foot, pellmell, the cannon-shot making huge gaps in their dense columns, it was impossible that they, or any, should hold out. They broke, they scattered, they retreated not, but fled in wild and irretrievable dismay, pursued, cut down, and slaughtered by the fresh cavalry of Cromwell, who for eight miles had execution of the flyers; while the triumphant general calling a halt, when he perceived the battle won, sung, with his legions swelling the stormy chorus, the hundred and seventeenth psalm, in honour of that Lord who, as he said, " after the first repulse, had given up his enemies as stubble before the godly arms, and the victorious weapons, of his own elected people."

CHAPTER II.

And Worcester's laureat wreath.

MILTON'S Sonnets.

No blame be to you, sir; for all was lost.

The King himself

Of his wings destitute, the army broken,

And but the backs of Britons seen, all flying

Through a straight lane; the enemy full-hearted,

Lolling the tongue with slaughtering.

Cymbeline.

FOR several months after the battle of Dunbar both parties rested in comparative inaction. Edinburgh castle, after a brief siege, was surren

dered by Dundas withoнt, indeed, if the assertions of the royalists are to be credited, any sufficient reason.

During the winter Oliver remained in the metropolis of Scotland, engaged for the most part in disputations with the presbyterian clergy, who hated him with bitter and incessant rancour; and here he was attacked by a strong fit of ague, threatening to undermine his constitution, and actually reducing him so low, that it was early in July before he was prepared to take the field.

Meanwhile, Charles had been crowned at Perth, on the first day of January, '51, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, most of the nobles being present in their robes of state and coronets-had sworn both to the "national covenant," and to the "league and covenant"-had levied a strong army under command of the stout veteran Lesley—and had taken post, meaning to act on the defensive, on strong ground in the neighbourhood of Torwood. Here for some days the hostile armies faced each other, ma

VOL. III.

noeuvring to gain, if possible, advantages that might ensure success-Oliver continually desiring, Lesley as obstinately shunning, any contact that might lead to a general action. Skirmishes occurred almost every day between the cavalry and outposts, but none of much importance, whether from loss sustained or permanent results on the campaign; till at last, wearied by a game in which he had sagacity to see that he in the long run must be the loser, Cromwell transported his whole army into Fife, besieging and in two days making himself the master of the town of Perth.

Cromwell's object in this bold manœuvre was to draw down the Scottish army from its ground of vantage, and in this he succeeded fully, though not perhaps exactly in the manner he had contemplated; for, breaking up his camp at Torwood on the 31st, Charles turned his face toward the border, leading some twelve or fourteen thousand men, with the intent of concentrating his powers at Carlisle, where he expected to be

reinforced by a great rising of the royalists en masse from all the northern counties.

The consternation throughout England at the news of this advance was general and excessive. The parliament were in extremity of terror and suspicion; Bradshaw himself, stout-hearted as he was in public, privately owned his fears, and more than half suspected the good faith of Cromwell. Their terrors grew more and more real daily, when it was told in London that the cavaliers of Lancashire were gathering head under Lord Derby, and the presbyterians threatening to make common cause with them under their majorgeneral Massey; and in good sooth, had it not been for the insane fanaticism of the Scottish clergy, who, with a fierce intolerance that ruined their own cause, would suffer none to join the standard of the King, without subscribing to the covenant, the forces of the royalists would have been truly formidable, and might have, not improbably, succeeded in restoring Charles to his ancestral throne. But, happily for England