BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCLXXVIII. APRIL, 1847. Vol. LXI
Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes movedto 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 theseletters[1] and speeches of Cromwell, all men will readily and gratefullyacknowledge. A work more valuable as a guide to the study of thesingular and complex character of our pious revolutionist, our religiousdemagogue, our preaching and praying warrior and usurper, has not beenproduced. There is another portion of Mr Carlyle's labours which willnot meet so unanimous an approbation. As editor, Mr Carlyle has givenus a valuable work; as commentator, the view which he would teach usto take of English Puritanism is, to our thinking, simply the mostparadoxical, absurd, unintelligible, mad business we ever encountered inour lives.
Our Hero-worshipper, it must be allowed, has been more fortunate thistime in the selection of his object of devotion than when he shouted tothe skies his Mirabeaus and Dantons. But he makes an unfortunate speciesof compensation. In proportion as his hero is more within the bounds ofhumanity has his worship become more extravagant and outrageous. Heout-puritans the Puritans; he is more fanatic than his idol; he haschosen to express himself with such a righteous truculence, such asanguinary zeal, such a pious contempt for human virtue and humansympathies, as would have startled Old Noll himself. It is a badreligion this hero-worship—at least as practised by Mr Carlyle. Here isour amiable countryman rendered by it, in turn, a terrorist and afanatic. All his own intellectual culture he throws down and abandons.Such dire transformation ensues as reminds us of a certain hero-worshipwhich Milton has celebrated:
And horrid sympathy; for what he sees
He feels himself, now changing; down his arms,
Down falls the spear and shield; down he as fast;
And the dire hiss renews, and the dire form,
Catched by contagion."
But to our task—which is no light one; for in our survey of this bookwe have