BY JOHN MORLEY, M.P. FULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH CAREFULLY AUTHEN- UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. DA 426 1186 1900 NOTE EVERYBODY who now writes about Cromwell must, apart from old authorities, begin by grateful acknowledgment of his inevitable debt to the heroic labors of Mr. Gardiner, our great historian of the seventeenth century; and hardly less to the toil and discernment of Mr. Firth, whose contributions to the "Dictionary of National Biography" show him, besides much else, to know the actors and the incidents of the civil wars with a minute intimacy commonly reserved for the things of the time in which a man actually lives. If I am asked why, then, I need add a new study of Oliver to the lives of him now existing from those two most eminent hands, my apology must be that I was committed to the enterprise (and I rather think that some chapters had already appeared) before I had any idea that these giants of research were to be in the it was heroes" biographic field. Finding myself more than half way Morley's proops] across the stream, I had nothing for it but to persevere, with as stout a stroke as I could, to the other shore. Then there is the brilliant volume of my friend of a lifetime, Mr. Frederic Harrison. By him my trespass will, I know, be forgiven on easy terms; for the wide compass of his attainments as historian and critic, no less than his close observation of the world's affairs, will have long ago discovered to him that any such career and character as Cromwell's, like one of the great stock arguments of old-world drama, must still be capable of an almost endless range of presentment and interpretation. J. M. |