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The common brake-fern and its allies seem to betray tropical sympathies by their late appearance and sensitiveness to autumnal frost.

Now named the Crau. It lies between Arles and the sea—a bare and malarious tract of great size covered with shingle and boulders. Aeschylus describes it as a ‘snow-shower of round stones,’ which Zeus rained down in aid of Heracles, who was contending with the Ligurians.

A star in the Whale, conspicuous for its singular and rapid changes of apparent size.

After passing through several phases this word, in Cromwell's mouth, with the common logic of tyranny, became simply a synonym for personal rule.

The terrorism of the Protector's government, and the almost universal hatred which it inspired, are powerfully painted by Hallam. ‘To govern according to law may sometimes be an usurper's wish, but can seldom be in his power. The protector abandoned all thought of it. . . . All illusion was now (1655) gone, as to the pretended benefits of the civil war. It had ended in a despotism, compared to which all the illegal practices of former kings, all that had cost Charles his life and crown, appeared as dust in the balance.’

The trials under which Gerard and Vowel were executed in 1654, Slingsby and Hewit in 1658, are the most flagrant instances of Cromwell's perversion of justice, and contempt for the old liberties of England. But they do not stand alone.

‘A certain coarse good nature and affability that covered the want of conscience, honour, and humanity: quick in passion, but not vindictive, and averse to unnecessary crimes,’ is the deliberate summing-up of Hallam,—in the love of liberty inferior to none of our historians, and eminent above all for courageous impartiality, —iustissimus unus.

Yet to readers, (if such readers there be) who can look with an undazzled eye on military success, or hear the still small voice of truth through the tempest of rhetoric, Cromwell's foreign policy, (excepting the isolated case of his interference with the then comparatively feeble powers of Savoy and the Papacy on behalf of the persecuted Waldenses), will be far from supporting the credit with which politico-theological partisanship has invested it.

Holland was beyond question the natural ally on political and religious grounds of puritan England. But a mischievous war against her in 1652–3 was caused by the arrogant restrictions of the Navigation Act of 1651. The successful English demand in 1653 that the Orange family, as connected closely with that of Stuart, should be excluded from the Stadtholdership, was in a high degree to the prejudice of the United Provinces.

In 1654 Cromwell was negotiating with France and Spain. From the latter he arrogantly asked wholly unreasonable terms, whilst Mazarin, on the part of France, offered Dunkirk as a bribe. News opportunely arriving that certain Spanish possessions in America were feebly armed, Cromwell at once declared war: and now, supplementing unscrupulous policy by false theology, announced ‘the Spaniards to be the natural and ordained enemies of England, whom to fight was a duty both to country and to religion:’ (Ranke: xii. 6).

The piratical war which followed, in many ways similar to that which the ‘wise Walpole’ tried to avert in 1739, was hardly less impolitic than immoral. It alienated Holland, it sanctioned French aggression on Flanders (xii. 7), it ended by giving Mazarin and Lewis XIV that supremacy in Western Europe for which England had to pay in the wars of William III and Anne; whilst, as soon as it was over, France naturally allied herself with Spain, on a basis which might have caused the union of the two crowns (xii. 8) and which allowed Spain at once to support Charles II. As the result of the Protector's ‘spirited policy’ England thus figured as the catspaw of France, and the enemy of European liberty.

It is satisfactory, however, to find that, in Ranke's judgment, the common modern opinion that Cromwell's despotism was favourably regarded in England because of his foreign enterprize, is exaggerated. Even against the conquest of Jamaica,—his single signal gain,—unanswerable arguments were popularly urged at the time: (xii. 4, 8)— But the Protectorate, in the light of modern research,—like the reign of Elizabeth,—still awaits its historian.

See Matthew Arnold's finely discriminative Essay on Falkland