BRITISH STATESMEN,

VOL. II.

Ey Schw Poster. Soy. of the Innor Temple!

PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, REES, ORME, BROWN, GREEN & LONGMAN, PATERNOSTER ROW.

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7v.

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PREFACE.

IN giving the lives of the most prominent actors upon the great and awful stage of the Old English Revolution, the Author has thought himself justified in departing from the system observed by his predecessors, and, instead of the numerous individual sketches that, under other circumstances, are all that is necessary, devoting a whole volume at a time to but two or three of those eventful biographies which include the histories of minor contemporaries, and, indeed, the history of the age itself. For the times, awful as they were, were scarcely greater than the men; - the ideas of both present themselves to us at once, like shadowy and solid giants standing together, and hardly letting us discern which leads the other.

The life of Eliot is the first that has appeared. He did not survive to be an actor in the scene during the most obvious part of the great contest; and posterity has been so much occupied with those who did, that they are startled when they have leisure to look back, and see these older and not less noble shapes of its commencement, - these less bodily, yet hardly less visible, demi-gods, - who were its first inspiring minds. Eliot was the greatest
actor in the outbreak of the Revolution, though it
became ultimately the more memorable part of his lot
to think and to suffer; and the reader will see that
he did both, with that mixture of force and delicacy,
that prose of common sense and poetry of the heart,
which so remarkably characterises the man of busi-
ness in that age, and which is traceable, in the
Author's opinion, to the effect which the chivalrous
breeding of the reign of Elizabeth had upon the
rising generation. The sons and daughters of the
"Arcadia" were the parents of the men of Charles
and Cromwell.