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he observed at the time, in his air and manner, an indescribable kind of exaltation. Sir Philip Warwick afterwards observed it too; and, being entirely at a loss to reconcile so "great and majestic a deportment and comely pre"" sence with what he remembered of his very ill-made apparel, and not very clean or sufficient linen, when he first heard him speak in the parliament-house twelve years before, is much disposed to attribute the change to the fact of his having meanwhile "had a better tailor and "more converse among good company." The same difficulty occurs even to Clarendon, who more shrewdly dismisses it with the remark, that "his parts seemed to "be raised, as if he had concealed his faculties till he "had occasion to use them." But we shall not ourselves have any difficulty at all, if we simply believe of such a man that only the occasion for use would ever tempt him to the assumption or display. A readiness for the duty of the hour, and no restlessness beyond it, would seem to be the lesson of Cromwell's life, whatever part of it we examine; and if we think the forcible dissolution of the Long Parliament an interruption to the temperate wisdom which generally guided him, it is because we feel that without it the supreme power must nevertheless have been his, unattended by the difficulties in which the consequences of that act involved him. At the very last, he said himself, he was doubtful about doing it; but another and stronger impulse got the mastery over him. "When I went there," he told his council of officers, "I did not think to have done this. "But perceiving the spirit of God so strong upon me, "I would not consult flesh and blood." And so we arrive again at what he told Monsieur the President de Bellièvre, that One never mounts so high as when one does not know where one is going.

But M. Guizot would attach little importance to that stronger impulse which the Lord General there professed to have over-ruled him. We do not know that anything has impressed us more throughout his book than its

extremely partial and imperfect recognition of the religious element, which formed so large a portion not merely of Cromwell himself, but of the entire English Revolution. Doubtless it arises from the fact that this element, so necessary in the study of it, lies too far away from those evils which dwell insensibly and most strongly upon the historian's mind, and from which his study of these great events in our history had deliberately or unconsciously arisen. He is even careful to hint his belief, more than once, that there were in those days more infidels in England than we commonly suppose. It is curious to contrast his view in this respect with that of another French writer, M. de Lamartine, who, regarding Cromwell from the thick of French republicanism, has very partially and confusedly, but as he believes wholly, accepted Mr. Carlyle's interpretation, and informs his countrymen that Cromwell was a fanatic. M. Guizot, accustomed through his own life to submit to the dictates of a calm unostentatious piety all public actions, and not unfrequently reminding his reader that a Divine Providence is ordering and disposing the affairs of States, yet cannot see in Cromwell either fanatic or chosen man of God. In no part of his history of Oliver do we find any swerving from this view, and subsequent and very recent reflection appears only to have confirmed him in it. In the whole of his account of Richard Cromwell there is no more striking passage than that in which, describing the respective positions occupied by the followers of Oliver and the advocates of the Republic, he again expresses forcibly the distinction between the purely worldly character of the Protectorate and the Divine purpose it was called to fulfil. The Cromwellians under Richard, he says, rather by experience and political instinct than by any principle clearly comprehended or defined, did not think that the people should be held sufficient to constitute the entire Government, or that it had the right to unmake and reconstruct it at its pleasure. In their opinion the Government required, for the maintenance and good order

of society, some base independently subsistent, recognised by the people, but anterior, and in a certain degree superior, to its shifting will. Originally conquest, afterwards the hereditary principle in monarchy, and the preponderance of great landowners, had created in the English Government such power, independent in itself, immovable in right, and indispensable to society. By the course of things, however, the territorial proprietorship had in part changed hands, and, by its own faults, the hereditary principle of monarchy had succumbed. But God then raised up Oliver, and gave him the power with the victory. Conqueror and actual master, surrounded by his comrades in war, and treating with a house elected by the people, he had been able to found, for his successor as for himself, the Protectorate and its Constitution; and thus was provided that anterior and independent power, born of events, not of the people's will, and which the people should be held as little able to destroy according to its fancy, as it had been able of its motion to create. This great fact, therefore, accomplished upon the ruins of the ancient monarchy, and in the name of necessity, by the genius of a great man sustained by God, it became the duty of all men to recognise and accept; and, from the uniform tone of his reasoning, it is manifest that the historian himself would so have accepted it, though he sees that it carried with it also the seeds of failure inseparable from its revolutionary origin.

He thus in a great measure excludes from consideration that particular element in Cromwell's idea of Government which led him, in the re-constitution of the State with a view to that bequest to his successor, to be indifferent whether it was republican or monarchical in its political form, provided only that, above all things, it was godly in its spirit. Yet a sound perception of this might have led him to far more just conclusions as to the views also held by Cromwell in regard not only to his system of rule during life, but to the very succession he desired to leave after him. Upon a close examination

it would be found, we suspect, that his true ideal was among the Jewish forms of government disclosed by the sacred book, even such as showed, in the midst of the petty kings of Moab and Edom, the free people of Israel, without a king, living majestically. The grand old Hebrew Judges would be perhaps his nearest model. But M. Guizot will not recognise anything of this. M. Guizot thinks his mind was great, because it was just, perspicacious, and thoroughly practical; but of this greatness he does not find that religion formed an essential part, or contributed to it in any material way. He avoids, indeed, all commonplace abuse. He knows that in Cromwell's day the open use of scriptural language was no more synonymous with cant, than republicanism with discord; but in both cases he appears to think that the one had a tendency to beget the other, and he accepts Cromwell's reported comment to Waller on a dialogue with one of the saints ("we must “talk to these men in their own way"), as a fair hint of the value of his piety. It was no more than one portion, and not the chief, of his state craft. Even the rapt and exalted fervour of his address to what we may call the assembled saints in the Barebones Parliament, M. Guizot attributes to those instincts on the part of a profound genius anxious to derive, as though immediately from God, the pretended supreme power which he had himself established, and the inherent infirmity of which he already perceived. We certainly cannot but regard as extremely remarkable the grave indifference with which the French historian is thus able to set aside, as only one of many means towards a worldly end, the fervent vein of scriptural thought and feeling which runs not alone through every deliberate work of Cromwell's, but which tinges also his every lightest act, and, in his private as in his public utterances, is that which still makes most impressive appeal to all who would thoroughly investigate his character.

For this we hold to have been finally established by Mr. Carlyle, and to constitute the peculiar value of his labours in connexion with the subject. To collect and

arrange in chronological succession, and with elucidatory comment, every authentic letter and speech left by Cromwell, was to subject him to a test from which falsehood could hardly escape; and the result has been to show, we think conclusively and beyond further dispute, that through all these speeches and letters one mind runs consistently. Whatever a man's former prepossessions may have been, he cannot accompany the utterer of these speeches, the writer of these letters, from their first page to the last, travelling with him from his grazing lands at St. Ives up to his Protector's throne; watching him in the tenderest intercourse with those dearest to him; observing him in affairs of state or in the ordinary business of the world, in offices of friendship or in conference with sovereigns and senates; listening to him as he comforts a persecuted preacher, or threatens a persecuting prince; and remain at last with any other conviction than that in all conditions, and on every occasion, Cromwell's tone is substantially the same, and that in the passionate fervour of his religious feeling, under its different and varying modifications, the true secret of his life must be sought, and will be found. Everywhere visible and recognisable is a deeply interpenetrated sense of spiritual dangers, of temporal vicissitudes, and of never ceasing responsibility to the Eternal. "Ever in his "Great Taskmaster's eye." Unless you can believe that you have an actor continually before you, you must believe that this man did unquestionably recognise in his Bible the authentic voice of God; and had an irremovable persuasion that according as, from that sacred source, he learned the divine law here and did it, or neglected to learn and to do it, infinite blessedness or infinite misery awaited him for evermore.

It is also clear to us from the letters, with only such reservation as we have already intimated, and after the large allowance to be made in every case for human passion and frailty, that Cromwell was, to all practical intents, as far removed on the one hand from fanaticism,