the puritans, as it seemed to him, with noble phrase in his last advices to his son.
Say it has ever been his father’s mind,
That perfect reason, justice, government,
Are the chief attributes of Him who made,
And who sustains the world, in whose full being,
Wisdom and power are one; and I, his creature,
Would fain have gained authority and rule,
To make the imagined order in my soul
Supreme o’er all, the proper good of man.
But Him to love who shaped us, and whose breast
Is the one home of all things, with a passion
Electing Him amid all other beings,
As if he were beside them, not their all,
This is the snug and dozing deliration
Of men, who filch from woman what is worst,
And cannot see the good. Of such beware.
This is the nobler tone of Strafford’s spirit.[1] That more habitual to him is heard in his presumptuous joy before entering the parliament, into which he went as a conqueror, and came out a prisoner. His confidence is not noble to us, it is not that of Brutus or Van Artevelde, who, knowing what is prescribed by the law of right within the breast, can take no other course but that, whatever the consequences; neither like the faith of Julius Cæsar or Wallenstein in their star, which, though less pure, is not without religion; but it is the presumption of a strong character
- ↑
His late biographer says well in regard to the magnanimity of his later days,
of so much nobler a tone than his general character would lead us to expect.
“It is a mean as well as a hasty judgment, which would attribute this to any
unworthy compromise with his real nature. It is probably a juster and more
profound view of it, to say that, into a few of the later weeks of his life, new
knowledge had penetrated from the midst of the breaking of his fortunes. It
was well and beautifully said by a then living poet,
‘The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.’”
Forster's Life of Strafford, Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia.
