Flinging epithets at Cromwell is a very harmless indulgence of sentiment. His memory has passed unscathed even through the burning eloquence which, from the pulpit of the Restoration, denounced him as "wearing a bad hat, and that not paid for." Since research has placed him before us as he really was, the opinion has been gaining ground that he was about the greatest human force ever directed to a moral purpose; and in that sense, about the greatest man, take him all in all, that ever trod the scene of history. If his entire devotion to his cause, his valour, his magnanimity, his clemency, his fidelity to the public service, his domestic excellence and tenderness are not "conduct," all we can say is, so much the worse for "conduct." The type to which his character belonged, in common with the whole series of historic types, had in it something that was special and transitory, combined with much that, so far as we see, was universal and will endure for ever. It is in failing to note the special and transitory element, and the limitations which it imposed on the hero's greatness, that Carlyle's noble biography runs into poetry, and departs from historic truth. To supply this defect is the proper work of rational criticism; but the criticism which begins with "Philistine" is not likely to be very rational. The objection urged by Bolingbroke against Cromwell's foreign policy, on the ground that to unite with France, which was gaining strength, against Spain, which was beginning to decline, was not the way to maintain the balance of power in Europe, is once more reproduced as though it had not been often brought forward and answered. Cromwell was not bound to trouble his head about such a figment of a special diplomacy as the balance of power any more than Shakespeare was bound to trouble his head about Voltaire's rules for the drama. He was the chief and the defender of Protestantism, and as such he was naturally led to ally himself with France, which was comparatively liberal, against Spain, which was the great organ of the Catholic reaction. An alliance with Spain was a thing impossible for a Puritan. Looking to the narrower interest of England, much more was to be gained by a war with Spain than by a war with France, because by a war with Spain an entrance was forced for English enterprise through the barriers which Spanish monopoly had raised against commercial enterprise in America. The security of England appears, in Cromwell's judgment, to have depended on her intrinsic strength, which no one can doubt that, under extraordinary disadvantages, he immensely increased, rather than on the maintenance of a European equilibrium which, as the number of the powers increased, became palpably impracticable. It may be added, that the incipient decline of the double-headed House of Austria, if it is visible to our eyes as we trace back the course of events, can hardly have been visible