No man’s character was ever so completely and so tersely summed up as the great Oliver’s is here in these few words of a critic belonging to another race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, it may be added that no man ever was raised up and set to work by the Controller of human destinies as opportunely as he was. History shows no parallel to it, not even in the oft-quoted story of Cincinnatus, and certainly in all the long array of our rulers there is none other whose story is so crammed with wonders or who crowded so many notable and pregnant acts into the busy days of a few years as this gentleman-farmer of Huntingdonshire, who at forty-three left his farming and vestry-meetings and the like and girded on his sword to go and fight the good fight of freedom, and who at fifty-two laid it aside to prove himself as good a statesman and ruler as he had been soldier and general. His claim to a foremost place among the Makers of Britain is a twofold one, for he was a restorer, a reinvigorator, as it were, of this realm, as well as a very considerable widener of it. When the futile and inglorious reign of “the most learned fool in Christendom” came to an end, all the brilliant promise of the Elizabethan age had been wofully obscured, and the glories of the great Queen and her pirates looked like those of a summer sun setting behind a bank of fog. As Macaulay justly put the case: “On the day of the accession of James I. England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held and began to be regarded as a Power hardly of the second order.... He began his administration by putting an end to the war which had raged many years between England and Spain, and from that time he shunned hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his neighbours and the clamour of his subjects.” How different this from the gallant days of Gloriana and her knights! And yet this poor crowned and sceptred ninny aspired to be a despot even as his son after him did. It is true that these realms were beginning to need a despot and that badly, but not such a one as could ever have been born of that hopeless House of Stuart. A despot who is a strong man may be good or evil as he uses his opportunities and his powers, but the whole stage of history has not yet held a despot who was also a weak man who did not prove himself at once a curse to his country and the world. The story of the feeble violence and silly cunning with which Charles the First sought to enforce that ridiculous theory of his about the Divine Right of Kings has been too often and too variously told for us to need to trouble with it here. There _is_ a Divine Right of Kings, as the great Oliver was very soon to show with most unmistakable and most unanswerable logic, but the kind of king who really has Divine rights does not usually have them because he is the son of his father, and especially of such a father as James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland.