Sleep steals on us even like his brother Death —

We know not when it comes — we know it must come —

We may affect to scorn and to contemn¹ it,

For ’tis the highest pride of human misery²

To say it knows not of an opiate;

Yet the reft parent, the despairing lover,

Even the poor wretch³ who waits for execution,

Feels this oblivion, against which he thought

His woes⁴ had arm’d his senses, steal upon him,

And through the fenceless citadel⁵ — the body —

Surprise that haughty⁶ garrison⁷ — the mind.

HERBERT.

Colonel Everard experienced the truth contained in the verses of the quaint⁸ old bard⁹ whom we have quoted above. Amid private grief, and anxiety for a country long a prey¹⁰ to civil war, and not likely to fall soon under any fixed¹¹ or well-established form of government, Everard and his father had, like many others, turned their eyes to General Cromwell, as the person whose valour had made him the darling of the army, whose strong sagacity had hitherto predominated over the high talents by which he had been assailed¹² in Parliament, as well as over his enemies in the field, and who was alone in the situation to settle the nation, as the phrase then went; or, in other words, to

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