They were not like Jew
brokers, contending with each other who could best remedy with
fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin
brought on their country by their degenerate councils. The
compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp
(Cromwell) by his kinsman, a favorite poet of that time, shows what it
was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished, in
the success of his ambition:
Still as you rise, the state exalted too,
Finds no distemper whilst 'tis changed by you;
Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise
The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys.
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as
asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to
illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their
competitors was by outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying
angel, smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under
which it suffered. I do not say (God forbid), I do not say that the
virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but
they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said, our
Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis.
Such the Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of
a civil war. Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were
your Henry the Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil
confusions and not wholly without some of their taint.
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