DA 426 0932 INTRODUCTION. 1821 vil IT has been the singular ill fortune of Oliver Cromwell, and of his family, that his character hath been left exclusively in the hands of his enemies. The short interval between his death and the Restoration, and the unsettled state of the nation in the intermediate time, left no opportunity for a faithful and impartial history of that extraordinary man. From that time to the present, his memory hath been abused and vilified without any allowance for the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed his name alone is to this day deemed by many a sufficient description of every thing that is ambitious, hypocritical, and tyrannical. He has been held forth as a composition of every bad quality, without one virtue to counterbalance them. The particular views of all those who took a part in the troubles of the times in which he acted, were frustrated by his ascendancy, and however differing in other respects, they have united in blackening his memory. Every trifling or ridiculous story of the supposed irregularities of his youth, and of the imagined tricks and childish follies even |