Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, which word was first applied in bucolic pleasantry by an unbeliever--may God rest his soul!--and was adopted by this body of people who desired to live lives of purity, reflecting the will of the Lord. Oliver did in his life so typify all the Puritan qualities of sterling honesty (as well as some simplicities springing out of his faults) that the time spent in considering him shall not be lost. "Our Oliver was the last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from England," wrote Thomas Carlyle. Obscured in lurid twilight as the shadow of death, hated by somnambulant pedants, doleful dilettanti, phantasmagoric errors, bodeful inconceivabilities, trackless, behind pasteboard griffins, wiverns, chimeras, Carlyle had to search through thirty thousand pamphlets and forty thousand letters for the soul of Cromwell. Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, England, April Twenty-fifth, Fifteen Hundred Ninety-nine. His parents belonged to the landed gentry, but who yet were poor enough so they ever felt the necessity of work and economy. The mother of Cromwell was a widow when she wedded Richard, the happy father of Oliver. The widow's husband had accommodatingly died, and he now has a monument, placed they say by Oliver Cromwell himself, in Ely Cathedral, which records him thus: "Here sleepeth until the last Great Day, when the Trump shall sound, William Lynne, Esq., who had the honor and felicity to be the first husband of Elizabeth, Mother through the Grace of God to Oliver Cromwell." At the bottom of the inscription a would-be wag wrote, "Had he lived long enough he would have been the stepfather of Oliver." Oliver was the fifth child of his parents, who it seems were happily wedded, the gray mare being much the better horse. And this once caused Oliver to say (and which the same is here recorded to disprove the statement that he had no wit), "Men who are born to rule other men are themselves ruled by women." This may be truth or not--I can not say. Smelted out of the dross-heap of lying biographers, most of whose stories should be given Christian burial, we get the truth that this boy was brought up by pious, hard-working parents. The splenetic capacity, the calumnious credulity, the pleasures of prevarication and of rolling falsehoods like a sweet morsel under the tongue, have made those thirty thousand Cromwell pamphlets possible. It is stated by one writer, Heath, now pleasantly known as "Carrion Heath," that Oliver's father was a brewer, and the son grew up a tapster, but was compelled to resign his office on account of being his own best customer.