Looked at from our point of view, there were terrible blemishes on these triumphs. Every advantage was pursued with the unsparing ferocity which was possible only to religious bigotry fired to a white heat. It is only reasonable to suppose that these Puritan champions of the new faith were fired with just the same furious and pitiless zeal as that which inspired the Israelites in their attack on Canaan, or the first armies of Islam in their assaults on the idolaters of the East. They slew and spared not, they hewed their enemies in pieces as Samuel hewed Agag “before the Lord,” and they honestly believed that the Lord looked down with approval on them and their bloody work. Priceless treasures of art were destroyed, not only without remorse, but with grim exultation. To them they were abominations of the heathen, just as the Canaanite idols of silver and gold were to the armies of Israel. But however ferociously it was done, the work was done thoroughly, and by August, 1646, the fall of Ragland Castle following on the surrender of Oxford, brought down the curtain on the first act of the Civil War. Charles gave himself up to the Scots at Newark, and Oliver turned to fight the enemies of his own household. The chief of these enemies, curiously enough, was that same Parliament in whose name he had won all his brilliant triumphs, and a conflict, very interesting to the student of humanity, now began between the Man of Action and one of those Talking Machines which the good Earl Simon some four centuries before had found so singularly ineffective. There is no need to tell in detail how the struggle went. Every one knows how Cromwell preached and prayed and stormed at the self-sufficient busybodies who thought themselves a power in the land because they called themselves a parliament. Then, seeing that no other method would stop their gabble, he brought in his soldiers and turned them out to talk in the streets or wherever else they could get any one to listen to them, while he went on with his work. It is not very many years since Thomas Carlyle, who perhaps understood Cromwell better than any other man not living in his own age, was walking over Westminster Bridge with a very distinguished British officer one night when the Mother of Parliaments was busy tearing her hair and rending her garments over some wordy futility or other, and, jerking his thumb towards the lighted windows, he said: “Ah, my lord, I should like to see the good day when you would go in there with a file of Grenadiers as old Noll did with his dragoons and clear that nest of cacklers out. Maybe the nation would get some of its business _done_ then instead of only getting it talked about.” From this there is a certain moral to be drawn by the wise. For my own part I should dearly love to know with what words old Noll himself would have answered the Sage of Chelsea.