help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as
he was! This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the
wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern
parties; uttered to them a _part_ of his mind. Each little party thought
him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find him not of their
party, but of his own party. Was it his blame? At all seasons of his
history he must have felt, among such people, 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 now have 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," "f