The three great parties of the Revolution, then, had been successively called upon to conduct it, to govern the country according to their ability and theories; and they had been found incapable of doing so; they had all three completely failed, and were writhing powerless. 'It was then,' says Bossuet, 'that a man was found who left nothing to fortune that he could place beyond its reach by counsel and foresight;' an expression quite erroneous, and which all history belies. No man ever left more to fortune than Cromwell; none ever exposed more to hazard, or proceeded with more temerity, without design or object, but the determination to go as far as fate would permit him. Cromwell is characterised by a boundless ambition and an admirable skill in converting each day and each circumstance into a means of progression, the art of turning fortune to account, without presuming to direct it. He displayed qualities such as perhaps no man who has pursued a career at all analogous ever evinced; he was suited for all the phases, the most distinct and varied, of the revolution. He was equally a man for the first as for the last of its periods: in the beginning, the instigator of insurrection, the promoter of anarchy, and the most fierce revolutionist in England; subsequently, the man of reaction, the re-establisher of order and of social organisation; thus playing by himself alone all the parts which, in the usual course of revolutions, are divided amongst the greatest actors. We cannot say that Cromwell was a Mirabeau; he wanted eloquence, and in the first years of the Long Parliament, although highly active, he made no figure. But he was successively Danton and Bonaparte. He had more than any other contributed to prostrate power, and he raised it up because none other could assume and wield it. Some government was requisite, and all aspirants to the conduct of one miserably failed; but he succeeded. Once master of the government, this man, whose ambition had shown itself so daring and insatiable, who had always advanced, pushing fortune before him, and stayed by no barrier, exhibited a good sense, prudence, and perception of the practicable, sufficient to control his most violent desires. {221} There is no doubt he had a keen relish for absolute power, and felt a strong inclination to place the crown upon his head, and bequeath it to his family. This latter purpose he abandoned, when he became timeously aware of the peril it would expose him to; and with regard to absolute power, although he practically exercised it, he was of too sound an intellect not to comprehend that the feeling of his age was utterly repugnant to it, that the revolution in which he had co-operated, and which he had followed in all its phases, had been directed against despotism, and that the irrepressible desire of England was to be governed by a parliament, and according to parliamentary forms. Therefore he, the despot, by taste and in fact, endeavoured to have a