Here, however, it is time to call the attention of the reader to the opening career of that extraordinary man, who, in the course of the next ten years, raised himself from the ignoble pursuits of a grazier to the high dignity of lord protector of the three kingdoms. Oliver Cromwell was sprung from a younger branch of the Cromwells, a family of note and antiquity in Huntingdonshire, and widely spread through that county and the whole of the Fenn district. In the more early part of his life he fell into a state of profound and prolonged melancholy; and it is plain from the few and disjointed documents which have come down to us, that his mental faculties were [Footnote 1: May, 214. Journals, July 18, 19, 27; Aug. 3, 7, 9, 15, 26. Lords', vi. 149, 158, 175, 184.] [Sidenote a: A.D. 1643. August.] impaired, that he tormented himself with groundless apprehensions of impending death, on which account he was accustomed to require the attendance of his physician at the hour of midnight, and that his imagination conjured up strange fancies about the cross in the market-place at Huntingdon,[1] hallucinations which seem to have originated in the intensity of his religious feelings, for we are assured that "he had spent the days of his manhood in a dissolute course of life in good fellowship and gaming;"[2] or, as he expresses it himself, he had been "a chief, the chief of sinners, and a hater of godliness." However, it pleased "God the light to enlighten the darkness" of his spirit, and to convince him of the error and the wickedness of his ways; and from the terrors which such conviction engendered, seems to have originated that aberration of intellect, of which he was the victim during great part of two years. On his recovery he had passed from one extreme to the other, from the misgivings of despair to the joyful assurance of salvation. He now felt that he was accepted by God, a vessel of election to work the work of God, and bound through gratitude "to put himself forth in the cause of the Lord."[3] This flattering belief, the [Footnote 1: Warwick's Memoirs, 249. Warwick had his information from Dr. Simcott, Cromwell's physician, who pronounced him _splenetic_. Sir Theodore Mayerne was also consulted, who, in his manuscript journal for 1628, describes his patient as _valde melancholicus_.--Eliis, Orig. Letters, 2nd series, iii. 248.] [Footnote 2: Warwick, 249.]