to an army in winter. Leslie, who has followed close on his rear, takes his position on the slope of this range, with an army about twice as numerous as Cromwell's, and full of spirits, as of men giving chase. What followed has been graphically described by Carlyle, whose description, however, is too lengthy to be quoted verbatim. I shall give you my recollection of it, partly in his words, partly in my own, as may best suit my purpose. On the Monday morning, before sunrise, Leslie moves down his horse to the other side of the Brock to that on which Oliver has his line of battle. In the afternoon of the same day, Cromwell sees, from the movement on the hill, that he is bringing down his army to the position which his horse have occupied since the morning. He is evidently preparing for attack, and probably hopes to annihilate that hemmed-in English army. Cromwell considers that it will be an advantage if he attack first, instead of waiting to be attacked ;-"Here is the enemy's right wing coming out to the open space, free to be attacked on all sides; and the main-battle, hampered in narrow sloping ground between Doon-hill and the Brock, has no room to manœuvre or assist; beat the right wing where it now stands-take it in front and flank with an overpowering force, it is driven upon its main-battlethe whole army is beaten ;"-mentions the plan to some of his generals, who cordially approve. At nightfall the word is given. "Trust in God-pray-and keep your powder dry." It is a wild night-windy and wet. The English, in their tents, are wakeful and prayerful, looking to Heaven, and keeping their powder dry. The Scotch, without shelter, put out their matches, all but two in a company, and seek refuge and sleep under the stooks of Before daybreak, when the time for attack arrived, the moon, as if favouring Cromwell's plan, shines through a rift in the cloud. A trumpet is heard in the Scottish

corn.

camp. They are evidently astir; and Lambert, who is to head the English, is not here. After some signs of impatience from Cromwell, Lambert appears. Then the trumpet sounds the charge. The cannon thunder all along the line. The watchword passes from rank to rank: “The Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Hosts!" Steadily, surely, they advance, those brave ones who have never known defeat. The Scotch, who thought to surprise them, are surprised instead-cannot resist the onset. After a short, sharp struggle, they begin to waver. Oliver, who is watching the conflict, says, "They run! I profess, they run!" And as over St. Abb's Head and the German Ocean the first gleams of the level sun fall upon them, like another Joshua he exclaims-Now

"Let God arise, and scattered

Let all his enemies be;

And let all those that do him hate,

Before his presence flee.'

The conflict thickens. The watchwords are repeated. "The King-the Kirk-the Covenant!" "The Lord of Hosts-the Lord of Hosts!" Nothing can withstand the resistless charge of the Ironsides. The right wing is scattered, driven hither and thither. Most of them rush over their own foot, trampling down the poor men, who are just rising in a shivering condition from under the stooks of corn, their matches out, or but newly lit. At the foot of Doon Hill, Cromwell commands a halt, until his horse can gather for the chase; and there, devout in triumph as in trial, summons them to recognise the God of Battles, and ascribe their victory to Him. With the Ironsides around him, the grim furrowed brow bared in that morning light, he gives out the 117th Psalm, which to some fine old tune those stern warriors send rolling above the smoke of battle, clear and grand against the sky :

"O give ye thanks unto the Lord,
All nations that be;

Likewise, ye people, all accord
His name to magnify!

For great to usward ever are
His loving-kindnesses;

His truth endures for evermore :

The Lord, O do ye bless!"

Never before had such psalm been sung in such circumstances, since the days of the Hebrew warriors and kings. No wonder it was Cromwell's crowning mercy. Never had there been such a victory-ten thousand prisoners— nearly all the foot in a mass-besides hundreds slain! The fact and the formula had met in deadly grapple, and the fact was triumphant, as, in the long run, the fact will ever be.

The battle of Dunbar destroyed the Covenanting army, and left the party without power, as they were without pretext, for any formidable or organized resistance during the remainder of the Protectorate. Cromwell, while governing with firm hand, granted to the Presbyterians, in their religious observances, all the liberty which they could fairly claim. He left them free to carry out their polity in their own congregations, though he censured and prohibited their attempts to enforce it on others. After a lengthened correspondence with them, in which, to our thinking, he has the best of the argument, and appears to greatest advantage, he closed their General Assembly; a measure which, though it may appear despotic, their controversies and bickerings had rendered necessary to public tranquillity, and which sending the ministers home to their flocks, to devote themselves, without distraction, to their pastoral duties, was fraught with good both to themselves and the nation.

With the amount of liberty enjoyed, the best of them appear to have been tolerably satisfied. If they wished to see Presbyterianism occupying a more commanding position,

and retained their preference for Monarchy in the abstract, they had seen too much of Charles to think of seeking to gain their object by adopting measures for his restoration. And when the Royalists gathered together a motley army, to restore the king, with or without conditions, and the General Assembly of the Kirk passed resolutions approving of their procedure, Argyll, the leader of the Covenanters, kept aloof from the movement; Warriston, another of their prominent men, opposed; and a large minority in the Assembly, headed by James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, protested fiercely against the resolution of their brethren. In this way the party, already too reduced in numbers, was divided into the two sections known as the Resolutioners and Protesters, between whom, for years, a bitter strife was maintained, which greatly facilitated the triumph of the common foe.

It does not accord with our purpose to dwell on the events connected with the Restoration. Suffice it to say that Charles arrived in London in 1660, not one whit improved by ten years of exile and adversity. Perhaps he was not capable of improvement. Certainly it would have been difficult to find in the three kingdoms-I do not say a worse, but a more worthless man. We cannot call him a tyrant the designation would be too flattering; tyranny involves a certain grandeur, a degree of earnestness and strength, of which he knew nothing. We cannot even say that he was a bigot, like his father. Of the small modicum of merit which that charge would imply, he was entirely destitute. He had not sincerity enough to be a bigot. He was a mere heartless voluptuary, whose highest object, whether as a monarch or a man, was his own sensual gratification. Utterly void of all religious conviction, his preference of one form to another was determined solely by the extent to which it left him free to pamper his baser desires. He became a Presbyterian, when by that means he

might obtain the Crown; and had circumstances remained unchanged, he would have had no objection to continue one, except that its stricter discipline interfered with his licentious pleasures, and afterwards led him to say, "It was no religion for a gentleman," and that he "would not suffer a set of low fellows to be prying into his private affairs." At the Restoration he was ostensibly an Episcopalian, because that was the only condition on which he could fill the English throne. All the while he was a Papist at heart, and a Papist he died. Not, indeed, that he had any secret conviction of the Divine origin of Popery; but only that he secretly thought it the most convenient, and preferred it because its easy morality, and its system of Absolution and Indulgences, rendered it possible, as he thought, to couple the debaucheries of a harem in this world with the delights of a heaven in the next. He reigned like a worse, because a Christian, Sultan, joking with his courtiers, and dallying with his courtezans, while the kingdom was committed to the care of pashas licentious and greedy-birds of the same feather with himself, whose chief recommendation was the efficiency with which they ministered to their master's lusts. It was truly said of him, that "he left the nation more vitiated and debauched than ever it was by any other king."

To think of such a profligate reigning over this fair realm of England after Cromwell's glorious Protectorate !-to think of the people dancing and drinking themselves blind in honour of his return!-to think that, for nearly two centuries, public thanksgivings were annually offered to God for his blessed restoration-while the great name of Cromwell was coupled with all that is vile!-to think that while Cromwell's portrait is denied a place among those of the kings of England, statues of Charles crown our public squares, and portraits of himself and his courtezans line our public galleries-as if England's glory should be forgotten,