ye
but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notions
of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a _conscience_ in it,
the essence of all _real_ souls, great or small? No, we cannot figure
Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study him and his
career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is no evidence of
it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of calumny this man
has been subject to, after being represented as the very prince of
liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some cunning
counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood
brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by
him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking
Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof!--Let us
leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They
are not portraits of the man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the
joint product of hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very
different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier
obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all
betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous
melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness _too_ deep for
him. Of those stories of "Spectres;" of the white Spectre in broad
daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound
to believe much--probably no more than of the other black Spectre, or
Devil in person, to whom the Officer _saw_ him sell himself before
Worcester Fight!

But the mournful, over-sensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his
young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician
told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at
midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near
dying, and "had fancies about the Town-cross." These things are
significant. Such an excitable, deep-feeling nature, in that rugged
stubborn strength of his, is not the symptom of falsehood; it is the
symptom and promise of quite other than falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have fallen,
for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth; but if so,
speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he is
married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man.