John Bramhall (_ætat_ 63). George Morley (_ætat_ 58). John Earle (_ætat_ 55). Sir Kenelm Digby (_ætat_ 53). Sir Edward Hyde (_ætat_ 48). Thomas Killigrew (_ætat_ 45). George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (_ætat_ 29). The relations of Cromwell to such persons varied, of course, with their attitudes towards himself and his government. The theologian among his adherents to whom he seems to have been drawn by the strongest elective affinity was Dr. John Owen. "Sir, you are a person I must be acquainted with," he had said to Owen in Fairfax's garden; laying his hand on his shoulder, one day in April 1649, just after he had first heard Owen preach;[1] and so, from being merely minister of Coggeshall in Essex, Owen had become Cromwell's friend and chaplain in Ireland, and had still, through his subsequent promotions, ending with the Deanery of Christ Church and the Vice-Chancellorship of Oxford, been much about Cromwell and much trusted by him. Perhaps the only difference now between them was that Owen's theory of Toleration was less broad than Cromwell's. Next to Owen among the divines of the Commonwealth, the Protector seems to have retained his liking for Dr. Thomas Goodwin, and for such other fervid or Evangelical Independents as Caryl, Sterry, Hugh Peters, and Nicholas Lockyer, with a gradual tendency to John Howe, the youngest of his chaplains. For the veteran free-lance and Arminian John Goodwin, a keen critic now of Cromwell's Commission of Triers and of other parts of his Church-policy, his liking must have been less; but Goodwin's merits were fairly appreciated, and he had at least perfect liberty to conduct his congregation as he pleased and to publish his pamphlets. So, on the other hand, eminent Presbyterian divines like Calamy, accommodated amply in Cromwell's Established Church, had all freedom and respect.--As to his dealings with non-clerical men of letters friendly to his government, we know a good deal already. Milton, of whose relations to the Protectorate we shall have to speak more at large, was his Latin Secretary; Needham was his journalist; Marvell was in his private employment and was looking for something more public. Still younger men were growing up, in the Universities or just out of them, regarding the Protectorate as now the settled order of things, in which they must pass their future lives. Cudworth, recently promoted from the mastership of Clare College, Cambridge, to that of Milton's old College of Christ's, had been asked by the Protector to recommend to him any very promising young Cambridge men he might discover;[2] and, doubtless, there had been a similar request to Owen of Oxford. Dryden, still at Cambridge, though now twenty-five years of age, and already, by his father's death, a small Northamptonshire squire of £40 a year, was looking forward, we shall find, as his family connexions with the Parliamentarians and the Commonwealth made natural, to a life in London under the great