The Protector, however, seems to have profoundly impressed even Waller's light and fickle mind; and the panegyric which he produced on him in 1654, is not only the ablest, but seems the sincerest of his productions. He had hitherto been writing about women, courtiers, and kings; but now he had to gird up his loins and write on a man. The piece is accordingly as masculine in style, as it is just in appreciation; and, with the exception of Milton's glorious sketch in the "Defensio pro populo Anglicano," and Carlyle's lecture in his "Heroes and Hero-worship," it is, perhaps, the best encomium ever pronounced on the Lord Protector of England—almost worthy of Cromwell's unrivalled merits and achievements, and more than worthy of Waller's powers. It is said, that when twitted with having written a better panegyric on Cromwell than a congratulation to Charles II., he wittily replied, "You should remember that poets succeed better in fiction than in truth." Perhaps in this he spoke ironically; certainly the fact was the reverse of his words. It is because he has spoken truth in the first, and fiction in the second, of productions, that the first is incomparably the better poem. Sketches of character taken from the life are better than those where imagination operates on hearsays and on recorded actions. And certainly few men had a better opportunity than Waller of seeing in private and in undress, and with an eye in which native sagacity was sharpened by prejudices, partly for, partly against, the Man of that century—a man in whom we recognise a union of Roman, Hebrew, and English qualities—the faith of the Jew, the firmness of the Roman, and the homespun simplicity of the Englishman of his own age—in purpose and in powers "an armed angel on a battle-day;" in manners a plain blunt corporal; and in language always a stammerer, and sometimes a buffoon; the middle-class man of his time, with the merits and the defects of his order, but touched with an inspiration as from heaven, lifting him far above all the aristocracy, and all the royalty, and all the literature of his period; who found his one great faculty—inflamed and consecrated commonsense—to be more than equal to the subleties, and brilliancies, and wit, and eloquence, and taste, and genius, of his thousand opponents—whose crown was a branch of English oak, his sceptre a strong sapling of the same, his throne a mound of turf—who economised matters by being at once king and king's jester, and whose mere clenched fist, held up at home or across the waters, saved millions of money, awed despots, encouraged freedom in every part of the world, and had nearly established a pure form of Christianity over Great Britain—who gave his country a model of excellence as a man, and as a ruler, simple, severe, ruggedly picturesque, and stupendously original, and solitary as one of the primitive rocks—whose eloquence was uneven and piercing as the forked lightning, which is never so terrible as when it falls to pieces —and highest praise of all, whose deeds and character were so great in their sublime simplicity, that the poet, who afterwards sung the hierarchies of heaven, and the anarchies of hell, was fain to sit a humble secretary, recording the thoughts and actions of Cromwell, and felt afterwards that he had been as nobly employed when defending his grand defiance of evil and arbitrary power, as when he did
"Assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
We have seen pictured representations of Cromwell and Milton seated together at the council-table, in which the painter wished more than to insinuate that Milton was the superior being; but in our judgment the advantage was on the other side, and the poet seemed to bear only that relation and proportion to the Protector which the eloquent Raphael, the "affable archangel," the bard of the war in heaven, does to the Gabriel or the Michael, whose tremendous sword mingled in and all but decided the fray. And we thought what a junction were that of the two powers—of the sword and the pen, the actor and the recorder, the man to do, and the poet to sing! Waller in his panegyric sees and shews in a few lines Cromwell's relation to Britain, and that of both to the world:—
"Heaven that has placed this island to give law,
To balance Europe, and her states to awe,
In this conjunction does on Britain smile,
The greatest leader and the greatest isle."
He saw that in Cromwell, and in Cromwell alone, had the power of Britain come to a point: IT was made, if not to be the governor to be the moderator of the earth, and HE was sent to govern it, to condense its scattered energies, to awe down its warring factions, and to wield all its forces to one good and great end. In him for the first time had the wild island, the Bucephalus of the West, found a rider able, by backing, bridling, and curbing him, to give due direction and momentum to his fury, force, and speed.
He has scattered some other precious particles of thought in this poem, such as:—
"Lords of the world's great waste, the ocean, we
Whole forests send to reign upon the sea."
"The Caledonians, arm'd with want and cold."
"The states, changed by you,
Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise,
The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys."
"Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse,
And every conqueror creates a Muse."