Gleanings from old S. Paul's Volume 25

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 Excerpt: ...in early life," and was, as Lord Clarendon still more pungently puts it, "a bold fellow who had been an ill shoemaker, and afterwards clerk to a brewer of small beer."f The touch in that sentence, "a brewer of small beer," is a very pretty piece of sarcasm. Lord Hughson the Cobler's teeth greedily chatter, To carve up a Prentice's Head in a Platter, For he will go through-stitch with the whole matter. It is of this heterogeneous assemblage which Cromwell had gathered together that Macaulay says, with his usual force, that "the multitude, who felt respect and fondness for the great historical names of the land, laughed without restraint at a House of Lords, in which lucky draymen and shoemakers were seated, to which few of the old nobles were invited, and from which almost all those old nobles who were invited turned disdainfully away."J Carlyle, Cromwell's Letters, v. 91. t Clarendon, History, book xvi. J History, vol. i., chap. i. And in The Cobler's last Witt and Testament; or the Lord Hewson's translation; the loyalist writer puts these words into the Colonel's mouth: Therefore to Tyburn I must ride, Although it cannot be deny'd, But that I have liv'd single ey'd. The last extract expresses the writer's wishes rather than the actual fact. Hewson was, indeed, hanged--but only in effigy: for Pepys says: "After dinner I took leave, and coming home heard that in Cheapside there had been a little before a gibbet set, and the picture of Huson hung upon it in the middle of the street." This was on January 25, 1659-60: Hewson himself escaped hanging by flight, and died at Amsterdam in 1662. A few years later, and the City interfered with much energy to save this "void peece of ground att the West end of Poules Ch...