So!--as our honest German friend would exclaim, puffing from his mouth at the same time a huge volume of symbolic smoke. We have withdrawn it seems, from the path of light ever since the reign of the army and its godly officers established A.D. 1649. We must return and connect ourselves therewith; it is our only salvation; though, indeed, if Puritanism was the manifestation of the ideas of all preceding centuries--if the same current of thought can be traced from William the Conqueror to Oliver the conqueror--a very little ingenuity would suffice to trace the same ideas, the same current of thought, somewhat farther still. But this reign of the puritanical army was really "the last glimpse of the godlike!"--it was "the reign of God!" and we live under the reign of ----, psha! Why, he does not even give us a substantial devil, but coins a strange personification of a negative. Such was not the devil, by the way, at the time of "the noblest heroism ever transacted on the earth." Such a definition of the "roaring lion," would, in those days of light and happiness, have procured its author, at the very least, a trip to Barbadoes. Even Cromwell himself would have _Barbadoesed_ him. "This last of our heroisms!" God grant it is the last! It is only out of another religious war that another such heroism can arise. If church and dissent should take up arms, and, instead of controversies carried on in pamphlets, upon tradition and white surplices, should blow out each other's brains with gunpowder, then Mr Carlyle would see his "heroic ones" revive upon the earth.