House, ranged in due order. In among these his Majesty walked, with strange thoughts perhaps as he remembered his father's last moments in that fatal room, with the scaffold ready outside; and, after he had seated himself in the chair of state and there had been all obeisances, he was addressed in prepared orations by the two Speakers,-by the Earl of Manchester for the Lords, and by Sir Harbottle Grimstone for the Commons. His Majesty replied briefly, but suitably, excusing himself for his brevity by declaring that the fatigue of his journey, and the confusion of joyful noises still in his ears, unfitted him for saying much. He was, indeed, so completely tired out that the religious service in Westminster Abbey with which the day was to have ended had to be exchanged for private service in the presence-chamber of Whitehall. He slept in Whitehall that night, the first time since January, 1641-2, when he had left it with his father as a boy of twelve. Gossip says that the beautiful Mrs. Palmer, to be known afterwards as Lady Castlemaine, and finally as the Duchess of Cleveland, was already near the Palace 1.

Over England, Scotland, and Ireland flew the news of the King's triumphant entry into his capital, and everywhere with the same delirium of joy. In Edinburgh, Dublin, and all considerable towns, there were proclamations and reproclamations, with peals of bell-ringing, bonfires and shouting mobs, public feasts and wine running from the spouts for the general benefit, drinkings of his Majesty's health and of Monk's, and burnings of Oliver in effigy, by himself or with a twin-effigy of the Devil. For months and months the delirium was to continue, and even to grow; nor through the whole reign of Charles was there ever to be an end, or even much visible abatement, of that mood of popular adoration of the monarch, with hatred to the memory of Oliver and all his belongings, which ran through the Islands, like a sudden epidemic, in the first year of the Restoration 2.

1 Clarendon, 994-996 (Continuation of Life); Phillips, 709-710; Whitlocke, IV. 415 416; Parl. Hist. IV. 54-63; Burnet (edit. 1823), I. 160, footnote by Lord Dartmouth, Secretary

of State and Lord Privy Seal in the reign of Queen Anne.

2 Phillips, 714; Chambers's Domestic Annals of Scotland, II. 261; and tradition passim. From an Edinburgh

From that year, for example, what a universal wheel of popular English literature to abject Stuartism and systematic Anti-Oliverianism in politics! Passing from the books and pamphlets of the Protectorate, or even from those of 1659, to the new mass from 1660 onwards, one is amazed at the discovery that the Muses in a nation can be such arrant turncoats. While Oliver lived, and for some time after his death, they had applauded him and panegyrised him, even the honest Royalist wits who remained within his dominions subdued at length into respect for him, and expressing that respect in language which was the more remarkable because it was cautious and reluctant. Now it was all otherwise. In prose and in verse, nothing but panegyrics to Charles, laudations of Charles and his kindred day after day, renunciations of Oliver in every form of posthumous insult, reports of his meditations in Hell and of his blasphemous messages upwards from his pre-eminence among the damned. Take a few of the leading instances:-Among the first to celebrate the Restoration in verse was Edmund Waller, of whose relations to Cromwell we have already seen enough, and of whose Panegyric to my Lord Protector in May 1655 there may be some recollection (Vol. V. pp. 85, 86). Waller must have been busy with the necessary recantation as soon as he heard of the King's arrival at Dover; for his poem To the King on his Majesty's Happy Return was registered by the publisher, Richard Marriott, on May 30, the day after his Majesty's entry into Whitehall1. Amid 120 lines of heroics his Majesty might read these :—

"Much-suffering Monarch, the first English-born

That has the crown of these three nations worn,
How has your patience with the barbarous rage
Of your own soil contended half an age,

Till (your tried virtue and your sacred word
At last preventing your unwilling sword)

Armies and fleets which kept you out so long

Owned their great sovereign and redressed his wrong;
When straight the people, by no force compelled,
Nor longer from their inclination held,

Break forth at once, like powder set on fire,
And with a noble rage their king require!...
Faith, Law, and Piety, that banished train,
Justice and Truth, with you return again;
The city's trade and country's easy life

Once more shall flourish without fraud or strife.
Your reign no less assures the ploughman's peace
Than the warm sun advances his increase,
And does the shepherds as securely keep
From all their fears as they preserve their sheep.
But, above all, the muse-inspired train

Triumph and raise their drooping heads again:
Kind Heaven at once has, in your person, sent
Their sacred judge, their guard, their argument."

Another of the "muse-inspired train" who made all haste was Abraham Cowley. His Ode upon the Blessed Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty Charles the Second was out on the 31st of May, published by Henry Herringman1. Much is to be excused to Cowley, a man of far finer intellect and of more generous nature than Waller, and whose compliance with Cromwell's rule, though it involved the rupture of intimate previous connexion with the Stuarts, had been the effect of mere momentary despair. All things considered, however, was not Cowley labouring too consciously in this poem to win his pardon by skilful phraseology? He doubts whether the Isle, after its long lapse into barbarism, can yet expect back any of the virtues.

"Of all, methinks, we least should see

The cheerful looks again of Liberty.

That name of Cromwell, which does freshly still
The curses of so many sufferers fill,

Is still enough to make her stay,

And jealous for a while remain,

Lest, as a tempest carried him away,

Some hurricane should bring him back again."

1 Dated Thomason copy in the British Museum.

Still there are signs of hope:

"Where's now that ignis fatuus which erewhile
Misled our wandering Isle ?

Where's the impostor Cromwell gone ?
Where's now that falling star, his son?"

And Charles is on the horizon :

"Come, mighty Charles! desire of nations, come!
Come, you triumphant exile, home!

He's come, he's safe at shore: I hear the noise
Of a whole land which does at once rejoice;

I hear the united people's sacred voice.

The sea which circles us around

Ne'er sent to land so loud a sound;

The mighty shout sends to the sea a gale,
And swells up every sail;

The bells and guns are scarcely heard at all;
The artificial joy's drowned by the natural.
All England but one bonfire seems to be,
One Etna shooting flames into the sea;
The starry worlds which shine to us afar
Take ours at this time for a star.

With wine all rooms, with wine the conduits, flow;
And we, the priests of a poetic rage,

Wonder that in this golden age

The rivers too should not do so.

There is no Stoic, sure, who would not now

Even some excess allow,

And grant that one wild fit of cheerful folly

Should end our twenty years of dismal melancholy."

Sir William Davenant could at no time write so well as Cowley; but, as having been Poet-Laureate of the late reign from 1637, and as now stepping legitimately into the Laureateship again, something was expected of him. He had been a faithful Royalist all along, had suffered for his Royalism more than Cowley, had never lapsed as Cowley had done, and had been under no greater obligations to the Protectorate than for shelter, and permission at last to set up an English Opera. In these circumstances his Poem upon his Sacred Majesty's most happy return to his Dominions is even creditable to his moderation. There is little of retrospective malice in it, but chiefly

1 Printed for Herringman, and out in London June 25, as I learn from a copy in the Thomason Collection.

a heavy enumeration of the undoubted virtues of Charles,―his clemency, his judgment, his "fire of thought," his valour, his social and domestic graciousness, and his care for religion; and the only thing one cannot wholly forgive in the poem is its existence. Here are the six lines following the list of Charles's virtues :

"Thus showing what you are, how quickly we
Infer what all your subjects soon will be !
For from the monarch's virtue subjects take
The ingredient which does public virtue make;
At his bright beam they all their tapers light,
And by his dial set their motion right.”

But what shall we say of Dryden? He had grown up in the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, connected with their statesmen and acknowledging their principles; he had been in official employment under Thurloe for Oliver (Vol. V. p. 375); and his best known literary performance hitherto had been his Heroic Stanzas consecrated to the memory of his Highness Oliver, written just after the entombment of Oliver in Westminster Abbey. Among the stanzas had been these :

"How shall I then begin or where conclude
To draw a fame so truly circular?
For in a round what order can be shewed,
Where all the parts so equal-perfect are?

His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone;
For he was great ere Fortune made him so,
And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow. . .

And yet dominion was not his design;

We owe that blessing not to him but Heaven,
Which to fair acts unsought rewards did join,

Rewards that less to him than us were given."

And so, through a sustained eulogy on all Cromwell's military and political career, till death took him. Even then his grand influence remained :—

"No civil broils have since his death arose,

But faction now by habit does obey;

And wars have that respect for his repose

As winds for halcyons when they breed at sea.