efore and
during the war of secession accordingly turned to Cromwell. Had our
Puritan ancestors remained at home till the civil war in England, they
would have fought under the great Oliver, and it is natural that their
descendants should venerate him. All young men of the period of which I
am speaking, who were interested in history, read Macaulay, the first
volume of whose history appeared in 1848, and they found in Cromwell a
hero to their liking. Carlyle's Cromwell was published three years
before, and those who could digest stronger food found the great man
therein portrayed a chosen one of God to lead his people in the right
path. Everybody echoed the thought of Carlyle when he averred that ten
years more of Oliver Cromwell's life would have given another history to
all the centuries of England.

In these two volumes Gardiner presents a different conception of
Cromwell from that of Carlyle and Macaulay, and in greater detail. We
arrive at Gardiner's notion by degrees, being prepared by the reversal
of some of our pretty well established opinions about the Puritans.
Macaulay's epigrammatic sentence touching their attitude towards
amusements undoubtedly colored the opinions of men for at least a
generation. "The Puritan hated bear-baiting," he says, "not because it
gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."
How coolly Gardiner disposes of this well-turned rhetorical phrase: "The
order for the complete suppression of bear-baiting and bull-baiting at
Southwark and elsewhere was grounded, not, as has been often repeated,
on Puritan aversion to amusements giving 'pleasure to the spectators,'
but upon Puritan disgust at the immorality which these exhibitions
fostered." Again he writes: "Zealous as were the leaders of the
Commonwealth in the suppression of vice, they displayed but little of
that sour austerity with which they have frequently been credited. On
his way to Dunbar, Cromwell laughed heartily at the sight of one soldier
overturning a full cream tub and slamming it down on the head of
another, whilst on his return from Worcester he spent a day hawking in
the fields near Aylesbury. 'Oliver,' we hear, 'loved an innocent jest.'
Music and song were cultivated in his family. If the graver Puritans did
not admit what has been called 'promiscuous dancing' into their
households, they made no attempt to prohibit it elsewhere." In the
spring of 1651 appeared the "English Dancing Master," conta