to tax itself." We will
not astonish ourselves that the meaning of such men as the Puritans
remained dim to it. To men who believe in no reality at all, how shall a
_real_ human soul, the intensest of all realities, as it were the Voice
of this world's Maker still speaking to us,--be intelligible? What it
cannot reduce into constitutional doctrines relative to "taxing," or
other the like material interest, gross, palpable to the sense, such
a century will needs reject as an amorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens,
Pyms and Ship-money will be the theme of much constitutional eloquence,
striving to be fervid;--which will glitter, if not as fire does, then
as ice does: and the irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of
"madness," "hypocrisy," and much else.

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has
been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man
whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish
men; but if we will consider it, they are but _figures_ for us,
unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have
existed at all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye
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 kin