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,

as, on the other, from hypocrisy. It is certainly not necessary that we should accept it as proof of fanaticism, that, on the day before setting out to the war with Scotland, he enlarged to Ludlow upon the great providences of God then abroad upon the earth, and in particular talked to him for almost an hour upon the hundred and tenth psalm. We have but to remember it as the psalm in which God's promise was given to make his enemies his footstool, to make his people willing, and to strike through kings in the day of his wrath,—to understand why Cromwell so recalled it on the eve of his last entrance into battle. It is as little necessary that we should accept, as proof of hypocrisy, the proof M. Guizot offers of his rejecting and even ridiculing the report set about by the fanatical officers after the dissolution of the Parliament, to the effect that he had undergone special and supernatural revelations. "The reports spread about "the Lord General," writes M. de Bordeaux to M. de Brienne," are not true. He does not affect any special "communication with the Holy Spirit, and he is not so "weak as to be caught by flattery. I know that the Portuguese ambassador having complimented him on "this change, he made a jest of it." But the French ambassador does not omit to accompany his statement with a careful tribute to the Lord General's zeal and great piety. Nor do we think M. Guizot justified in the belief he appears to entertain, that Cromwell's toleration of differences in religion proceeded from the merely politic spirit, and was due only to his wisdom as a ruler of men. To his profound knowledge of the art of government may indeed be referred such projects as were started in the Protectorate, for a synod to bring the different sects into peaceful agreement, for ensuring a complete legal toleration to the Jews, and for receiving in England even a bishop of the Church of Rome to preside over the religious communion of the Catholics. But from the depth of true piety in his own soul must have proceeded that larger personal charity, which was so ready, with

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listening ear and helping hand, for any form of honest. belief that claimed from him sympathy and protection. Let any one read his noble correspondence with the governor of Edinburgh Castle, when, having defeated the army of the Covenant in battle, he proceeded in argument to overthrow its preachers-and entertain any further doubt of this if he can. Those are the incomparable letters in which he reasoned out a perfect scheme of sublime toleration; in which he vindicated the execution of Charles Stuart as an act which Christians in after times would mention with honour, "and all tyrants in "the world look at with fear;" in which he warned the Presbytery that their platform was too narrow for them to expect "the great God to come down" to such minds and thoughts; in which he told them that he had not himself so learned Christ as to look at ministers as lords over, instead of helpers of, God's people; and in which he desired them specially to point out to him the warrant they had in Scripture for believing that to preach was their function exclusively. "Your pretended fear lest. error should step in, is like the man who would keep "all the wine out of the country lest men should be "drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy "to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a suppo"sition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge." And then, within some six months or so, Edinburgh having meanwhile surrendered, and the Presbytery, recovered from its sulks, having accepted permission again to open its pulpits, you see this same Cromwell respectfully himself attending their services and sermons, and taking no other notice of the latter being specially directed against himself and his fellow "sectaries," than to desire friendly discourse with the ministers who had so railed against them, to the end that, if possible, misunderstandings might be taken away.

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Neither had Cromwell, before he evinced this spirit, waited until authority fell to him as Lord General, at which time, in M. Guizot's view, considerations altogether

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politic and worldly began largely to operate with him. There is a very remarkable letter decisive as to this, which the Gentleman's Magazine first published three quarters of a century ago, but which Mr. Carlyle has been able to confirm by proof and adjust to the right place in his life,—the year after the battle of Naseby. Not long before the date of it, he had entered Ely cathedral while the Reverend Mr. Hitch was "performing the choir service, and with a "leave off your fooling, and come down, sir," had turned the reverend gentleman sheer out of the place, intoning, singing, and all. But this was because Mr. Hitch had become a nuisance to a godly neighbourhood, and had treated with deliberate disregard a previous warning of Oliver's to the very plain and legible effect, that, "lest the soldiers should in "any tumultuous or disorderly way attempt the refor"mation of the cathedral church, I require you to forbear "altogether your choir service, so unedifying and offen"sive; and this as you shall answer it, if any disorder "should arise thereupon." And notwithstanding the prompt procedure by which he kept his word in this case, he shows himself, in the letter we have named and are now about to quote, not less ready to protect any honest people differing completely from himself in regard to choir or other services, provided always they so exercised their unedifying faith as not to be offensive to others. He intercedes with a Royalist gentleman, in the adjoining (Norfolk) county, for liberty of conscience to certain of his tenants. "And," he writes, "however the "world interprets it, I am not ashamed to solicit for such as are anywhere under pressure of this kind; doing even as I would be done by. Sir, this is a quarrelsome age, and the anger seems to me to be the worse, where "the ground is difference of opinion; which to cure, to "hurt men in their names, persons, or estates, will not be "found an apt remedy." Over and over again he insists and enlarges on these views. He started life with them, and they remained with him to its close. Over and over

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