Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen’s delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses are sometimes) to prophecy; and two of his prophecies, at least, have hardly been fulfilled. He was somewhat mistaken when, on the birth of the Duke of York, he informed the world that ‘The state is now past fear; and all that we Need wish besides is perpetuity’; and after indulging in various explanations of the reason why ‘Nature’ showed no prodigies at the birth of the future patron of Judge Jeffreys, which, if he did not believe them, are lies, and if he did, are very like blasphemies, declares that the infant is ‘A son of Mirth, Of Peace and Friendship; ’tis a quiet birth.’ Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of human affairs, can Mr. Cartwright be now altogether satisfied with his rogue’s augury as to the capacities of the New England Puritans, when he intends to pick pockets in the New World, having made the Old too hot to hold him— ‘They are good silly people; souls that will Be cheated without trouble: one eye is Put out with zeal, th’ other with ignorance, And yet they think they’re eagles.’ Whatsoever were the faults of the Pilgrim Fathers (and they were many), silliness was certainly not among them. But such was the court fashion. Any insult, however shallow, ribald, and doggrel (and all these terms are just of the mock-Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher sings in ‘The Ordinary,’ just after an epithalamium so graceful and melodious, though a little warm in tone, as to be really out of place in such a fellow’s mouth), passes current against men who were abroad the founders of the United States, and the forefathers of the acutest and most enterprising nation on earth; and who at home proved themselves, by terrible fact, not only the physically stronger party, but the more cunning. But so it was fated to be. A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy court in blind security, till ‘the breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall, which cometh suddenly in an instant.’ * * * * * But, after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, good or bad, all belonged to the Royalists.