Darkness, was to be fought for and secured. Supplies were voted; ‘drums beat in the City’ and elsewhere, as they had done three years ago,[1] to the joy of all men, when the Palatinate was first to be ‘defended’: but now it was to be ‘recovered’; now a decisive effort was to be made. The issue, as is well known, corresponded ill with these beginnings. Count Mansfeldt mustered his levies here, and set sail; but neither France nor any other power would so much as let him land. Count Mansfeldt’s levies died of pestilence in their ships; ‘their bodies, thrown ashore on the Dutch coast, were eaten by hogs,’ till half the armament was dead on shipboard. nothing came of it, nothing could come. With a James Stuart for Generalissimo, there is no good fighting possible. The poor King himself soon after died;[2] left the matter to develop itself in other still fataler ways.
In those years it must be that Dr. Simcott, Physician in Huntingdon, had to do with Oliver’s hypochondriac maladies. He told Sir Philip Warwick, unluckily specifying no date, or none that has survived, ‘he had often been sent for at midnight’; Mr. Cromwell for many years was very ‘splenetic’ (spleen-struck), often thought he was just about to die, and also ‘had fancies about the Town Cross.’[3] Brief intimation; of which the reflective reader may make a great deal. Samuel Johnson too had hypochondrias; all great souls are apt to have,—and to be in thick darkness generally, till the eternal ways and the celestial guiding-stars disclose themselves, and the vague Abyss of Life knit itself up into Firmaments for them. Temptations in the Wilderness, Choices of Hercules, and the like, in succinct or loose form, are appointed for every man that will assert a soul in himself and be a man. Let Oliver take comfort in his dark sorrows and melancholies. The quantity of sorrow he has, does it not mean withal the quantity of sympathy he has, the quantity of faculty and
