"of Bashan: and the chariots of God are twenty-thou"sand, even thousands of Angels, and God will dwell "upon this Hill forever!" [PROCUL PROFANI! The man is without a soul that looks into this Great Soul of a man, radiant with the splendours of very Heaven, and sees nothing there but the shadow of his own mean darkness. Ape of the Dead Sea, peering asquint into the Holy of Holies, let us have done with THY commentaries! Thou canst not fathom it.]

I am sorry I have troubled you, in such a place of heat as this is, so long. All I have to say, in my own name, and that of my fellow Officers who have joined with me in this work, is: That we shall commend you to the grace of God, to the guidance of His Spirit: "That' having thus far served you, or rather our Lord Jesus Christ 'in regard to you,' we shall be ready in our stations, according as the Providence of God shall lead us, to be subservient to the 'farther' work of God, and to that Authority which we shall reckon God hath set over us. And though we have no formal thing to present you with, to which the hands, or visible expressions, of the Officers and Soldiers of the three Nations of England, Scotland and Ireland, 'are set;' yet we may say of them, and we may say also with confidence for our brethren at Sea, -with whom neither in Scotland, Ireland, nor at Sea, hath there been any artifice used to persuade their consents to this work, that nevertheless their consents have flowed in to us from all parts, beyond our expectations: and we may with all confidence say, that as we have their approbation and full consent to the other work, so you have their hearts and affections

*

unto this." And not only theirs: we have very many Papers from the Churches of Christ throughout the Nation; wonderfully both approving what hath been done in removing of obstacles, and approving what we have done in this very thing. And having said this, we shall trouble you no more. But if you will be pleased that this Instrument** be read to you, which I have signed by the advice of the Council of Officers, we shall then leave you to your own thoughts and the guidance of God; to dispose of yourselves for a farther meeting, as you shall see cause.

***

I have only this to add. The affairs of the Nation lying on our hands to be taken care of; and we knowing that both the Affairs at Sea, the Armies in Ireland and Scotland, and the providing of things for the preventing of inconveniences, and the answering of emergencies, did require that there should be no Interruption, but that care ought to be taken for these things; and foreseeing likewise that before you could digest yourselves into such a method, both for place, time and other circumstances, as you shall please to proceed in, some time would be required, which the Commonwealth could not bear in respect to the managing of things: I have, within a week 'past,' set up a Council of State, to whom the managing of affairs is committed. Who, I may say, very voluntarily and freely, before they see how the issue of things will be,

* "other work" delicately means dissolving the old Parliament; "this" is assembling of you, "this very thing."

** The Instrument is to be found among the Old Pamphlets; but being of a much lower strain, mere constitutionalities, &c., in phrase and purport alike leaden, we do not read it.

*** Report in Parliamentary History, and the common Pamphlets, ends

here.

have engaged themselves in business; eight or nine of them being Members of the House that late was. I say I did exercise that power which, I thought, was devolved upon me at that time; to the end affairs might not have any interval 'or interruption.' And now

when you are met, it will ask some time for the settling of your affairs and your way. And, 'on the other hand,' a day cannot be lost, 'or left vacant,' but they must be in continual Council till you take farther order. So that the whole matter of their consideration also which regards them, is at your disposal, as you shall see cause. And therefore I thought it my duty to acquaint you with thus much, to prevent distractions in your way: That things have been thus ordered; that your affairs will 'not stop, but' go on, 'in the meanwhile,' - till you see cause to alter this Council; they having no authority or continuance of sitting, except simply until you take farther order. *

The reader has now struggled through this First Speech of my Lord General's; not without astonishment to find that he has some understanding of it. The Editor has had his difficulties: but the Editor too is astonished to consider how such a Speech should have lain so long before the English Nation, asking, "Is there no meaning whatever in me, then?" — with negatory response from almost all persons. Incompetent Reporters; still more the obscene droppings of an extensive Owl-population, the accumulated guano of Human Stupor in the course of ages, do render Speeches unintelligible! It ought to be added, that my Lord General always spoke extempore; ready to speak, if his mind were full of meaning;

* Milton State-Papers, pp. 106-114: and Parliamentary History, xx. 153-175; which latter is identical with Harleian Miscellany (London, 1810), vi. 331-344. Our Report, in some cramp passages, which could not always be indicated without confusion, is a tertium quid between these two. Generally throughout we adhere to Milton's, which is the more concise, intelligible and everyway better Report.

very careless about the words he put it into. And never, except in one instance, which we shall by and by come upon, does he seem to have taken any charge as to what Report might be published of it. One of his Parliaments once asks him for a correct Report of a certain Speech, spoken some days before: he declares, "He cannot remember four lines of it." It appears also that his meaning, much as Dryasdust may wonder, was generally very well understood by his audience: it was not till next generation, when the owldroppings already lay thick, and Human Stupor had decidedly set in, that the cry of Unintelligibility was much heard of. Tones and looks do much; - yes, and the having a meaning in you is also a great help! Indeed, I fancy he must have been an opaque man to whom these utterances of such a man, all in a blaze with such a conviction of heart, had remained altogether dark.

The printed state of this Speech, and still more of some others, will impose hard duties on an Editor; which kind readers must take their share of. In the present case, it is surprising how little change has been needed, beyond the mere punctuation, and correct division into sentences. Not the slightest change of meaning has, of course, anywhere seemed, or shall anywhere seem, permissible; nor indeed the twentieth part of that kind of liberty which a skilful Newspaper Reporter takes with every speech he commits to print in our day.

A certain critic, whom I sometimes cite from, but seldom without some reluctance, winds up his multifarious Commentaries on the present Speech in the following extraordinary way:

"Intelligent readers," says he, "have found intelligibility "in this Speech of Oliver's: but to one who has had to read it as a painful Editor, reading every fibre of it with magnifying"glasses, has to do, it becomes all glowing with intelligibi"lity, with credibility; with the splendour of genuine Vera"city and heroic Depth and Manfulness; and seems in fact,

* Burton's Diary. Postea, Speech XVII.

"as Oliver's Speeches generally do, to an altogether singular "degree, the express image of the soul it came from! - Is not "this the end of all speaking, and wagging of the tongue in "every conceivable sort, except the false and accursed sorts? "Shall we call Oliver a bad Speaker, then; shall we not, in a “very fundamental sense, call him a good Speaker? ·

"Art of Speech? Art of Speech? The Art of Speach, "I take it, will first of all be the art of having something "genuine to speak! Into what strange regions has it carried "us, that same sublime 'Art,' taken up otherwise! One of the "saddest bewilderments, when I look at all the bearings of it, "nay properly the fountain of all the sad bewilderments, "under which poor mortals painfully somnambulate in these "generations. 'I have made an excellent Speech about it, "written an excellent Book about it,' and there an end. "How much better, hadst thou done a moderately good deed "about it, and not had anything to speak at all! He who is "about doing some mute veracity has a right to be heard "speaking, and consulting of the doing of it; and properly no "other has. The light of a man shining all as a paltry phos"phorescence on the surface of him, leaving the interior dark, "chaotic, sordid, dead-alive, was once regarded as a most

"mournful phenomenon!

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as the

"False Speech is probably capable of being the falsest and "most accursed of all things. False Speech; so false that it "has not even the veracity to know that it is false, poor commonplace liar still does! I have heard Speakers "who gave rise to thoughts in me they were little dreaming of "suggesting! Is man then no longer an 'Incarnate Word,' as "Novalis calls him, sent into this world to utter out of him, "and by all means to make audible and visible what of God's"Message he has; sent hither and made alive even for that, "and for no other definable object? Is there no sacredness, "then, any longer, in the miraculous tongue of man? Is his "head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you "jingle to frighten crows, and make bees hive? He fills me "with terror, this two-legged Rhetorical Phantasm! I could Carlyle, Cromwell. III.

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