alsity," and such like. The first is what I might
call substituting the _goal_ of their career for the course and
starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that
he had determined on being Protector of England, at the time when he was
ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all
mapped out: a program of the whole drama; which he then step by step
dramatically unfolded, with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy,
as he went on,--the hollow, scheming [Gr.] _Upokrites_, or Play-actor,
that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such
cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How much does
one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is all dim;
an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities,
vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had _not_ his life lying all in that
fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that unfathomable cunning
of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it
so; but to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall away
of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view
by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in
view;--but look whether such is practically the fact! Vulgar History,
as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the best kinds of
History only remember it now and then. To remember it duly with rigorous
perfection, as in the fact it _stood_, requires indeed a rare faculty;
rare, nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for faculty; or more than
Shakspeare; who could _enact_ a brother man's biography, see with the
brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things _he_ saw; in
short, _know_ his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to do.
Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which distort our image
of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try to represent
them so; in sequence, as they _were_; not in the lump, as they are
thrown down before us.

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, refers to this
same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men; we
mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious in that
sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man
who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes
about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims