claimed for men of genius. Plato was certainly correct in alleging that a constitutional unsteadiness has been associated with many forms of genius. Perilous excitability, subtle disease, often attend it. Let men of genius be considerately, tenderly, delicately treated,-only not worshipped.

I have been thus explicit on the subject of hero-worship because it is to his great mistake on this point that I trace everything to which I most seriously object in Mr. Carlyle's later writings. In some respects these are superior to his earlier; but, on the whole, the canker of hero-worship eats into them more deeply; and though I should hesitate to say that his book on Cromwell reveals any trace of failing power, or is not, all things considered, his greatest achievement, I regard it as marred by the evil influence. Heroworship bears therein its natural fruit of injustice towards such men as Hampden, Pym, Vane, and others, who toiled as faithfully in the cause of Puritanism and of England as Cromwell himself. Historically also the same influence depresses the value of the book; for the constitutional aspects of the struggle are slightly, almost scornfully, treated, and a certain amount of obscurity is thus inevitably thrown over the relation of the Puritan Revolution to the course of political development, since the seventeenth century, in England and America. Cromwell being viewed from the first as a hero, to be worshipped, an exaggerated idea is presented of the injustice that had been previously done him. This remark applies more particularly to the preliminary vindication of Cromwell in the Lectures on Heroes than to the Life and Letters; but the reference to preceding writers on Cromwell in the Lectures on Heroes remains to this day unaltered. "Few Puritans of note," it is there written, "but find their apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet,

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and finds no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth but he betrayed the cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartufe; turning all that noble struggle for constitutional liberty into a farce played for his own benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell." I shall not say that any author of European reputation, at the time when this was written, had accurately stated in how far Cromwell could justly be charged with the "wickedness" of erecting a military despotism on the ruins of that liberty for which he and his fellows had fought. It is more than doubtful whether a majority of competent judges would decide, at this hour, that Mr. Carlyle's own vindication on this point is complete. Such judges would not accept Mr. Carlyle's doctrine of the partial irresponsibility of the hero, and the Divine right of men of transcendent genius to dismiss Parliaments and supersede laws. But the terms in which Macaulay, writing in the Edinburgh Review, and, therefore, expressing an opinion in which he reckoned on the concurrence of Liberal Europe, had previously characterised Cromwell, prove that the theory of his being a Tartufe, who turned the struggle for constitutional liberty into a farce, had been thoroughly discarded. Comparing him with Cæsar and Napoleon, Macaulay placed Cromwell above the latter. He expressly denied that the Protector's ambition was of "an impure or selfish kind," which it must have been if it was like the ambition of Tartufe. "No sovereign," wrote Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review, so early as 1828, "ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings and interests of his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary measures; but he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was that he loved to surround his throne

with such men as Hale and Blake. Hence it was that he allowed so large a share of political liberty to his subjects, and that, even when an opposition dangerous to his power and to his person almost compelled him to govern by the sword, he was still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favourable season, free institutions might spring. We firmly believe that, if his first Parliament had not commenced its debates by disputing his title, his government would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able abroad." This is the language of cordial and proud appreciation; and it was surely too much, after this had appeared in the most influential of European periodicals, from the pen of one of the most brilliant of European writers, to say that "selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity" were the characteristics universally attributed to the great Protector.

CHAPTER VII.

HIS CROMWELL: HUME'S UNFORTUNATE

PROPHECY.

HE exceptions taken in the preceding chapter to Carlyle's Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell are nowise incompatible with an almost reverential admiration for the book. Whatever had been done for Cromwell before its appearance, much remained to be done. Carlyle afforded him what, most certainly, no previous writer had been able to afford him-the sympathetic interpretation of a kindred spirit. "There may still be discussion," I have recently had occasion to write, "long and searching, about Cromwell; but until Mr. Carlyle wrote, his life was unintelligible. Carlyle raised him from the dead."

It was not, however, by sympathy of kindred genius alone that Carlyle could enable his contemporaries to understand Cromwell. Hard work was to be done, work of a peculiarly tedious and wearing kind, work requiring immense patience and the most sustained attention, work to which men of high literary genius are seldom willing to stoop. The history of literature affords no richer treat than may be derived from a comparison of Cromwell as painted by Hume, with Cromwell as painted by Carlyle. Cautious David Hume was so sure of his judgment, and that of his knowing contemporaries in the sceptical eighteenth century, respecting the great Puritan, that he ventured to utter a kind of prophecy upon the subject.

"The great defect in Oliver's speeches," says Hume, in a note to the sixty-first chapter of his History of England, "consists not in his want of elocution, but in his want of ideas. The sagacity of his actions, and the absurdity of his discourse, form the most prodigious contrast that ever was known. The collection of all his speeches, letters, sermons (for he also wrote sermons), would make a great curiosity, and, with a few exceptions, might justly pass for one of the most nonsensical books in the world.” Cromwell preached sermons, but Hume was letting fly an arrow into the air when he spoke of Cromwell writing sermons, nor did the rough troopers to whom he preached take reports of his sermons. But the letters and speeches of Cromwell, Hume's prophecy respecting which I put into italics, have been collected by Carlyle; and the collection forms, by universal consent, one of the noblest books within the whole range of literature. Hume quotes a passage from one of Cromwell's speeches, and, as Hume gives it, no mortal can make sense of it. The subject to which it relates is the offer of the title of king to Cromwell. Turning from the coil and welter of unintelligible words, presented to us as Cromwell's by Hume, we take up Carlyle and read the passage. The artist-biographer, basing his art, as all true art is based, on honest labour, realises for us, to begin with, the exact position in which Oliver stood at the time. The Parliament was offering him the Crown; the Ironsides could not be got to tolerate his assumption of kingship; and Cromwell had to solve the very ticklish problem of letting the Parliament know, without inflicting any insult, that the will of the Ironsides, not the will of the Parliament, must, in this instance, be done. Having thus, by accurate knowledge, made the past present, Carlyle takes up the unpunctuated jumble of words that had contented Hume; fits clause to clause; and traces the frontier line between the sentences. The change is