In the Protectorate they swarmed.
Matchless still among the tributes in verse was Milton's single Sonnet of May 1652, "_Cromwell, our chief of men_," and Milton had written no more to or about Cromwell in the metrical form since the Protectorate had begun, but had contented himself with adding to his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his _Defensio Secunda_.

It is Milton now, almost alone, that we remember as Cromwell's laureate; but among the sub-laureates there were some by no means insignificant.

Old George Wither, though his marvellous metrical fluency had now lapsed into doggrel and senility, had done his best by sending forth, in 1654-5, from some kind of military superintendentship he held in the county of Surrey (Wood calls it distinctly a Major-Generalship at last, but that is surely an exaggeration), two Oliverian poems, one called _The Protector: A Poem briefly illustrating the Supereminency of that Dignity,_ the other _A Rapture occasioned by the late miraculous Deliverance of his Highness the Lord Protector from a desperate danger_.[1] In stronger and more compact style, though still rather rough, Andrew Marvell, in the same year, had added to his former praises of Cromwell a poem of 400 lines, published in a broad-sheet, with the title _The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector_.

It began:-- [Footnote 1: Wood's Ath.III.

762-772.] "Like the vain curlings of the watery maze Which in smooth streams a sinking weight does raise, So man, declining always, disappears In the weak circles of increasing years, And his short tumults of themselves compose, While flowing Time above his head does close.
Cromwell alone with greater vigour runs, Sun-like, the stages of succeeding suns; And still the day which he doth next restore Is the just wonder of the day before.
Cromwell alone doth with new lustre spring, And shines the jewel of the yearly ring; 'Tis he the force of scattered Time contracts, And in one year the work of ages acts."[1] [Footnote 1: Marvell's Works, edited by Dr.Grosart, I.169-170.] But the most far-blazoned eulogy at the time, and the smoothest to read now, was one in forty-seven stanzas, which appeared May 31, 1655, with the title _A Panegyric to my Lord Protector of the present greatness and joint interest of his Highness and this Nation, by E.W., Esq._ The author was Edmund Waller, still under a cloud for his old transgression, but recovering himself gradually by his wealth, his plausibility and fine manners, and his powers of versifying.