.

In which the Author, very unwillingly, is forced to write.
a Little History.
While kings and men were thus occupied with England, which governed itself quite alone, and which, it must be said in its praise, had never been so badly governed, a man upon whom God had fixed his eye, and placed his finger, a man predestined to write his name in brilliant letters upon the page of history, was pursuing in the face of the world a work full of mystery and audacity.

He went on, and no one knew whither he meant to go, although not only England, but France, and Europe, watched him marching with a firm step and head held high.

All that was known of this man we are about to tell.
Monk had just declared himself in favor of the liberty of the Rump Parliament, a parliament which General Lambert, imitating Cromwell, whose lieutenant he had been, had just blocked up so closely, in order to bring it to his will, that no member, during all the blockade, was able to go out, and only one, Peter Wentworth, had been able to get in.
Lambert and Monk--everything was summed up in these two men; the first representing military despotism, the second pure republicanism.

These men were the two sole political representatives of that revolution in which Charles I.had first lost his crown, and afterwards his head.