But, on the other hand, the strength of both sides, at this early day, was in a class of serious and devoted men, who took up the sword so sadly, in view of civil strife, that victory seemed to them almost as terrible as defeat.  In some, the scale of loyalty slightly inclined, and they held with the King; in others, the scale of liberty, and they served the Parliament; in both cases, with the same noble regrets at first, merging gradually into bitter alienation afterwards.  “If there could be an expedient found to solve the punctilio of honor, I would not be hero an hour,” wrote Lord Robert Spencer to his wife, from the camp of the Cavaliers.  Sir Edmund Verney, the King’s standard-bearer, disapproved of the royal cause, and adhered to it only because he “had eaten the King’s bread.”  Lord Falkland, Charles’s Secretary of State, “sitting among his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs, would, with a shriek and sad accent, ingeminate the words, Peace!  Peace!” and would prophesy for himself that death which soon came.  And these words show close approximation to the positions of men honored among the Puritans, as when Sir William Waller wrote from his camp to his chivalrous opponent, Sir Ralph Hopton,—­“The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service.”

As time passed on, the hostility between the two parties exceeded all bounds of courteous intercourse.  The social distinction was constantly widening, and so was the religious antagonism.  Waller could be allowed to joke with Goring and sentimentalize with Hopton,—­for Waller was a gentleman, though a rebel; but it was a different thing when the Puritan gentlemen were seen to be gradually superseded by Puritan clowns.  Strafford had early complained of “your Prynnes, Pims, and Bens, with the rest of that generation of odd names and natures.”  But what were these to the later brood, whose plebeian quality Mr. Buckle has so laboriously explored,—­Goffe the grocer and Whalley the tailor, Pride the drayman and Venner the cooper, culminating at last in Noll Cromwell the brewer?  The formidable force of these upstarts only embittered the aversion.  If odious when vanquished, what must they have been as victors?  For if it be disagreeable to find a foeman unworthy of your steel, it is much more unpleasant when your steel turns out unworthy of the foeman; and if sad-colored Puritan raiment looked absurd upon the persons of fugitives, it must have been very particularly unbecoming when worn by conquerors.

And the growing division was constantly aggravated by very acid satire.  The Court, it must be remembered, was more than half French in its general character and tone, and every Frenchman of that day habitually sneered at every Englishman as dull and inelegant.  The dazzling wit that flashed for both sides in the French civil wars flashed for one only in the English; the Puritans had no comforts of that kind, save in