and dangerous,’ was being discussed, he proposed to substitute the words ‘useless but not dangerous.’ On another occasion, it is said, in drawing up a republican document, he spoke of ‘England being restored to its ancient government of commonwealth,’ and in answer to an objection that a commonwealth never before existed in England, quoted a text which had always puzzled him, where a man blind from his birth was said to be ‘restored’ to the sight he _should have had_. Under cover of this gaiety, however, and of a life reputed to be lewd, Marten had a strong republican enthusiasm, which he carried with him to his death through an imprisonment of twenty years. These republicans, one would suppose, must have felt the uneasiness of their position. They had been the first to appeal from the unpurged parliament to the army. Ludlow, indeed, in his memoirs professed to have been shocked when Cromwell, in the spring of 1647, whispered to him in the house {337} that Holles and his party would never leave ‘till the army pulled them out by the ears’; yet by his own confession a few months later, during the treaty of Newport, he urged Ireton to put force on the parliament before Ireton himself was prepared to do so, and Marten had done the like with Cromwell. To the army they had thus appealed, but to the army, now that they were successful, they no longer meant to go. Its enthusiasm was not theirs. They had too much of the ancient Roman in them, Marten, perhaps, rather of the ancient Greek, to sympathise with the ‘foolishness of Christ’ as it was presented in the army. It was not in them that men, whose pastime was preaching and being preached to, who discovered strange lights in their bibles to interpret strange events, could find a natural leader, but in one who in his private prayers would ‘throw himself on his face and pour out his soul with tears for a quarter of an hour,’ who never went into battle without a text to feed on, who sang psalms as he led them to victory. The army, though it had no representative of its peculiar spirit on the council of state except Cromwell, was the real constituency of the republican parliament. It contained dangerous elements over which parliament had not the least control, and which might at any time overturn the parliamentary system. These may be summed up as the spirit of simple military arrogance, represented by Lambert, the levelling spirit represented by Lilburne and Wildman, and the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ spirit represented by Harrison. Lambert appears to have had the most conspicuous military talent of any of Cromwell’s officers. In the critical spring of 1648 he held an independent command in the north of England. He showed great skill in hanging on the skirts of Hamilton’s army before Cromwell joined him, and afterwards headed the pursuit. At Dunbar he led the fatal attack on the Scotch right wing, and next year when Charles was marching to Worcester, hung on