falling into hell; and, in the end, you will yourselves be castaways.

We make no apology for giving forth this certain, though it may seem somewhat authoritative, sound. Never can the lesson be too often or too emphatically taught, that it is by Davids, not by Goliaths, that the Lord fights His battles. The volume before us exhibits the lesson, translated into living facts. We confess there is a meagreness, an unshapeliness, sometimes even a dryness, about the various detached pieces,-which doubtless would have been avoided, had the respected Editor been left at liberty, by the rules of the Society (which forbid anything in the shape of commentary,) to condense the antique materials into a connected narrative. But Mr Tweedie has done his part judiciously. And we shall be glad to see another volume as rich in pregnant matter as that which we for the present close.

ART. VII.-Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations. By THOMAS CARLYLE. 2 vols. London, 1845.

"I CONFESS, for it behoves me to deal plainly with you; I must confess, I would say, I hope I may be understood in this, for, indeed, I must be tender what I say to such an audience as this. I say I would be understood, that in this argument I do not make a parallel betwixt men of a different mind and a parliament, which shall have their desires. I know there is no comparison, nor can it be urged upon me, that my words have the least color that way, because the Parliament seems to give liberty to me to say any thing to you. As that that is a tender of my humble reasons, and judgment, and opinion, to them, and if they are such, and will be such to them, and are faithful servants, and will be so to the supreme authority, and the legislature wheresoever it is: If I say I should not tell you, knowing their minds to be so, I should not be faithful if I should not tell you so, to the end you may report it to the Parliament. I shall say something for myself. For my own mind, I do profess it, I am not a man scrupulous about words or names of such things I have not; but, as I have the word of God, and I hope I shall ever have it, for the rule of my conscience, for my information, so truly men that have been led in dark paths through the providence and dispensation of God, why, surely it is not to be objected to a man, for who can love to walk in the dark? But Providence does so dispose."

The above amorphous conglomeration of visible darkness is given by David Hume, as a sample of the speeches of Cromwell, while he adds the following characteristic remarks:- The great defect in Oliver's speeches consists not in his want of elocution,

but in his want of ideas. The sagacity of his actions, and the absurdity of his discourses, form the most prodigious contrast that ever was known. The collection of all his speeches, letters, sermons (for he also wrote sermons,) would make a great curiosity, and, with a few exceptions, might justly pass for one of the most nonsensical books in the world. Prophetic David!

There seems to be no head, or particular, or application, of any of the Protector's sermons extant; but the collection of all his remaining letters and speeches has been made, and will justly pass for one of the most extraordinary books ever printed. If there be any nonsense' in the volumes edited by Mr Carlyle, Cromwell is not the author of it. What'sense' the latter had concerning himself, and God, and Jesus Christ, and human life, with its present duties and eternal results, and how he expressed that sense in word or deed, will be considered immediately; but we must first of all, as a continuation of a former article in this journal, speak of his biographer, elucidator, and commentator. For the elucidations' are not of the historical kind merely. In this work, as in all his previous ones, Mr Carlyle comes out and provokes attention as a master in Israel,-an expounder of the eternal laws,' the interpreter of the hieroglyphics of our mysterious universe, as one who has possession of the blazing torch and subtle clue, and who has, guided by these, gained escape from dim, and desolate, and dreary regions; no more imprisoned in the lower and temporary, as he would and does call it, but breathing the pure and sunlit air of the upper and perennial realms. He came into our world, weeping for paradise lost; he has passed through the burning anxiety of paradise sought for; and now he has stepped within the gate of paradise regained? Homer led his Ulysses into the shadowy spirit world, mainly with the intent of teaching the doctrine of immortality; and it will be found that Mr Carlyle aims at more than simply furnishing us with a biography or chapter of history.*

It is from him, we believe, that modern peculiar estimates of the power and function of the press or literaturet have emanated. To him and others, who have put on his intellectual livery, the press is the is the very ark of the covenant, and the genuine priesthood of our day minister, not at altars in surplices, or in pulpits in Geneva gowns, but at the fount of types. The hope is cherished that the race of theologians will, ere long, become extinct, inspiration having failed them, and that the instructors of mankind will be sent forth from the new school of the prophets. Such notions will be smiled at, as, perhaps, even more ro

may be smiled at as even more romantic than those of young England. Nevertheless, they are gravely entertained, not by the cold, material, terrene, school of Chambers, or the glittering Macaulays, but by men of nobler aspirations and of deeper thought. For ourselves, we have to say that, believing Mr Carlyle to be the fontal source of such views, we have always opened his works with high expectancy, and given them no common share of our time and study. No thinking soul will, in the main, object to his idea of literature or of art in print. But when the ideal is so high, we look for actual correspondence. Mr Carlyle observes in his essay on the author of Waverley, that the genius of the nineteenth century cast its mantle over a tall figure walking to and fro on the dusty floor of our Edinburgh Parliament House: but that poor Walter Scott had no God's truth, no heavenly message to announce.' Yes! he died and made no sign, like the cardinal of old. What truth, then, has this man to tell us?

A friend of ours was one of a party, in a well-known mansion in London, on a certain occasion. The lady of the house being, in her own conceit, an immensely superior individual to the singers, named the Lake School, was commenting to a young poet and barrister on the puerilities of 'Peter Bell,' and the affectation of Wordsworth. It ended in his being banished the coterie for ever; but the young man could not help saying: 'Perhaps your ladyship may not be aware that all that about Peter Bell and affectation has been unheard of for the last ten years.' He should have added, men are not now measuring him with Bond Street tailor-tape*-they are listening to the deep, calm voice from the northern hills. High patronage and sunny smiles were lost; but the popularity of one of the finest historical dramas of modern times was not in the least damaged by the loss. What was said of the writer of the Excursion is just as true now of Carlyle. Who now thinks of objecting to his style or dress? It is felt by all who can feel, that it is quite natural to him. He has affected no one, imitated no one. All imitation, says Emerson, is suicide.

* Talking of tailor-tape, let the reader peruse the following fable, which Mr Carlyle repeats as an illustration of his descent to the past. 'Balder, the white sungod, beloved of gods and men, was dead. His brother Hermoder, urged by his mother's tears and the tears of the universe, went forth to seek him. He rode through gloomy winding valleys... nine days; at Sonesome Bridge he found the portress Modgudor, "the vexer of minds."-Hermoder rode on, leapt sheer over Helas Gates: saw Balder; but could not bring him back. Balder beckoned him mournfully a still adieu: Nanna, Balder's wife, sent "a thimble" to her mother as a memorial; Balder never could return. 'Old portress Modgudor,' says Carlyle, is Dryasdust, in Norse petticoat and hood.' But he says nothing of the thimble, which is, to us, a very significant emblem. Is it not a satire on the questionable style, in which history has been stitched, or rather patched, together?

VOL. XIX, NO. II.

Mr Carlyle has no symptom of decay about him. He is quite himself. But, having spoken on this point formerly, we leave it, and return to our question, which involves matters just so much greater, as the soul is greater than its frail tabernacle.

We look backward for half a century, and can find no parallel to this writer, until the eye rests on the hermit of Olney; the Saxon psalmist, William Cowper; and we venture the assertion, notwithstanding the manifold and manifest discrepancies and contrasts between the two; for there is to us unspeakable significance in this one point of agreement, that we have two laymen preaching to the times, earnestly struggling, amid the gloom which shrouds their own spirits, by keen weaponed satire, or ge nial humour, or grave didactic word to medicate the evil of the day, which presses heavily on both. What Cowper taught is known, or may easily be discovered; but what, categorically, is the teaching of Carlyle, who can tell?

There are two considerations which here call for lucid, unreserved statement of doctrine or belief,—the one is found in the condition of our country, which, as is emphatically said in this book, is staggering devil-wards and mammon-wards, the other lies in the life of the man here narrated. Now, if ever, having full confidence in our author's sincerity, we looked for frank and explicit exposition. And what, after much re-perusing of these volumes, have we gained? This, in few words, is the general result. The veil is removed from the countenance and heart of Cromwell, but the author has put it on himself. Carlyle, with all his high endeavour and manful courage, is still a 'veiled prophet.' We complain not of affectation, but of RESERVE. The reserve is not of the Oxford kind. Tractarians tell us the truths which it is not convenient to expose to the private judgment or rude gaze of the laity. Their esoteric sublimities are announced, and the reasons given why it were dangerous to preach them to the crowd. In their case, we know what they do not mean to say. But in Carlyle, 'deep calls unto deep.' No man can affirm from this book what the writer of it really believes, or what he would have his readers believe. Am I to become Calvinist like Oliver, or Quaker like Barclay, or hold that 'mere reason is God?* The materials whence to gain an answer to these questions, we will as succinctly as we can lay before our readers.

Let us first listen to Carlyle's diagnosis of the times. Does Cowper ask, why weeps the muse for England? Here is an answer.†The Christian doctrines, which in that seventeenth century dwelt alive in every(?) heart, have now in a manner died out

of all hearts-very mournful to behold-and are not the guidance of this world any more. Here, properly, lies the grand unintelligibility of the seventeenth century for us... The age of the Puritans is not extinct only, and gone away from usits earnest purport* awakens no resonance in our frivolous hearts. We understand not, one in a thousand, what it ever could have meant.' 'On the whole, say not, good reader, as is often done, "it was then all one as now." 'It was considerably different

then from now.'

There are countless passages, of a similar tone and tenor, scattered up and down in these volumes, all of which are designed to teach us, that if we had free trade all over the globe to-morrow, and game and corn laws abolished for ever, and fleet fire-chariots careering at sixty miles an hour from Penzance to Caithness, and all our children adepts in the rule of three, and cheap penny histories loading our cottage shelves, and shower and plunge baths for every unwashed body in the kingdom, and measureless liberty to tax ourselves withal: still one thing were needed for Britain, without which, she would remain ignoble, unheroic-differing from the Puritan time not by infinitesimals but infinites; meaner, poorer, less than that, as the shot belt about the waist of the modern squire differs from a Bible doctrine carried in the heart, as Peel from Cromwell, James Graham from Secretary Milton, a corporation of corn-chandlers from a church of the living God, Henry Brougham from Matthew Hales, and the Constitution of Man from Comus and the Paradise Lost.

"It is,” our author continues, "with other feelings than those of poor peddling dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism-antique reign of God . . . to modern reign of NoGod, whom men name Devil: this is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man." I. i.

Again:

"To assert that Óliver had lived a wild life about town or elsewhere, was then a great reproach to him; it would be now, in our present strange condition of the moral law, one knows not what. With a moral law gone all to moonshine, with the hard stone tables, the God-given precepts and eternal penalties, dissolved all in cant and mealy-mouthed official flourishings, it might perhaps, with certain parties, be a credit!"

For, we quote once more

* Vol. i. pp. 15, 122.

+ Ibid. p. 93.

+ Ibid. p. 68.