to amuse her, when Mrs. Claypole herself entered. "Madam," he said, "it was lucky that you came at this nick of time, or I should certainly have stolen this pretty little baby." "Stolen her," replied her mother, "and for what purpose, for she is too young to become your mistress!" "Madam," he said, "it would have been revenge." "Revenge," replied Mrs. Claypole, "why, what harm have I done that you should steal my child?" "None at all," said Harrington, "but you might have been prevailed upon to induce your parent to restore my child whom he has stolen." Mrs. Claypole, of course, demanded an explanation, on which he told her it was the child of his brain. She was naturally pleased with the manner in which he had introduced himself, and, as he assured her the work contained no treason, she kindly exerted her influence, and the manuscript was restored.

We should admire Mrs. Claypole less were her character more prominent. There was nothing of brilliance in her career, but she possessed that feminine loveliness of character which we look for in the sister or the wife, and which we associate with the happy scenes of domestic life. Carrington, in his curious history of her father, lingers enthusiastically over the recollection of her virtues. "How many of the royalist prisoners got she not freed? How many did she not save from death whom the laws had condemned? How

many persecuted Christians hath she not snatched out of the hands of the tormentors, quite different from that Herodias who could do anything with her father." "Cromwell," adds the same writer, "ravished to see his own image so lively described in those lovely and charming features of that winning sex, could refuse her nothing; insomuch, that when his clemency and justice did balance the pardon of a poor criminal, this most charming advocate knew so skilfully to disarm him, that his sword falling out of his hands, his arms only served to lift her up from those knees on which she had cast herself, to wipe off her tears, and to embrace her.”

Her last illness was a severe and afflicting one. The execution of Doctor Hewett, who died for his attachment to the royal family, and for whose pardon she had passionately interceded with the Protector, is supposed to have hastened her death. But the loss of one of her children, her third son, Oliver, who died a short time before her, is more likely to have aggravated her sufferings. Her own death-bed must have been a distressing scene; nor can we conceive anything more painful than Cromwell watching the dissolution of his beloved daughter. During her illness she is said to have frequently remonstrated with him on the course which he was pursuing. But, "in her hysterical fits," says the physician Bates, "she much dispirited him, by upbraiding him sometimes with

one of his crimes, and sometimes with another, according to the fancied distractions of her disease." "That," says Lord Clarendon, "which chiefly broke the Protector's peace, was the death of his daughter, Claypole, who had been always his greatest joy, and who, in her sickness, which was of a nature the physicians knew not how to deal with, had several conferences with him, which exceedingly perplexed him. Though nobody was near enough to hear the particulars, yet her often mentioning, in the pains she endured, the blood her father had spilt, made people conclude she had presented his worst actions to his consideration. And though he never made the least show of remorse for any of those actions, it is very certain that either what she said, or her death, affected him wonderfully." "The Lady Claypole," says Heath, "died at Hampton Court, August 6th, of a disease in her inwards, and being taken frantic, raved much against the bloody cruelties of her father, and about the death of Doctor Hewett, for whom 'tis said she interceded."

Mrs. Claypole breathed her last at the palace of Hampton Court on the 6th of August, 1658, in the twenty-ninth year of her age. "She died," says Carrington, "an Amazonian-like death, despising the pomps of the earth, and without any grief, save to leave her father perplexed at her so sudden being taken away." Andrew Marvell, in his "Ode on the Death of Cromwell," dwells