the happier, Saturn was the greater god;--rather cannibal or so, but one
excuses it in him, as in some other heroes one knows of.

"It is, as you say, your destiny to write about Cromwell: and you
will make a book of him, at which the ears of our grandchildren will
tingle;--and as one may hope that the ears of human nature will be
growing longer and longer, the tingling will be proportionately greater
than we are accustomed to. Do what you can, I fear there will be little
gain from the Royalists. There is something very small about the biggest
of them that I have ever fallen in with, unless you count old Hobbes a
Royalist.

"Curious to see that you have them exactly preserved in the Country
Gentlemen of our day; while of the Puritans not a trace remains except
in History. Squirism had already, in that day, become the _caput
mortuum_ that it is now; and has therefore, like other mummies, been
able to last. What was opposed to it was the Life of Puritanism,--then
on the point of disappearing; and it too has left its mummy at Exeter
Hall on the platform and elsewhere. One must go back to the Middle
Ages to see Squirism as rampant and vivacious as Biblicism was in the
Seventeenth Century: and I suppose our modern Country Gentlemen are
about as near to what the old Knights and Barons were who fought the
Crusades, as our modern Evangelicals to the fellows who sought the Lord
by the light of their own pistol-shots.

"Those same Crusades are now pleasant matter for me. You remember, or
perhaps you do not, a thing I once sent you about Coeur-de-Lion. Long
since, I settled to make the Cantos you saw part of a larger Book; and
worked at it, last autumn and winter, till I had a bad illness. I am
now at work on it again; and go full sail, like _my_ hero. There are six
Cantos done, roughly, besides what you saw. I have struck out most
of the absurdest couplets, and given the whole a higher though still
sportive tone. It is becoming a kind of _Odyssey_, with a laughing and
Christian Achilles for hero. One may manage to wrap, in that chivalrous
brocade, many things belonging to our Time, and capable of interesting
it. The thing is not bad; but will require great labor. Only it is labor
that I thoroughly like; and which keeps the maggots out of one's brain,
until their time.

"I have never spoken to you, never been able to speak to you, of the
change in my life,--almost as great, one fancies, as one's own death.
Even now, although