George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

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The council of officers, the revival of the ‘inter-

Chap. XI.}

rupted’ Long Parliament, the intrigues of Fleetwood and Desborough, the transient elevation of Lambert, were but a series of unsuccessful attempts to defeat the wishes of the people. Every new effort was soon a failure; and each successive failure did but expose the enemies of royalty to increased indignation and contempt. In vain did Milton forebode that, ‘of all governments, that of a restored king is the worst;’ nothing could long delay the restoration. The fanaticism which had made the revolution, had burnt out, and was now a spent volcano. Among the possible combinations of human character, is that of an obstinate and almost apathetic courage, a sluggish temperament, a narrowness of mind, and yet a very accurate, though a mean-spirited judgment, which, ‘like a twofoot rule,’ measures great things as well as small, not rapidly, but with equal indifference and precision. Such a man was Monk, soon to be famous in American annals, from whose title, as duke of Albemarle, Virginia named one of her most beautiful counties, and Carolina her broadest bay. Sir William Coventry, no mean judge of men, esteemed him a drudge; Lord Sandwich sneered at him plainly as a thick-skulled fool; and the more courteous Pepys paints him as ‘a heavy, dull man, who will not hinder business, and cannot aid it.’ He was precisely the man demanded by the crisis. When Monk marched his army from Scotland into England, he was only the instrument of the restoration, not its author. Originally a soldier of fortune in the army of the royalists, he had deserted his party, served against Charles I., and readily offered to Cromwell his support. He had no adequate conceptions of the nature or the value of