ly distasteful: he _does_ bring
the saint very prominently upon the field, and we are to recognise in
Cromwell--"an armed soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom;
_doing God's judgments on the enemies of God!_"

"It is a phenomenon," he continues, "not of joyful nature; no, but of
awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe. Not a phenomenon which
you are taught to recognise with bright smiles, and fall in love with at
sight:--thou, art thou worthy to love such a thing; worthy to do other
than hate it, and shriek over it? Darest thou wed the Heaven's
lightning, then; and say to it, Godlike One? Is thy own life beautiful
and terrible to thee; steeped in the eternal depths, in the eternal
plendours?"--(Vol. ii. p. 53.)

In the despatch which Cromwell addresses to the Speaker, Lenthall, after
the storm of Tredah, otherwise Drogheda, we observe that the Puritan is
as strong as ever, but that the Soldier and the great Captain speak out
with increased boldness. Our sectarian farmer of St Ives, who brooded,
by the dark waters of the Ouse, over the wickedness of surpliced
prelacy, whose unemployed spirit sank at times into hypochondria, and
was afflicted with "strange fancies about the town-cross," has been
moving for some time in the very busiest scene the world could furnish
him, and has become the great general of his age. The spirit of the "big
wars" has entered, and grown up side by side with his Puritanism. The
ardour of the battle fully possesses him; he is the conqueror always in
the tremendous charge he makes at the head of his Ironsides; and he lets
appear, notwithstanding his self-denying style, a consciousness and a
triumph in his own skill as a tactician. He is still the genuine
Puritan; but the arduous life, the administrative duties of a soldier
and a general, have also been busy in modifying his character, and
calling forth and exercising that self-confidence, which he will by and
by recognise as "faith" and the leading of Providence, when he assumes
the place of dictator of his country.

From one passage in this despatch it would appear that his severity at
the storm of Drogheda was not wholly the result of predetermined policy,
but rose, in part, from the natural passion which the sword, and the
desperate struggle for life, call forth.

"Divers of the enemy retreated into the Mill-Mount, a place very strong
and of difficult access. The Governor, Sir Arthur Ashton, and divers
considerable office