In parting company with the editor of these letters and speeches, we feel that we have not done justice to the editorial industry and research which these volumes display. Our space would not permit it. For the same reason we have been unable to quote several instances of vivid narrative, which we had hoped to transfer to our own pages. And as to our main quarrel with him--this outrageous adoption of Puritanical bile and superstition,--we have been haunted all along by a suspicion we have occasionally expressed, that the man _cannot_ be in earnest. He could not have been so abandoned by his common sense. He has been so accustomed to mingle sport, and buffoonery, and all sorts of wilful extravagance, with his most serious mood, that he perhaps does not know himself when, and how far, he is in earnest. In turning over the leaves of his work, we light, towards the end of the second volume, upon the following passage, which may, _perhaps_, explain the temper of the writer, when he is abetting and encouraging his fanatical heroes. He is uttering some sarcasms upon the poor "art of speech." "Is there no sacredness, then, any longer in the miraculous tongue of man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence, with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up that; or by the Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou blasphemous scandalous misbirth of Nature, is not even _that_ the kindest thing I can do for thee, if thou repent not, and alter in the name of Allah?'" To this sort of satirical humour--to "the truth of a song,"--not Dryasdust himself would call upon him to swear. And may not all his rhapsodies upon his "sword-in-hand" Puritans be little more than an amplification of this one passage? And, if we insist upon it, that a reform by the pen, or even by speech-making, is better than one by pike and musket--if we should suggest that matters of civil government are better decided by civil and political reasoning than by metaphorical texts of Scripture, interpreted by prejudice and passion--if we contend for such truisms as these, shall we not be in danger of occupying some such position as the worthy prelate whose sagacity led him to discover that _some facts_ in Gulliver's Travels had surely been overcharged? FOOTNOTES: [1] _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle._