who might meet
me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it
is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against
you, and, on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusations
and confusions, in defence of that!"--

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting,
this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts among
men. Not _Hunger_ alone produced even the French Revolution: no, but
the feeling of the insupportable all-pervading _Falsehood_ which had
now embodied itself in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and
Nonentity, and thereby become _indisputably_ false in the eyes of all!
We will leave the Eighteenth century with its 'liberty 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,