity, sharp as the sunbeam to penetrate, and rapid as the thunderbolt to consume, Pym was the undaunted, indefatigable, implacable, foe, of every measure and of every man that threatened to assail the power of the Parliament, or to destroy the great work which was in hand for the people and posterity.

When the citadel of publick liberty was menaced, Pym defended it as one who thought in such a battle all arms lawful. That his parts were, according to Mr. Hume's phrase, 'more fitted for use than ornament,' is little to say of those abilities which, after the Earl of Bedford's death, and when Pym was unsupported by any other influence, raised him to the rank in the estimation of his opponents of being one of the Parliament Drivers,'* and gave to him in their

6

* Wood's Athenæ.-Persecutio Undecima.

phraseology the nickname of King Pym.' His great experience in the practice of Parliament, on which his authority was hardly inferiour to that of Selden himself, gave to Pym the greatest advantages of preparedness in debate. His efforts were mainly directed. to maintain the privileges and power of the Commons. His ruling maxim was that which he expressed on Strafford's impeachmentParliaments, without parliamentary power, are but a fair and plausible way into bondage.' Nor was he less well versed in the business of the Treasury than of the House. A man so forward and powerful, and by the court so hated, and so feared, was sure to be assailed with calumnies the most virulent and the most improbable. Accordingly the almost repulsive austerity of Pym's habits and demeanour could not protect him against the foolish imputation of having won over the beauteous Countess of Carlisle, by a softer influence than that of political agreement, to the interests of the country party; and a modern author, to whom it has been necessary to advert more than once in these memorials, after a fanciful picture of Pym's system of secret