.... Your enemy, as I tell you, naturally, by
that antipathy which is in him,--and also providentially, (that is, by
special ordering of Providence.) An enmity is put in him by God. 'I will
put an enmity between thy seed and her seed,' which goes but for little
among statesmen, but is more considerable than all things. And he that
considers not such natural enmity, the _providential_ enmity as well as
the _accidental_, I think he is not well acquainted with the Scripture,
and the things of God,"--(_Speech_ 5.)

In fine, we see in Cromwell, every where and throughout, the genuine,
fervid Puritan--the Puritan general, the Puritan statesman. He was a
man, and, therefore, doubtless ambitious; he rose through a scene of
civil as well as military contest, and, doubtless, was not unacquainted
with dissimulation; but if we would describe him briefly, it is as the
GREAT PURITAN that he must, ever be remembered in history.

In parting company with the editor of these letters and speeches, we
feel that we have not done justice to the editorial industry and
research which these volumes display. Our space would not permit it. For
the same reason we have been unable to quote several instances of vivid
narrative, which we had hoped to transfer to our own pages. And as to
our main quarrel with him--this outrageous adoption of Puritanical bile
and superstition,--we have been haunted all along by a suspicion we have
occasionally expressed, that the man _cannot_ be in earnest. He could
not have been so abandoned by his common sense. He has been so
accustomed to mingle sport, and buffoonery, and all sorts of wilful
extravagance, with his most serious mood, that he perhaps does not know
himself when, and how far, he is in earnest. In turning over the leaves
of his work, we light, towards the end of the second volume, upon the
following passage, which may, _perhaps_, explain the temper of the
writer, when he is abetting and encouraging his fanatical heroes. He is
uttering some sarcasms upon the poor "art of speech."

"Is there no sacredness, then, any longer in the miraculous tongue of
man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle
to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this
two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without
rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence,
with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up
that; or b