THE END OF THE NINTH VOLUME.
Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne & Co.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "What can be more extraordinary, than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which have sometimes, or of mind, which have often, raised men to the highest dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to succeed in, so improbable a design, as the destruction of one of the most ancient, and most solid founded monarchies upon the earth? That he should have the power, or boldness, to put his prince and master to an open and infamous death? To banish that numerous and strongly allied family? To do all this under the name and wages of a parliament? To trample upon them, too, as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he grew weary of them? To raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of their ashes? To stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England? To oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice? To serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them victoriously at last? To over-run each corner of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the poverty of the north? To be feared and courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth? To call together parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the breath of his mouth? To be humbly and daily petitioned, that he would please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master of those who had hired him before to be their servant? To have the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal, as was the little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the spending of them? And, lastly, (for there is no end of all the particulars of his glory,) to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity? To die with peace at home, and triumph abroad? To be buried among kings, and with more than regal solemnity? And to leave a name behind him, not to be extinguished but with the whole world, which as it is now too little for his praises, so might have been too for his conquests if the short line of his human life could have been stretched out to the extent of his immortal designs?"—Cowley's Works, Vol. II. p. 583.
Perhaps the facetious Tom Brown has hit upon the true reason of Dryden's choice of a subject, when he makes him say, "that he had no particular kindness for the person of Oliver; but that it was much the same with the poets as with the Jews—a hero cannot start up in any quarter of the world, be his quarrel right or wrong, but both are apt to think him the Messias, and presently pitch upon him as the fittest person to deliver the twelve tribes and the nine muses out of captivity."—Reasons of Mr Bayes' changing his religion.
Nor only didst thou for thy age provide,
But for the years to come beside;
Our after times, and late posterity,