There have been few men known to history, who can be worthily compared with the subject of these pages for the extraordinary circumstances of their rise to power, or for their prudence and greatness in its enjoyment. We see in him a man of middle rank and moderate fortune, breaking out from privacy, if not obscurity, at a time of life when the fame of most men is at its meridian, of many at its close, and in a very few years raising himself to absolute power on the shoulders of his friends and on the necks of his enemies; and though we censure both the end of his political labours and the measures which led the way to it, yet in both there is much left for us to respect and to admire. Oliver, the only son of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Stuart (the daughter of a knightly family in the Isle of Ely, said to have been related to the royal house), was born at Huntingdon, April 24, 1599. His grandfather, Sir Henry Cromwell, was four times Sheriff of the counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon; his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, after whom he was named, was reputed to be the richest knight in England; and his family was related to the Earls of Essex, and to the houses of Hampden, St. John, and Barrington. It is necessary to mention the respectability of Cromwell’s connexions, because he is reported to have been a man of mean birth, by persons who vainly thought to fix a stigma on his great name by assigning to him a low origin. After having received a good school education he was sent, at the age of seventeen, to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He did not remain there long enough to complete his studies, but, leaving the University before the usual time, was entered at Lincoln’s Inn. His enemies accuse him of having been guilty of all manner of debaucheries, both at college and as a student of law; but as we know that his whole life, from the age of twenty-one, was severely moral, this accusation may be allowed to rest with the obscure memories of its authors. His father dying when Oliver had attained the age of twenty, he left London, and went to reside with his mother, who eked out her small jointure with the profits of a brewery which she had established, and conducted herself: hence came the contemptuous appellation, often bestowed upon Cromwell, of the “brewer of Huntingdon.” At the age of twenty-one he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of the county of Essex. At this period of his life he was involved in some pecuniary difficulties, from which he was relieved by the death of his maternal uncle Sir Thomas Stuart, who bequeathed him an estate of between four and five hundred pounds yearly value in the isle of Ely, on which he took up his residence. Some of his biographers declare, “that because he prayed and expounded the word too much, and caused his servants to do the like,” he became again straitened in his circumstances. This has been the more readily believed, because he at this time became highly disgusted with the want