The war of the Puritans was a section of that universal war which alone makes up the true history of the world--the war of Belief against Unbelief; the struggle of men intent on the real essence of things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. And among these Puritans Cromwell stood supreme, grappling like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things. Yet Cromwell alone finds no hearty apologist anywhere. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartuffe; turning all that noble struggle for constitutional liberty into a sorry farce played for his own benefit. This, and worse, is the character they give him. From of old, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been incredible to me. All that we know of him betokens an earnest, hearty sincerity. Everywhere we have to note his decisive, practical eye, how he drives towards the practicable, and has a genuine insight into what is fact. Such an intellect does not belong to a false man; the false man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediences; the true man is needed to discern even practical truth. Napoleon by no means seems to me so great a man as Cromwell. His enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, are but as the high stilts on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort. "False as a bulletin," became a proverb in Napoleon's time. Yet he had a sincerity, a certain instinctive, ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any basis. He had an instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His companions, we are told, were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God; they had proved it by all manner of logic. Napoleon, looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs; but who made all that?" The atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great fact stares him in the face. So, too, in practice; he, as every man that can be great, sees, through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter, and drives straight towards that. Accordingly, there was a faith in him, genuine so far as it went. That this new, enormous democracy is an insuppressible fact, which the whole world cannot put down--this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? _La carrière ouverte aux talents_--"the implements to him who can handle them"--this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution or any revolution could mean. It is a great, true message from our last great man. Sartor Resartus "Sartor Resartus," first published in "Frazer's Magazine" in 1833-34, is Thomas Carlyle's most popular work, and is largely autobiographical.