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destroying survived its hostility. We have always admired the remark of Coleridge, that what makes the Civil War a pleasant object of study is that we can read of the struggle, and yet respect both sides. And this is one of several characteristics of the movement which distinguishes it from the revolutions of later times; a distinction that must be carefully kept in mind. when we argue in our days from the precedents of the seventeenth

century.

There is one fact about the stirring old Cavalier and Roundhead days which makes them excellent material for the historical writer. It may seem fanciful, but it is certainly true, that poetry disappeared out of our politics with those events. They were the last of the romantic epochs, the borderland between old feudal England and modern busy practical England. Compare the picture raised in the mind by the mention of the age of Charles with that of the age of Anne for example,-pleasant and clever as the latter age undoubtedly was. A certain elevation of view and generous force of mind marks the men of the earlier period, the Falklands, the Pembrokes, the Northamptons, the Richmonds, or the Hampdens, the Blakes, the Vanes. The objects contended for are nobler and higher. The poetry they read is fresher, sweeter, more lyrical. We have Herrick and Suckling instead of Prior and Gay. The Anne men always come to the mind, associated with town life,-routs, drums, coffee, china, wit and sarcasm and scandal. Their wigs are prosaic compared with their grandfathers' love-locks; their cocked-hats vulgar compared with the steeple-hats, past which bullets whistled at Marston Moor. Mention one such name as this last, and forthwith the memory of a reading man teems with moated grange and galloping dragoons, buff-coat and bandolier. A file of muskets glitters behind the green hedge; a flag rises on the deserted tower. Quaint, pretty, clever, are the words suggested by the Queen Anne scene, romantic, generous, picturesque, by the Commonwealth one. It would seem as if all systems made a grand display just before their termination. Old England had one gala day of it,-of chivalry in her Cavaliers, of piety in her Roundheads,- before settling down to modern business, and transmitting her beliefs and sentiments into new forms. A line divides her public life, about the time that Oliver sunk into his grave. Beyond that line we see our ancestors tinged with a certain hue of romance, which we can scarcely claim for ourselves. We can enjoy a ballad about their doings, written by a Scott or a Browning, but poetry at present keeps remarkably clear of the business of the session.' It is a difference like that between the old portraits of Vandyke and the modern por

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traits

traits of a gentleman, of which we have a yearly supply. A consciousness of this change is not to make us undervalue the real inherited worth, which lives now in plainer garments and does duller 'work; and romance and poetry exist for the individual for ever, be the changes in public life what they may. We are only pointing out a natural transition in its connexion with literature; and we believe that Mr. Dixon's book owes much to the fact that a period like that of our Civil War is intrinsically favourable to biography from its romantic character.

Robert Blake, destined as General and Admiral to play such an important part in that period, was a Somersetshire man. He was of a good landed family there, said by a tradition in the branch still existing to have come originally from Northumberland. A speculative person might attribute his marked nautical genius to the blood of those old Danes who set sail from the Baltic, under the Raven, ages ago. What is certain, however, at present, is only that the Admiral's ancestor, Humphrey Blake, possessed the Manor of Tuxwell, in the reign of Henry the Eighth. By a process, quite common among what old Fuller calls the 'middling-sized 'gentry, the Blakes took to merchandise in Bridgewater, which town had the honour of producing the man who made them famous, about the end of August, 1598-the year before the birth of Cromwell. He was the eldest son of Humphrey Blake, gentleman and merchant, by Sara Williams of Plansfield, co-heiress of a good knightly family of the county. It was precisely from this class-persons of gentle blood, yet average fortune and position—that the great men of Blake's party

came.

Mr. Dixon has duly visited the localities, and enables us to reproduce the scenes and circumstances of his hero's youth. They still show in Bridgewater the old-fashioned, substantial house, with its oak wainscots and ornamented ceilings, in which the Blakes lived. The gardens ran down to the river Parrett; the windows looked out over a wide valley to the Quantock hills. One of the earliest objects that would catch the boy's young eyes would be the masts of the shipping in the stream,-masts decked with the colours of more than one nation, and suggesting who knows what visions of distant purple seas, and fierce Algerine corsairs, and all that could stimulate the heart and waken the wonder of a bold strong lad. Such influences, joined to the talk of his father the merchant,-and in those days the merchant went abroad with his ship and guarded her treasures with his own stout arm,—

Etymologically, the name of Blake or Blacke (as it is sometimes spelled), that is, Blak, is certainly Scandinavian.

must

must have deeply impressed young Blake. But he was a grave youngster, and took naturally to his book; had a vein of melancholy (as Cromwell, too, had) running through him; and speeded so well in letters that at sixteen he exchanged Bridgewater grammar-school for St. Alban's Hall, Oxford. Failing in a competition for one of the Christchurch scholarships, he shifted his quarters to Wadham, then just founded by a Somersetshire friend of his father's, and spent no less than nine years at the University. Little is known of his college life. An old story records that he sometimes indulged in 'stealing of swans;' but such freaks cannot have occupied much of his time. Clarendon speaks with respect of his attainments, and it is certain that his learning was far greater than that of most fighting men ; in fact, it may safely be said of him, that while inclination made him a scholar it was rather destiny that made him a soldier. He found himself drawn into the great struggle of his time by his position and his sense of duty; and in the hurry of the life of after years he never seems to have lost either the taste which had made him learned or the earnestness which had made him a Puritan.

In his twenty-seventh year he was recalled home by the illness of his father. The world had not gone well with the old gentleman, who, dying in November, 1625, left Robert to take charge of a large family, upon what was by no means a large income. Here were new duties, which he achieved with fidelity, and, in the main, with success. Of his brothers, Humphrey followed him by and by into the Navy; suffered for non-conformity after the Restoration; and emigrated to Carolina, where his descendants still exist. William became a successful Doctor of Civil Law. Nicholas engaged in the Spanish trade, like his progenitors, and was ancestor of the present family of Venne House in the West Country. The other brothers seem to have done well, and the girls to have married respectably. It rarely happens that a very able man appears in a race without his near kinsfolk being, not indeed equal to himself, but of superior talent and energy to that of the multitude, as might be shown from many instances if this were the occasion.

We are now to think of Blake as settled at Bridgewater, taking care of his mother, who survived her husband for many years, and in loco parentis to his numerous troop of brothers and sisters. His character was formed, and may be described in a word as Puritanical. The world is now better qualified to understand what such a description implies, than it was for a century and a half after the Restoration. For a long time, it was commonly understood to mean a fanatic or a hypocrite; and the Puritan was to most people either a man that had been half-cracked,

or

or a man that had been wholly a rascal. The world does not appear to have reflected that it must have been a very degrading thing for the Church and nobles of England to have submitted to the ascendency of such a rabble so wholly in the wrong. The gentleman who mourned over the defeat of his ancestors in the hard-fought fields of the great rebellion made his case much more pitiable by insisting that the English gentry were overcome by a mere crew of hypocrites and their dupes.

It is now high time for those who honour the old traditions of England, to do that justice to the Puritans which was almost uniformly denied them by the eighteenth century. We shall never understand the Civil War, nor be able to think of it without shame and humiliation, unless we will look at the bright as well as the dark side of the contending powers. The fact is, that Puritanism was a genuine expression of one form of Protestant Christianity. It allied itself with natures that were simple and earnest, sturdy and self-dependent. Such men were impatient of ecclesiastical authority, indifferent to symbolism and tradition, full of spiritual self-reliance. It is easy to see that the corruption of this form of character must have been something detestable, and hence we cannot wonder at the view taken of Roundheads by Cavalier wits. But in its genuine state, it was a powerful and worshipful embodiment of an inevitable tendency in the protestant mind; and it is now evident that no peace was possible in England until it had found its right relation to our institutions. It is useless to speculate as to whether this might have been brought about without a civil war; but certainly the civil war cannot be understood apart from it. Puritanism was the fundamental source of the opposition to the king; it became allied with other influences, but these depended on it, and not it upon them. A man from being a Puritan became often a Republican, but as general rule he was a Puritan first.

a

There was a certain affinity between Puritanism and Republicanism, for both were impatient of authority and tradition. Accordingly, Blake seems to have very early fallen under the suspicion of being no friend to monarchical principles. And, this tendency again harmonizes with his relish for the classics. The republican of that day was not like our modern republicans. He was of the school of old George Buchanan, who had broached his antique radicalism in the De Jure Regni apud Scotos as early as 1571. He was an admirer of Brutus, and was fond of quoting Lucan. A grand simplicity was his ideal of government; an organization of stately but not splendid magistrates ruling over a free patriotic enlightened

people:

people: a beautiful but entirely visionary system which rose like a sun-tinted cloud-palace before the eyes of Sydney and Andrew Fletcher, and the last rays of which still glitter on the classic page of Walter Savage Landor.

Was Blake, then, a kind of Puritan democrat?-So it may be said, always providing that we distinguish carefully between such democracy' and that which bears the name in the times in which we live. Let no modern democratic radical fancy that he is of the school of those great old dreamers. The most violent of them would now be esteemed a bigoted aristocrat; indeed aristocracy is stamped broadly and deeply upon their ideal systems. George Buchanan expressly condemns the merely popular voice. How narrowly Milton would have restricted the general suffrage in political matters we know from the pamphlet he published just before the Restoration. Fletcher, as is still better known, had an ingenious scheme for restoring slavery in Scotland. The seventeenth century men were as different from the men of 1793 and 1848 in their views as they were superior to them in their characters and parts. They never dreamt of interfering with the general system of society and subordination, but still held to such fundamental ideas as the national religion, the old constitution, and the spirit of a gentleman.' The regiments of Essex and Hampden wore their family colours. Cromwell chose his Ironsides among the freeholders. A Percy, a Herbert, a Montague, a Grey were of their party. They taunted Charles, not with being their king-that, they admitted was his right— but with having taken liberties with them which their ancestors had not tolerated in the Plantagenets. Right or wrong, they were a quite different breed of revolutionists from any that the world has seen since, and the honour of England requires that this should be maintained at every proper opportunity.

Blake being thus a Puritan, with speculative leanings towards Republicanism, which leanings, however, would by no means have induced him to rise against the king in the absence of what he esteemed proper provocation, the next point of interest is how was he provoked? To this we answer, on his Puritan side. His whole life proves that in spite of his bookish turn, he was far more a practical than a speculative man. From ambition of the worldly kind he was entirely free. We doubt if he would have moved at all, but for the irritating war carried on by Laud and the Court against that religious party with which his deepest instincts had connected him. And as it chanced, Laud was appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells within a year or so (20th June, 1626) of the very date at which Blake returned to Bridgewater from Oxford.