I can to be gone." When morning dawned he lay insensible; and between three and four of the afternoon of his fortunate day, he heaved a deep sigh and expired.

In attempting to sketch the character of Cromwell, it is especially necessary to get some central point of view from which we can survey it in its whole outline. The complexities which it presents-its deep and involved shades-its confused and apparently conflicting features-render this all the more necessary. For, otherwise, his character becomes unintelligible-a mere mass of inconsistencies, in which we can see no coherence or meaning. He is great, and yet base; religious, and yet a hypocrite; a demagogue, and yet a despot; a dissembler, and yet a trifler; a man of vast and imperial schemes, and yet a man of low and paltry interests. This is something of the blurred and contradicting picture which Cromwell presents in many of our histories. It may be safely said that no great character can be explained in this manner. seek for some inward unity out of which the character has grown for hidden threads of consistency running through it, underlying all its more obvious appearances, and binding up its complicated structure into an intelligible whole.

We must

The secret of Cromwell's character appears to lie where he himself supposed-in the depth and power of his religious sentiment. This we must either admit, or hold him throughout to have been a hypocrite. Only one of these two alternatives can possibly remain after the careful study of his letters. This man was either from the first a conscious hypocrite, acting a part, as has been maintained-deliberately fore

casting schemes of glorious yet fraudulent ambition, the perfidy of which he sought to conceal by the most elaborate and unwearying pretensions to piety; or he was at first and throughout a man in whom the sense of the Divine predominated-whose rooted and most ruling instinct was to do God service; and who, amid all his actions, deeply censurable as some of these may have been, never entirely lost sight of this principle or purpose. Religion so filled his life that it either held him or he held it as a mere tool in his service. And there are few who will read his correspondence and speeches from beginning to end, with any understanding of them-with any intelligent sympathy with the time and its modes of religious feeling—and doubt which of these views is the correct one.

The alternative of hypocrisy in the face of his letters involves a series of suppositions so incredible, as to compel every candid student to part with it.* These letters are written in all circumstances-when as yet he was but a Puritan farmer and friend of persecuted ministers, when first the great contests of the Parliament began to stir his tumultuous energies on the eve of battle, and when the excitement of

* In evidence of this, allusion may be made to the different view of Cromwell's character suggested by Mr Foster in his 'Life," written for the Cabinet Cyclopædia more than twenty years ago-in many respects an admirable life-and that suggested in his recent paper, The Civil Wars and Oliver Cromwell. The "inimitable craft and skill, assuming the garb of sanctity," which explains so much in the "Life," has entirely disappeared in the later sketch. The result of Mr Carlyle's labours, he says, "has been to show conclusively, and beyond further dispute, that through all these [Cromwell's] speeches and letters one mind runs consistently. In the passionate fervour of his religious feeling 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.'"-FOSTER'S Essays, i. 312.

victory was yet on him-regarding the most ordinary domestic details, and the most broad general principles of religion and policy. They all bear a natural impress; they show the man, the politician, the warrior, the father, the husband, and patriot, and not merely the religionist. The religious ideas and phraseology in which they abound are in no sense factitious; they are the living essence of his common thought; they are mixed up with everything he says and does. The same tone pervades the letters throughout-the same cast of earnest, grave, and tender feeling-the same air of reality. As we read them, and try to purge our minds of all remembrance of the traditionary Cromwell with his hypocrisies and grimaces, there is nothing whatever that could excite such an image within us. His character rises before us plain, massive, and grand; rude in its features, irregular in its outline, but glowing with an intensely concentrated meaning; radiant with a divine fire in every feature-an earnest, practical, strong man, " in the dark perils of war, and in the high places of the field: hope shone in him like a pillar of fire when it had gone out in all others." The confidence of a divine cause the light of a divine trust-the soaring passion of a faith mighty to subdue mountains, these are the grand elements of his character. He uncovers his most familiar thoughts, he writes of the most ordinary details as to the marriage and settlement of his son, and the same earnestness meets usthe same practical spirit and aim show themselves. No expression escapes from him that suggests ostentation or mere effect, or double dealing. If this be hypocrisy, it is difficult to conceive what more the most natural and downright sincerity could have been. We recognise in Cromwell, therefore, above all, the

reality of religious conviction. He lived by faith. It was the firm perception and hold of the Divine that carried him forward through all his difficulties and amidst all his triumphs. God he felt to be with him. and to be his God; and his firm persuasion of this it was that strengthened his heart and consecrated his sword, and bore him erect when weakness or blindness left others struck down or groping helplessly amidst the confusion and darkness. The spirit of Puritanism found in him its most thorough expression as well as its greatest representative. He was penetrated to the very core of his being by the thought that God was ever near to him and guiding him, "ordering him and affairs concerning him," and that the cause which he served was His cause. He" seldom fought without some text of Scripture to support him." And as he fought, he lived. He was an " unworthy and mean instrument," to do some good, and God some service. To doubt or deny the leading of God in the great events of his time, was to him the deepest impiety-the most ungodly malice. "Is it an arm of flesh that hath done these things?" he says, writing from before Waterford in 1649. "Is it the wisdom, or counsel, or strength of men? It is the Lord only. God will curse that man and his house that dares to think otherwise. Sir, you see the work is done by a divine leading. God gets into the hearts of men, and persuades them to come under you.. . . These are the seals of God's approbation of your great change of government-which indeed was no more yours than these victories and successes are ours; yet let them with us say, even the most unsatisfied heart amongst them, that both are the righteous judgments and mighty works of God."

This spirit may be called fanaticism. The identi

fication of the Divine, not merely with a great moral cause, but with the accidents of that cause-the interpretation of success as a token of the divine favour, and the reverse-all this is of the essence of the fanatical. Puritanism itself was a fanaticism, in so far as it merged the spiritual in the temporal, and made its own dogmas and ordinances the measure of the divine. And the impartial critic cannot refuse to admit that fanatical elements mingled in Cromwell's character. The presence of these elements made him pre-eminently the man of his time-the great impersonation and power of it. But while we can everywhere trace in him the capacities of fanaticism, and while these show themselves now and then in startling and even shocking expressions, we see also at every turn of his life how far he was above them-how the native greatness of his mind, the breadth of his spirituality, as well as the shrewdness of his sense, raised him beyond the limits of the enthusiast. Destitute of intellectual cultivation, and without any of the checks that come from æsthetic sensibility or refinement, his mind was yet too enlightened, sound, and sagacious, and his sympathies too direct, broad, and vigorous, to permit him to be absolutely swayed by any theories whatever. It was this that made the difference between him and many of the men like Harrison, or even Vane, who at one time surrounded him, and with whom he acted. It was this that made the difference between him and the Scotch ministers and generals with whom he argued. The Divine was never to him this or that institution or covenant. The external never enslaved him, however it guided him. The great hero of Puritanism, he yet rose above its narrowness. Its faith never left him, and its hopes never died out of him, but its forms fell