Of those principles, then struggling for their infant existence, Milton was the most devoted and eloquent literary champion.  We need not say how much we admire his public conduct.  But we cannot disguise from ourselves that a large portion of his countrymen still think it unjustifiable.  The civil war, indeed, has been more discussed, and is less understood, than any event in English history.  The friends of liberty labored under the disadvantage of which the lion in the fable complained so bitterly.  Though they were the conquerors, their enemies were the painters.  As a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to decry and ruin literature; and literature was even with them, as, in the long run, it always is with its enemies.  The best book on their side of the question is the charming narrative of Mrs. Hutchinson.  May’s History of the Parliament is good; but it breaks off at the most interesting crisis of the struggle.  The performance of Ludlow is foolish and violent; and most of the later writers who have espoused the same cause—­Oldmixon, for instance, and Catherine Macaulay—­have, to say the least, been more distinguished by zeal than either by candor or by skill.  On the other side are the most authoritative and the most popular historical works in our language, that of Clarendon, and that of Hume.  The former is not only ably written and full of valuable information, but has also an air of dignity and sincerity which makes even the prejudices and errors with which it abounds respectable.  Hume, from whose fascinating narrative the great mass of the reading public are still contented to take their opinions, hated religion so much that he hated liberty for having been allied with religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyranny with the dexterity of an advocate while affecting the impartiality of a judge.

The public conduct of Milton must be approved or condemned according as the resistance of the people to Charles the First shall appear to be justifiable or criminal....

Every man who approves of the Revolution of 1688 [which dethroned James II., son of Charles I., on the ground that he “had broken the fundamental laws of the kingdom,” and enthroned William of Orange in his stead], must hold that the breach of fundamental laws on the part of the sovereign justifies resistance.  The question, then, is this:  Had Charles the First broken the fundamental laws of England?

No person can answer in the negative, unless he refuses credit, not merely to all the accusations brought against Charles by his opponents, but to the narratives of the warmest Royalists, and to the confessions of the king himself.  If there be any truth in any historian of any party who has related the events of that reign, the conduct of Charles, from his accession to the meeting of the Long Parliament, had been a continued course of oppression and treachery.  Let those who applaud the Revolution and condemn the Rebellion mention one act of James the Second to which