Oliver Cromwell

or over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the leaders of English thought, political and literary; the very men who were carrying to fruition Cromwell's tremendous policies being often utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces for which he stood-Puritanic and otherwise-at their real worth, and his judgment about them was, in all essentials, accurate. But the true appreciation of the place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the seventeenth century began with the publication of his life and letters by Carlyle. The gnarled genius of the man who worshipped the heroes of the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted the heroes of the present, enabled him to write with a loftiness and intensity that befitted his subject. But Carlyle's singular incapacity to "see veracity," as he would himself have phrased it, made him at times not merely tell half-truths, but deliberately invert the truth. He was of that not uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shuddering from actual contact with whatever it, in theory, most admires, and which, therefore, is reduced in self-justification to misjudge and misrepresent those facts of past history which form precedents for what is going on before the author's own eyes.