_ to keep your bodies and their appetites
from putrefying! Your cotton-spinning and thrice-miraculous
mechanism, what is this too, by itself, but a larger kind of
Animalism? Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and shew
contrivance; the Ant lays up accumulation of capital, and has,
for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is no soul in man
higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack
and spinning sea-sand; then I say, man is but an animal, a more
cunning kind of brute: he has no soul, but only a succedaneum
for salt. Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts
that perish, he ought to admit it, I think;--and also straightway
universally kill himself; and so, in a manlike manner, at least,
_end,_ and wave these bruteworlds _his_ dignified farewell!--

Chapter XIV

Sir Jabesh Windbag

Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn Gallows
because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this
country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have
had here for the last five centuries or so. For the last five
centuries, there has been no Governor among us with anything like
similar talent; and for the last two centuries, no Governor, we
may say, with the possibility of similar talent,--with an idea in
the heart of him capable of inspiring similar talent, capable of
coexisting therewith. When you consider that Oliver believed in
a God, the difference between Oliver's position and that of any
subsequent Governor of this Country becomes, the more you reflect
on it, the more immeasurable!

Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a ballotted
soldier strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life;
comports himself there like a man who carried his own life itself
in his hand; like a man whose Great Commander's eye was always
on him. Not without results. Oliver, well-advanced in years,
finds now, by Destiny and his own Deservings, or as he himself
better phrased it, by wondrous successive 'Births of Providence,'
the Government of England put into his hands. In senate-house
and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private and in
public, this man has proved himself a man: England and the voice
of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments, speaking
to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way of
solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what
informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no a