The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61,
No. 378, April, 1847, by Various

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

Author: Various

Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23690]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH ***

Produced by Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram, Josephine
Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
Journals.)

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXVIII. APRIL, 1847. VOL. LXI

CROMWELL.

Mr Carlyle's services to history in collecting and editing these
letters[1] and speeches of Cromwell, all men will readily and gratefully
acknowledge. A work more valuable as a guide to the study of the
singular and complex character of our pious revolutionist, our religious
demagogue, our preaching and praying warrior and usurper, has not been
produced. There is another portion of Mr Carlyle's labours which will
not meet so unanimous an approbation. As _editor_, Mr Carlyle has given
us a valuable work; as _commentator_, the view which he would teach us
to take of English Puritanism is, to our thinking, simply the most
paradoxical, absurd, unintelligible, mad business we ever encountered in
our lives.

Our Hero-worshipper, it must be allowed, has been more fortunate this
time in the selection of his object of devotion than when he shouted to
the skies his Mirabeaus and Dantons. But he makes an unfortunate species
of compensation. In proportion as his hero is more within the bounds of
humanity has his worship become more extravagant and outrageous. He
out-puritans the Puritans; he is more fanatic than his idol; he has
chosen to express himself with such a righteous truculence, such a
sanguinary zeal, such a pious contempt for human virtue and human
sympathies, as would have startled Old Noll himself. It is a bad
religion this hero-worship--at least as practised by Mr Carlyle. Here is
our amiable countryman rendered by it, in turn, a terrorist and a