eople, how if he
explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either have
shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact
hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have worked
in his province any more; nay perhaps they could not have now worked
in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man
among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen
everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to
you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an _error_. But
would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to
disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands
only on some thin traditionality, conventionality to him indubitable,
to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths!
"I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only
my little finger."

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in
all departments of practice! He that cannot withal _keep his mind to
himself_ cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call
it "dissimulation," all this? What would you think of calling the
general of an army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal
and private soldier who pleased to put the question, what his thoughts
were about everything?--Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all
this in a manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex
of such questioning "corporals" rolled confusedly round him through
his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have been as a great
true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one proved falsehood, as
I said; not one! Of what man that ever wound himself through such a
coil of things will you say so much?

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to
the very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; about
their "ambition," "falsity," and suchlike. The first is what I might
call substituting the _goal_ of their career for the course and
starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that
he had determined on being Protector of England, at the time when he
was plowing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all
mapped-out: a program of the whole drama; which he then step by step
dramatically unfolded with all manner of cunning, deceptive
dramaturgy, as he went on,--the hollow scheming [Greek: Ypochr