constituting themselves a permanent body on the Venetian model, only filling up vacancies as they should occur. In this dead-lock of conflicting jealousies and opinions the year 1652 passed away, the only vigour being shown in the prosecution of the Dutch war and the settlement of Scotland. Cromwell’s views were well known, and one day when in debate he spoke of Mr. Marten accidentally as ‘Sir Harry,’ Marten interrupted him by saying with a low bow, ‘I always expected when your majesty became king, you would make me a knight.’ He was clearly most unwilling, however, to break with the parliament, which he had absolutely in his hands, and if its leaders could have been induced, recognising their weakness and swallowing their formula, to invest him with a temporary dictatorship, he would have kept them at peace, as he alone had hitherto done, with the army, and worked with them constitutionally for the settlement of the nation. As it was, there are indications that he controlled the discontent of the army as long as he was able. Lambert’s vanity had been rudely affronted by the Rump, and his busy brain was brewing mischief. Harrison was becoming impatient for the inauguration of the ‘fifth monarchy.’ The military saints were finding, as Cromwell afterwards expressed it, that ‘all tenderness was forgotten to the good people, though it was by their hands and their means that the parliament sat where it did.’ ‘The reformation of law,’ he adds, ‘was a thing that many good words were spoken for; but we know that many months together were not sufficient for the settling of one word, “incumbrances.”’ [1] [1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech I.]