a wonderful perception of beauty, made Carlyle one of the most
influential English writers of the nineteenth century. His
marriage in 1826 with Jane Baillie Welsh was an unhappy one.
Carlyle died on February 4, 1881, having survived his wife
fifteen years. The three volumes of "Cromwell's Letters and
Speeches," with elucidations by Carlyle, were published in
1845; the first work, one might say, conveying a sympathetic
appreciation of the great Protector, all histories of the man
and his times having been hitherto written from the point of
view either of the Royalists or of the revolutionary Whigs. To
neither of these was an understanding of Puritanism at all
possible. Moreover, to the Cavaliers, Cromwell was a regicide;
to the Whigs he was a military usurper who dissolved
parliaments. To both he was a Puritan who applied Biblical
phraseology to practical affairs--therefore, a canting
hypocrite, though undoubtedly a man of great capacity and
rugged force.

_I.--Puritan Oliver_

One wishes there were a history of English Puritanism, the last of all
our heroisms. At bottom, perhaps, no nobler heroism ever transacted
itself upon this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us in the elysium
we English have provided for our heroes! The Rushworthian elysium.
Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Puritanism is not
of the nineteenth century, but of the seventeenth; it is grown
unintelligible, what we may call incredible. Heroes who knew in every
fibre, and with heroic daring laid to heart, that an Almighty justice
does verily rule this world; that it is good to fight on God's side, and
bad to fight on the devil's side. Well, it would seem the resuscitation
of a heroism from the past is no easy enterprise.

Of Biographies of Cromwell, there are none tolerable. Oliver's father
was a country gentleman of good estate, not a brewer; grandson of Sir
Richard Cromwell, or Williams, nephew of Thomas Cromwell "mauler of
monasteries"; his mother a Stuart (Steward), twelfth cousin or so of
King Charles. He was born in 1599, went to Cambridge in the month that
Shakespeare died. Next year his father died, and Oliver went no more to
Cambridge. He was the only son. In 1620 he married.

He sat in the Parliament of 1628-29; the Petition of Right Parliament; a
most brave and noble Parliament, ending with that scene when Holles held
the Speaker