The foremost representative men of their respective parties, they scarcely remember, perhaps, that there are ties and coincidences in their lives.  At the marriage of Rupert’s mother, the student Hampden was chosen to write the Oxford epithalamium, exulting in the prediction of some noble offspring to follow such a union.  Rupert is about to be made General-in-chief of the Cavaliers; Hampden is looked to by all as the future General-in-chief of the Puritans.  Rupert is the nephew of the King,—­Hampden the cousin of Cromwell; and as the former is believed to be aiming at the Crown, so the latter is the only possible rival of Cromwell for the Protectorate,—­“the eyes of all being fixed upon him as their pater patriae.”  But in all the greater qualities of manhood, how far must Hampden be placed above the magnificent and gifted Rupert!  In a congress of natural noblemen—­for such do the men of the Commonwealth appear—­he must rank foremost.  It is difficult to avoid exaggeration in speaking of these men,—­men whose deeds vindicate their words, and whose words are unsurpassed by Greek or Roman fame,—­men whom even Hume can only criticize for a “mysterious jargon” which most of them did not use, and for a “vulgar hypocrisy” which few of them practised.  Let us not underrate the self-forgetting loyalty of the Royalists,—­the Duke of Newcastle laying at the King’s feet seven hundred thousand pounds, and the Marquis of Worcester a million; but the sublimer poverty and abstinence of the Parliamentary party deserve a yet loftier meed,—­Vane surrendering an office of thirty thousand pounds a year to promote public economy,—­Hutchinson refusing a peerage and a fortune as a bribe to hold Nottingham Castle a little while for the King,—­Eliot and Pym bequeathing their families to the nation’s justice, having spent their all for the good cause.  And rising to yet higher attributes, as they pass before us in the brilliant paragraphs of the courtly Clarendon, or the juster modern estimates of Forster, it seems like a procession of born sovereigns; while the more pungent epithets of contemporary wit only familiarize, but do not mar, the fame of Cromwell, (Cleaveland’s “Caesar in a Clown,")—­“William the Conqueror” Waller,—­“young Harry” Vane,—­“fiery Tom” Fairfax,—­and “King Pym.”  But among all these there is no peer of Hampden, of him who came not from courts or camps, but from the tranquil study of his Davila, from that thoughtful retirement which was for him, as for his model, Coligny, the school of all noble virtues,—­came to find himself at once a statesman and a soldier, receiving from his contemporary, Clarendon, no affectionate critic, the triple crown of historic praise, as being “the most able, resolute, and popular person in the kingdom.”  Who can tell how changed the destiny of England, had the Earl of Bedford’s first compromise with the country party succeeded, and Hampden become the tutor of Prince Charles,—­or could this fight at Chalgrove Field issue differently, and Hampden survive to be general instead of Essex, and Protector in place of Cromwell?