a touching
manner, what school of piety this army of saints must have proved. At
the battle of Marston Moor a Colonel Walton had lost his son. "He was a
gallant young man, exceedingly gracious," and Cromwell, giving an
account of his death, in his consolatory letter to the father, writes
thus,--"A little after, he said, one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked
him what that was. He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be
any more _the executioner of his enemies!_"

But nothing disturbs the equanimity of our editor, or interrupts his
flow of rapture over the fanaticism of these times, especially when
expressed in the letters of Cromwell. Over the theological effusions
which the general of the Puritan army addresses, from his camp, to the
Edinburgh clergy, Mr Carlyle thus expatiates:--"Dryasdust, carrying his
learned eye over these, and the like letters, finds them, of course,
full of 'hypocrisy,' &c. Unfortunate Dryasdust! they are corruscations
terrible as lightning, and beautiful as lightning, from the innermost
temple of the human soul; intimations, still credible, of what a human
soul does mean when it _believes_ in the Highest--a thing poor Dryasdust
never did, nor will do. The hapless generation that now reads these
words ought to hold its peace when it has read them, and sink into
unutterable reflections, not unmixed with tears, and some substitute for
'sackcloth and ashes,' if it liked. In its poor canting, sniffling,
flimsy vocabulary, there is no word that can make any response to them.
This man has a living God-inspired soul in him, not an enchanted
artificial 'substitute for salt,' as our fashion is. They that have
human eyes can look at him; they that have only owl-eyes need not."

And then follows something upon _light_ and _lightning_. "As lightning
is to light, so is a Cromwell to a Shakspere. The light is beautifuller.
Ah, yes; but, until by lightning and other fierce labour your foul chaos
has become a world, you cannot have any light, or the smallest chance
for any!... The melodious speaker is great, but the melodious worker is
greater than he. Our Time cannot speak at all, but only cant and sneer,
and argumentatively jargon and recite the multiplication-table:
neither, as yet, can it work, except at mere railroads and
cotton-spinning. It will, apparently, return to chaos soon, and then
more lightnings will be needed, lightning enough,--to which Cromwell's
was but a mild matter,--to be follow