From the execution of the king to the death of Cromwell, the government was, with some variation of forms, in substance monarchical and absolute, as a government established by a military force will almost invariably be, especially when the exertions of such a force are continued for any length of time. If to this general rule our own age, and a people whom their origin and near relation to us would almost warrant us to call our own nation, have afforded a splendid and perhaps a solitary exception, we must reflect not only that a character of virtues so happily tempered by one another, and so wholly unalloyed with any vices, as that of Washington, is hardly to be found in the pages of history, but that even Washington himself might not have been able to act his most glorious of all parts without the existence of circumstances uncommonly favourable, and almost peculiar to the country which was to be the theatre of it. Virtue like his depends not indeed upon time or place; but although in no country or time would he have degraded himself into a Pisistratus, or a Caesar, or a Cromwell, he might have shared the fate of a Cato, or a De Witt; or, like Ludlow and Sidney, have mourned in exile the lost liberties of his country. With the life of the protector almost immediately ended the government which he had established. The great talents of this extraordinary person had supported during his life a system condemned equally by reason and by prejudice: by reason, as wanting freedom; by prejudice, as a usurpation; and it must be confessed to be no mean testimony to his genius, that notwithstanding the radical defects of such a system, the splendour of his character and exploits render the era of the protectorship one of the most brilliant in English history. It is true his conduct in foreign concerns is set off to advantage by a comparison of it with that of those who preceded and who followed him. If he made a mistake in espousing the French interest instead of the Spanish, we should recollect that in examining this question we must divest our minds entirely of all the considerations which the subsequent relative state of those two empires suggest to us before we can become impartial judges in it; and at any rate we must allow his reign, in regard to European concerns, to have been most glorious when contrasted with the pusillanimity of James I., with the levity of Charles I., and the mercenary meanness of the two last princes of the house of Stuart. Upon the whole, the character of Cromwell must ever stand high in the list of those who raised themselves to supreme power by the force of their genius; and among such, even in respect of moral virtue, it would be found to be one of the least exceptionable if it had not been tainted with that most odious and degrading of all human vices, hypocrisy.