accorded to other Dissenters.  On this footing they did go on, ex-Bishops and future Bishops among them, with increasing security; and gradually the notion got abroad that the Protector began to have even a kindly feeling for the “good old Church.”  Many Royalist authorities concur to that effect.  “The Protector,” says one, “indulged the use of the Common-Prayer in families and in private conventicles; and, though the condition of the Church of England was but melancholy, yet it cannot be denied that they had a great deal more favour and indulgence than under the Parliament.”  Burnet, on the authority of Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Bishop Wilkins, who was the second husband of Cromwell’s youngest sister, adds a more startling statement.  “Dr. Wilkins told me,” says Burnet, “he (Cromwell) often said to him (Wilkins) no temporal government could have a sure support without a national church that adhered to it, and he thought England was capable of no constitution but Episcopacy; to which he told me he did not doubt but Cromwell would have turned.”  Wilkins probably liked to think this after he himself had turned; but it is hardly credible in the form in which Burnet has expressed it.  Yet Cromwell, in that temper of conservatism, or desire of a settled order in all things, which more and more grew upon him after he had assumed the Protectorate, had undoubtedly the old Episcopalian clergy in view as a body to be conciliated, and employed as a counterpoise to the Anabaptists.  He cannot but have been aware, too, of the spontaneous movements in some of the quasi-Presbyterian Associations of the clergy for a reunion as far as possible with the more moderate Episcopalians, as distinct from the High-Church Prelatists or Laudians.  Among others, Baxter was extremely zealous for such a project; and his accounts of his correspondence about it with ex-Bishop Brownrigg in 1655, and his conversations about it at the same time with ex-Primate Usher, are very curious and interesting.  Baxter and many more were quite willing that there should be a restored Episcopacy after Usher’s own celebrated model:  i.e. an Episcopacy not professing to be jure divino, but only for ecclesiastical conveniency,—­the Bishops to be permanent Presidents of clusters of the clergy, and to be fitted into an otherwise Presbyterian system of Classes and Provincial Synods.  They were willing, moreover, in the interest of such a scheme, to reconsider the old questions of a Liturgy, kneeling at the Sacrament, and other matters of Anglican ceremonial.  Enough all this to rouse the angry souls of Smectymnuus, Milton, and the other Root-and-Branch Anti-Prelatists who had led the English Revolution.  But, as times change, men change, and it is not impossible that Cromwell, the first real mover of the Root-and-Branch Bill of 1641, may now, fifteen years later, have looked speculatively sometimes at the old trunk in the timberyard.  It is certain that he treated with profound respect