BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCLXXVIII. APRIL, 1847. Vol. LXI
Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.
[CROMWELL.]
[LAYS AND LEGENDS OF THE THAMES.]
[TRUE LOVE.]
[THE CARDINAL'S VOYAGE.]
[LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.]
[A NEW SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.]
[THE FIGHTING EIGHTY-EIGHTH.]
[LORD SIDMOUTH'S LIFE AND TIME.]
[HOW THEY MANAGE MATTERS IN THE MODEL REPUBLIC.]
[HORÆ CATULLIANÆ.]
[LESSONS FROM THE FAMINE.]
CROMWELL.
Mr Carlyle's services to history in collecting and editing these letters[1] and speeches of Cromwell, all men will readily and gratefully acknowledge. A work more valuable as a guide to the study of the singular and complex character of our pious revolutionist, our religious demagogue, our preaching and praying warrior and usurper, has not been produced. There is another portion of Mr Carlyle's labours which will not meet so unanimous an approbation. As editor, Mr Carlyle has given us a valuable work; as commentator, the view which he would teach us to take of English Puritanism is, to our thinking, simply the most paradoxical, absurd, unintelligible, mad business we ever encountered in our lives.
Our Hero-worshipper, it must be allowed, has been more fortunate this time in the selection of his object of devotion than when he shouted to the skies his Mirabeaus and Dantons. But he makes an unfortunate species of compensation. In proportion as his hero is more within the bounds of humanity has his worship become more extravagant and outrageous. He out-puritans the Puritans; he is more fanatic than his idol; he has chosen to express himself with such a righteous truculence, such a sanguinary zeal, such a pious contempt for human virtue and human sympathies, as would have startled Old Noll himself. It is a bad religion this hero-worship—at least as practised by Mr Carlyle. Here is our amiable countryman rendered by it, in turn, a terrorist and a fanatic. All his own intellectual culture he throws down and abandons. Such dire transformation ensues as reminds us of a certain hero-worship which Milton has celebrated: