twilight, rendering the Past credible, the Ghosts of the Past in some glimpses of them visible! Such is the effect of contem porary letters always; and I can very confidently recommend Oliver's as good of their kind. A man intent on forcing for himself some path through that gloomy chaos called History of the Seventeenth Century, and looking face to face upon the same, may perhaps try it by this method as hopefully as by another. Here is an irregular row of beacon-fires, once all luminous as suns; and with a certain inextinguishable erubescence still, in the abysses of the dead deep Night. Let us look here. In shadowy outlines, in dimmer and dimmer crowding forms, the very figure of the old dead Time itself may perhaps be faintly discernible here!

I called these Letters good,-but withal only good of their kind. No eloquence, 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 despatch 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 movement, 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, valor and belief, without words,-how noble is it in comparison to elo. quent words without heroic insight!

I have corrected the spelling of these Letters; I have punctuated, and divided them into paragraphs, in the inodern manner. The Originals, so far as I have seen such, have in general no paragraphs: if the Letter is short, it is usually found written on the first leaf of the sheet; often with the conclusion, or some postscript, subjoined crosswise on the margin,-indicating that there was no blotting paper in those days; that the hasty writer was loath to turn the leaf. Oliver's spelling and pointing are of the sort common to educated persons in his time; and readers that wish it may have specimens of him in abundance, and of all due dimness, in many printed Books: but to us, intent here to have the Letters read and understood, it seemed very proper at once and altogether to get rid of that encumbrance. Would the rest were all as easily got rid of! Here and there, to bring out the struggling sense, I have added or rectified a word, but taken care to point out the same; what words in the Text of the Letters are mine, the reader will find marked off by single commas: it was of course my supreme duty to avoid altering, in any respect, not only the sense, but the smallest feature in the physiognomy, of the Original. And so 'a minimum of annotation' having been added, what minimum would serve the purpose,-here are the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell; of which the reader, with my best wishes, but not with any very high immediate hope of mine in that particular, is to make what he can.

Surely it was far enough from probable that these Letters of Cromwell, written originally for quite other objects, and selected not by the Genius of History, but by blind Accident which has saved them hitherto and destroyed the rest,-can illuminate for a modern man this Period of our Annals, which for all moderns, we may say, has become a gulf of bottomless darkness! Not so easily will the modern man domesticate himself in a scene of things every way so foreign to him. Nor could any measurable exposition of mine, on this present occasion, do much to illuminate the dead dark world of the Seventeenth Century, into which the reader is about to enter. He will gradually get to understand, as I have said, that the Seventeenth Century did exist; that it was not a waste rubbish-continent of Rushworth-Nalson Statepapers, of Philosophical Scepticisms, Dilettantisms, Dryasdust

Torpedoisms;-but an actual flesh-and-blood Fact; with color in its cheeks, with awful august heroic thoughts in its heart, and at last with steel sword in its hand! Theoretically this is a most small postulate, conceded at once by everybody; but practically it is a very large one, seldom or never conceded; the due practical conceding of it amounts to much, indeed to the sure promise of all. I will venture to give the reader two little pieces of advice, which, if his experience resemble mine, may prove furthersome to him in this inquiry: they include the essence of all that I have discovered respecting it.

The first is, By no means to credit the widespread report that these Seventeenth-Century Puritans were superstitious crackbrained persons; given up to enthusiasm, the most part of them; the minor ruling part being cunning men, who knew how to assume the dialect of the others, and thereby, as skilful Machiavels, to dupe them. This is a wide-spread report; but an untrue one. I advise my reader to try precisely the opposite hypothesis. To consider that his Fathers, who had thought about this World very seriously indeed, and with very considerable thinking faculty indeed, were not quite so far behindhand in their conclusions respecting it. That actually their enthusiasms,' if well seen into, were not foolish but wise. That Machiavelism, Cant, Official Jargon, whereby a man speaks openly what he does not mean, were, surprising as it may seem, much rarer then than they have ever since been. Really and truly it may in a manner be said, Cant, Parliamentary and other Jargon, were still to invent in this world! O Heavens, one could weep at the contrast! Cant was not fashionable at all; that stupendous invention of 'Speech for the purpose of concealing Thought' was not yet made. A man wagging the tongue of him, as if it were the clapper of a bell to be rung for economic purposes, and not so much as attempting to convey any inner thought, if thought he have, of the matter talked of,—would at that date have awakened all the horror in men's minds, which at all dates, and at this date too, is due to him. The accursed thing! No man as yet dared to do it; all men believing that God would judge them. In the History of the Civil War far and wide, I have not fallen in with one such phenomenon. Even Archbishop Laud and Peter Hev

lin meant what they say; through their words do you look direct into the scraggy conviction they have formed :—or if ' lying Peter' do lie, he at least knows that he is lying! Lord Clarendon, a man of sufficient unveracity of heart, to whom indeed whatso ever has direct veracity of heart is more or less horrible, speaks always in official language; a clothed, nay sometimes even quilted dialect, yet always with some considerate body in the heart of it, never with none! The use of the human tongue was then other than it now is. I counsel the reader to leave all that of Cant, Dupery, Machiavelism, and so forth, decisively lying at the threshold. He will be wise to believe that these Puritans do mean what they say, and to try unimpeded if he can discover what that is. Gradually a very stupendous phenomenon may rise on his astonished eye. A practical world based on Belief in God ;— such as many centuries had seen before, but as never any century since has been privileged to see. It was the last glimpse of it in our world, this of English Puritanism: very great, very glorious; tragical enough to all thinking hearts that look on it from these days of ours.

My second advice is, Not to imagine that it was Constitution, Liberty of the people to tax themselves,' Privilege of Parliament, Triennial or Annual Parliaments, or any modification of these sublime Privileges now waxing somewhat faint in our admirations, that mainly animated our Cromwells, Pyms, and Hampdens to the heroic efforts we still admire in retrospect. Not these very measurable 'Privileges,' but a far other and deeper, which could not be measured; of which these, and all grand social improvements whatsoever, are the corollary. Our ancient Puritan Reformers were, as all Reformers that will ever much benefit this earth are always, inspired by a Heavenly Purpose. To see God's own Law, then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world; to see this, or the true unwearied aim and struggle towards this: it was a thing worth living for and dying for! Eternal Justice; that God's Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven: corollaries enough will flow from that, if that be there; if that be not there, no corollary good for much will flow. It was the general spirit of England in the Seventeenth Century. In other somewhat

adly disfigured form, we have seen the same immortal hope take practical shape in the French Revolution. and once more astonish the world. That England should all become a Church, if you like to name it so: a Church, presided over not by sham-priests in Four surplices at Allhallowtide,' but by true good-consecrated ones, whose hearts the Most High had touched and hallowed with his fire this was the prayer of many, it was the godlike hope and effort of some.

Our modern methods of Reform differ somewhat,-as indeed the issue testifies. I will advise my reader to forget the modern methods of Reform; not to remember that he has ever heard of a modern individual called by the name of Reformer, if he would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Cromwells, Pyms, Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be firebrands of the Devil, have had still worse measure from the Dryasdust Philosophies, and sceptical Histories, of later times. They really did resemble firebrands of the Devil, if you looked at them through spectacles of a certain color. For fire is always fire. But by no spectacles, only by mere blinders and wooden-eyed spectacles, can the flame-girt Heaven's messenger pass for a poor mouldy Pedant and Constitution-monger, such as this would make him out to be!

On the whole, say not, good reader, as is often done, “It was then all one as now." Good reader, it was considerably different

then from now. Men indolently say, "The Ages are all alike: ever the same sorry elements over again, in new vesture; the Issue of it always a melancholy farce-tragedy, in one Age as in another!" Wherein lies very obviously a truth; but also in secret a very sad error withal. Sure enough, the highest Life touches always, by large sections of it, on the vulgar and univer sal: he that expects to see a Hero, or a Heroic Age, step forth into practice in yellow Drury-lane stage-boots, and speak in blank verse for itself, will look long in vain. Sure enough, in the Heroic Century as in the Unheroic, knaves and cowards, and cunning greedy persons were not wanting,-were, if you will, extremely abundant. But the question always remains, Did they lie chained, subordinate in this world's business; coerced by steel whips, or in whatever other effectual way, and sent whimpering