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 practise! He that cannot withal _keep his mind to
himself_ cannot practise 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 _Hypocrites_, or
Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but
universal in such cases. And think for an instant how different the
fact is! How much does one of _us_ foresee of his own life? Short way
ahead of us it is all dim; an _un_wound skein of possibilities, of
apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell
had _not_ his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he
needed then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact
dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him it
was in no measur