They
were not like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best
remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the
wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate
councils. The compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old
stamp (Cromwell) by his kinsman, a favorite poet of that time, shows
what it was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he
accomplished in the success of his ambition:--
"Still as _you_ rise, the _state_, exalted too,
Finds no distemper whilst 't is changed by _you_;
Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise
The rising sun night's _vulgar_ lights destroys."
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as asserting
their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and
beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by
outshining them. The hand, that, like a destroying angel, smote the
country, communicated to it the force and energy under which it
suffered. I do not say, (God forbid!) I do not say that the virtues of
such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were
some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said, our Cromwell.
Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignys. Such the
Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war.
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