ft that
colossal figure incomplete. It would seem that they dared not assemble
all the characteristic features of that strange and gigantic prototype
of the religious reformation, of the political revolution of England.
Almost all of them have confined themselves to reproducing on a
larger scale the simple and ominous profile drawn by Bossuet from
his Catholic and monarchical standpoint, from his episcopal pulpit
supported by the throne of Louis XIV.

Like everybody else, the author of this book went no further than
that. The name of Oliver Cromwell suggested to him simply the bare
conception of a fanatical regicide and a great captain. Only on
prowling among the chronicles of the times, which he did with delight,
and on looking through the English memoirs of the seventeenth century,
was he surprised to find that a wholly new Cromwell was gradually
exposed to his gaze. It was no longer simply Bossuet's Cromwell the
soldier, Cromwell the politician; it was a complex, heterogenous,
multiple being, made up of all sorts of contraries--a mixture of much
that was evil and much that was good, of genius and pettiness; a sort
of Tiberius-Dandin, the tyrant of Europe and the plaything of his
family; an old regicide, who delighted to humiliate the ambassadors
of all the kings of Europe, and was tormented by his young royalist
daughter; austere and gloomy in his manners, yet keeping four court
jesters about him; given to the composition of wretched verses; sober,
simple, frugal, yet a stickler for etiquette; a rough soldier and a
crafty politician; skilled in theological disputation and very fond
of it; a dull, diffuse, obscure orator, but clever in speaking the
language of anybody whom he wished to influence; a hypocrite and a
fanatic; a visionary swayed by phantoms of his childhood, believing
in astrologers and banishing them; suspicious to excess, always
threatening, rarely sanguinary; a strict observer of Puritan rules,
and solemnly wasting several hours a day in buffoonery; abrupt and
contemptuous with his intimates, caressing with the secretaries whom
he feared, holding his remorse at bay with sophistry, paltering with
his conscience, inexhaustible in adroitness, in tricks, in resources;
mastering his imagination by his intelligence; grotesque and sublime;
in a word, one of those men who are "square at the base," as they
were described by Napoleon, himself their chief, in his mathematically
exact and poetically figurative la