that it altogether refuses to disclose itself. Mr. Carlyle has done the duty of an editor admirably, in a way indeed to set an example to all editors, by the helps he has provided in regard to this matter; for the most part making sufficient stepping-stones for us where the text is a little muddy by merely rectifying the punctuation, and now and then throwing in a word or two of explanation (always scrupulously indicated) where a decided fracture in the syntax seems to require such a bridge.

But it is not so much with Cromwell as with his Elucidator that we would at present detain our readers. We propose, without entering into much, if any, controversy about points of opinion, to give, so far as our space will allow, such an account of this very remarkable book as may set forth generally what it contains and how it is written.

It is, in the first place, a most lucid narrative of the course of public events and changes in England during the time treated of. If it were only for its clear and impressive exposition of this portion of our history, its value would be very great. We do not know any other work in which the story is told in such a way as to be so easily understood and remembered. The dates are given throughout with all possible precision and distinctness; and by suitable divisions, headings, running titles, and other appliances, both of logical method and of typography, everything is exhibited and impressed almost as it might be by a representation addressing itself to the eye as well as to the understanding. By the help of an excellent Index and Tables of Contents, any passage or fact that may be wanted is almost as easily found as a word is turned up in a Dictionary. In respect of all this the book is a model (much wanted) for the publishers of histories and historical documents.

The contrivances to which we have alluded are by no means merely mechanical: some of them, as has been mentioned, are logical; others are modes of notation here used for the first time. But undoubtedly these ingenuities make a very subordinate part of what is characteristic in the book. It is a remarkable work, most especially, for the abounding

spirit of life that is in it, evincing itself in every line and every word, and in all manner of ways and forms,-in animated narrative, in the forcible painting of scenes and actions, in the dramatic exhibition of character, in passion, in humour, in satire, in invective,-nor ever flagging for a moment, but rather growing stronger and stronger to the end. No writer ever sympathised more intensely with his subject, in all its parts and aspects. The England of the days of the great Civil War and the Protectorate is brought before us again in a manner that is quite marvellous not only in its battles and parliaments and other publicities, but also in at least many little illuminated spots of the great domestic background. All, it is true, still shows far away; the width of two centuries lies between us and those strange goings on, which are so unlike anything that happens now, or that has any where happened since; we seem to see them rather in the air than on the earth;

war appears

Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush

To battle in the clouds."

But the haze that Time has drawn over them is here rolled back for us, as far as may be, by the potent spell of genius. In some respects we think this the most effective revivification of the past that Mr. Carlyle has yet given us. It is not, of course, to be ranked with his 'French Revolution' as a finished History, or prose Epic rather; what we have here is a series of sketches, intermingled with documents, only the materials of a history. The artistic unity, the poetical fusion and distillation, are wanting. But yet both the author's feeling of his subject seems to us in the present case to be deeper, and his handling of it sometimes freer and more fearless, than in the other. No writer ever projected himself into any thing in a more uncompromising way than he does into our old English Puritanism and its great Hero: it is as if it were Cromwell himself sprung to life again among us in this nineteenth century, and gifted with words as fierce and flashing as his conquering sword. And in truth if that burning spirit had been sent upon the earth in our different day, might

he not, instead of the armed and sceptred Champion of Puritanism, have become (with some injury, perhaps, to the soundness of his faith) a great Prose Rhapsodist, or Poetical Historian, and, narrating and celebrating what he would in other circumstances have done, written such another book as this of his Elucidator? Then would have been verified "Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood," in another sense than the poet thought of. At all events, here in his living biographer and vindicator is the completion of Cromwell, what his inarticulate greatness most wanted, one to make his evanescent deeds and speechless meanings resound over the generations. So may every great dumb Hero find one day a tongue!

An Introduction of 124 pages is divided into five Chapters, of which, however, little must be said here. The First, entitled Anti-Dryasdust, is directed against a representative personage named Dryasdust, "who wishes merely to compile torpedo Histories of the philosophical or other sorts, and gain immortal laurels for himself by writing about it and about it ;" and who is at length without ceremony or circumlocution asked, "What does Dryasdust consider that he was born for? that paper and ink were made for?" Poor Dryasdust! he may answer, that if he is of no other use in creation, he fills at least an important part in the present History-the next important, we should almost say, to that of Oliver himself. Whenever our author feels an inclination to deal a kick at something (which is pretty often), there is Dryasdust, an ever-ready football, soft to the toe, and just of the right woolly consistency for relieving it most agreeably of its superfluous energy. Many a parabolic flight through the air does his well-poised mixture of gravity and levity make in the course of these volumes. Mr. Carlyle's quarrel with him may be compendiously stated as founded mainly on the allegation that the said Dryasdust occupies himself too much with the abstract to the neglect of the concrete; in other words, that his histories are all about philosophies and principles instead of about persons and facts. In this way, it seems to be conceived, a history of any country or period

is made to have scarcely more of the life of humanity in it than a system of astronomy. It is a mode of writing which our own historians are declared to have cultivated with especial success. Given

a divine Heroism, to smother it well in human Dulness, to touch it with the mace of Death, so that no human soul shall henceforth recognize it for a Heroism, but all souls shall fly from it as from a chaotic Torpor, an Insanity and Horror,-I will back our English genius against the world in such a problem! Truly we have done great things in that sort; down from Norman William all the way, and earlier; and to the English mind at this hour, the past History of England is little other than a dull dismal labyrinth, in which the English mind if candid will confess that it has found of knowable (meaning even conceivable), of loveable, or memorable-next to nothing. As if we had done no brave thing at all in this earth; as if not men but Nightmares had written of our History! The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a People as their neighbours perhaps, for Valour of Action, and true hard labour in this Earth, since brave Peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver anywhere or anywhen-but alas, it must be owned, in Stupidity of Speech they have no fellow !" Rightly understood, there is perhaps more truth in all this than the astonished reader would at first suppose; but at any rate it is necessary that he should well understand it to be our author's view of the matter. And let us hear too his doctrine of what History should be:-" Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul! For the leafy blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable, so confusedly as we say :-and truly the Art of History, the grand difference between a Dryasdust and a sacred Poet, is very much even this: To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more of the former we shall rejoice to hear; to hear of the latter will be an

:

We

affliction to us; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous malefactors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion it lies all these! Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible, When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past: when both are foolish, and the general soul is overclouded with confusions, with unveracities and discords, there is a 'Rushworthian Chaos."" But does any fact that has ever been ever wholly lose its significance and power of interesting? Has not Mr. Carlyle himself (in his 'Past and Present') brought life and leafiness again for us out of the chancepreserved story of the petty jealousies and distractions of a household of English monks in the twelfth century? should not despair of his doing the same thing were he to try his hand upon the Wars of the Roses. For the present, however, the ghost he would raise is that of our English Puritanism, which he calls "the last of all our Heroisms." As giving us the key-note to all that follows, we must not withhold a few sentences of what he says upon that matter in this introductory chapter:-"Few nobler Heroisms, at bottom perhaps no nobler Heroism ever transacted itself on this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us; overwhelmed under such an avalanche of Human Stupidities as no Heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie there, printed, written, to the extent of tons and square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed; full of every conceivable confusion ;yielding light to very few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many. Dull Pedantry, conceited idle Dilletantism,-prurient Stupidity in what shape soever, is darkness and not light. There are from Thirty to Fifty Thousand unread Pamphlets of the Civil War in the

own

British Museum alone: huge piles of mouldering wreck, wherein, at the rate of perhaps one pennyweight per ton, lie things memorable.” Again; "For indisputably this too was a Heroism; and the soul of it remains part of the eternal soul of things! Here, of our land and lineage, in practical English shape, were Heroes on the Earth once more. Who knew in every fibre, and with heroic daring laid to heart, That an Almighty Judge does verily rule this world; that it is good to fight on God's side, and bad to fight on the Devil's side. The essence of all Heroisms and Veracities that have been, or that will be. Perhaps it was among the nobler and noblest Human Heroisms, this Puritanism of ours; but English Dryasdust could not discern it for a Heroism at all;-as the Heaven's lightning, born of its black tempest, and destructive to pestilential Mud-Giants, is mere horror and terror to the Pedant species everywhere; which, like the owl in any sudden brightness, has to shut its eyes,-or hastily procure smoked spectacles on an improved principle.' It will be perceived that Mr. Carlyle is not given either to treat the illusions of other people with much indulgence, or to suffer any idolatry of his own to be lightly called in question. It may comfort and encourage some readers, however, to be informed that they will not be troubled with any great swarm of Puritanic Heroes in making their way through these volumes; instead of a whole generation, indeed, of such, it turns out that the only proper Hero after all is Cromwell himself. The rest are almost all either fat or frantic, solid, wooden, pudding-headed, or something else as entirely destructive of the Heroic.

The Second Chapter of the Introduction is entitled "Of the Biographies of Oliver "-all of which, from the "Flagellum" of Carrion Heath to the compilation of poor Noble, with his contented purblindness, and occasional "helpless broad innocence of platitude," are whistled down the wind with infinite unconcern. Chapter Third is on "The Cromwell Kindred," a most distinct account of the origin and connexions of the Protector's family, as far as traceable. The Fourth

Chapter, much the longest of the five, recounts the "Events in Oliver's Biography" down to the year 1635, the date of the earliest of the Letters, in the form of Annals, very exactly and luminously, often picturesquely. The following leading dates the reader may be advised to take along with him. Oliver Cromwell, son of Robert Cromwell, younger son of Sir Henry Cromwell, Knight, was born at Huntingdon, on the 25th of April, 1599. He is therefore, as Mr. Carlyle reminds us, always a year older than the century. On the 23rd of April, 1616, he was admitted of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. "Curious enough," observes our author, "of all days on this same day, Shakspeare, as his stone monument still testifies, at Stratford-on-Avon died. . . . . While Oliver Cromwell was entering himself of Sidney Sussex College, William Shakspeare was taking his farewell of this world. Oli ver's father had most likely come with him; it is but twelve miles from Huntingdon; you can go and come in a day. Oliver's father saw Oliver write in the Album at Cambridge: at Stratford, Shakspeare's Ann Hathaway was weeping over his bed. The first world-great thing that remains of English History, the Literature of Shakspeare, was ending; the second world-great thing that remains of English History, the Armed Appeal of Puritanism to the Invisible God of Heaven against many very visible Devils, on Earth and Elsewhere, was, so to speak, beginning. They have their exits and their entrances. And one People in its time plays many parts.' In June, 1617, Cromwell lost his father. He had had both an elder and a younger brother, but they were both dead-as was also an elder sister; he was now become the head of the household, consisting besides of his widowed mother and six daughters. Instead of returning to Cambridge, he is supposed to have come up in the first instance for a time to London, to acquire some knowledge of law. But on the 22nd of August, 1620, he was married at St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of the city of London; upon which he returned to Huntingdon, and took up his residence on the land left

him by his father there. He was returned for his native town to Charles I.'s third parliament, which met in March, 1628. In May, 1631, he sold his property at Huntingdon for 18007., and, taking a grazing farm at St. Ives, removed thither. And here he still was at the date of the first of the Letters collected in the present publication.

The Fifth and last of these Introductory Chapters is entitled "Of Oliver's Letters and Speeches," and tells us what his Elucidator professes to have done in regard to them, and what he thinks of them. He describes the Letters as good

"but withal only good of their kind.” "No eloquence," he adds, "elegance, not always even clearness of expression, is to be looked for in them. They are written with far other than literary aims; written, most of them, in the very flame and conflagration of a revolutionary struggle, and with an eye to the dispatch of indispensable pressing business alone; but it will be found, I conceive, that for such end they are well written. Superfluity, as if by a natural law of the case, the writer has had to discard; whatsoever quality can be dispensed with is indifferent to him. With unwieldy move. ment, yet with a great solid step he presses through, towards his object; has marked out very decisively what the real steps towards it are; discriminating well the essential from the extraneous; forming to himself, in short, a true, not an untrue picture of the business that is to be done. There is in these Letters, as I have said above, a silence still more significant of Oliver to us than any speech they have. Dimly we discover features of an intelligence, and Soul of a Man, greater than any speech. The Intelligence that can, with full satisfaction to itself, come out in eloquent speaking, in musical singing, is, after all, a small Intelligence. He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. Cromwell, emblem of the dumb English, is interesting to me by the very inadequacy of his speech. Heroic insight, valour and belief, without words-how noble is it in comparison to eloquent words without heroic insight!" An ingenious defence of bad composition.