Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/156

 pawning of crown jewels, or how he can. The Parliament by all methods is endeavouring to do the like. London subscribed ‘Horses and Plate,’ every kind of plate, even to women’s thimbles, to an unheard-of amount; and when it came to actual enlisting, in London alone there were ‘Four-thousand enlisted in a day.’ Four-thousand, some call it Five-thousand, in a day, the reader may meditate that one fact. Royal messages, Parliamentary messages; acres of typography thrillingly alive in every fibre of them,—these go on slowly abating, and military preparations go on steadily increasing till the 23d of October next. The King’s ‘Commission of Array for Leicestershire’ came out on the 12th of June, commissions for other counties following as convenient; the Parliament’s ‘Ordinance for the Militia,’ rising cautiously pulse after pulse towards clear emergence, had attained completion the week before. The question puts itself to every English soul, Which of these will you obey?—and in all quarters of English ground, with swords getting out of their scabbards, and yet the constable’s baton still struggling to rule supreme, there is a most confused solution of it going on.

Of Oliver in these months we find the following things noted; which the imaginative reader is to spread out into significance for himself the best he can.

February 7th. ‘Mr. Cromwell,’ among others, ‘offers to lend Three-hundred Pounds for the service of the Commonwealth,’ —towards reducing the Irish Rebellion, and relieving the afflicted Protestants there, or here. Rushworth, copying a List of such subscribers, of date 9th April 1642, has Cromwell’s name written down for ‘500l.’ —seemingly the same transaction; Mr. Cromwell having now mended his