The Cavalier poet, born at Loitghborough in Leicestershire in 1613, son of an usher in a free school there, was sent to Milton’s College, Christ’s, at Cambridge in 1627, when he was fifteen years old.  Milton had gone to Christ’s two years before, but at the age of seventeen.  Cleveland left Christ’s College in 1631, when he took his B.A. degree, and went to St. John’s, of which he was elected a Fellow in March 1634. He proceeded M.A. in 1634, and studied afterwards both law and physics, living for nine years at Cambridge.  John Cleveland was ejected from his position as Fellow and Tutor by the Parliamentary visitors in February 1645 (new style), and was sent to Newark as judge advocate under Sir Richard Willis, the Governor.  After the surrender at Newark, Cleveland depended upon friendship of cavaliers who gave him hospitality for his witty companionship, and the good scholarship that made him valuable as a tutor to their sons, Cleveland, who lives among our poets, wrote in the first days of his trouble these three prose Characters:—­

THE CHARACTER OF A COUNTRY COMMITTEE-MAN, WITH THE EAR-MARK.  OF A SEQUESTRATOR.

A committee-man by his name should be one that is possessed, there is number enough in it to make an epithet for legion.  He is persona in concreto (to borrow the solecism of a modern statesman).  You may translate it by the Red Bull phrase, and speak as properly, Enter seven devils solus.  It is a well-trussed title that contains both the number and the beast; for a committee-man is a noun of multitude, he must be spelled with figures, like Antichrist wrapped in a pair-royal of sixes.  Thus the name is as monstrous as the man, a complex notion of the same lineage with accumulative treason.  For his office it is the Heptarchy, or England’s fritters; it is the broken meat of a crumbling prince, only the royalty is greater; for it is here, as in the miracle of loaves, the voider exceeds the bill of fare.  The Pope and he ring the changes; here is the plurality of crowns to one head, join them together and there is a harmony in discord.  The triple-headed turnkey of heaven with the triple-headed porter of hell.  A committee-man is the relics of regal government, but, like holy relics, he outbulks the substance whereof he is a remnant.  There is a score of kings in a committee, as in the relics of the cross there is the number of twenty.  This is the giant with the hundred hands that wields the sceptre; the tyrannical bead-roll by which the kingdom prays backward, and at every curse drops a committee-man.  Let Charles be waived whose condescending clemency aggravates the defection, and make Nero the question, better a Nero than a committee.  There is less execution by a single bullet than by case-shot.