and pettiness; a sort of Tiberius-Dandin, the tyrant of Europe and the plaything of his family; an old regicide, who delighted to humiliate the ambassadors of all the kings of Europe, and was tormented by his young royalist daughter; austere and gloomy in his manners, yet keeping four court jesters about him; given to the composition of wretched verses; sober, simple, frugal, yet a stickler for etiquette; a rough soldier and a crafty politician; skilled in theological disputation and very fond of it; a dull, diffuse, obscure orator, but clever in speaking the language of anybody whom he wished to influence; a hypocrite and a fanatic; a visionary swayed by phantoms of his childhood, believing in astrologers and banishing them; suspicious to excess, always threatening, rarely sanguinary; a strict observer of Puritan rules, and solemnly wasting several hours a day in buffoonery; abrupt and contemptuous with his intimates, caressing with the secretaries whom he feared, holding his remorse at bay with sophistry, paltering with his conscience, inexhaustible in adroitness, in tricks, in resources; mastering his imagination by his intelligence; grotesque and sublime; in a word, one of those men who are “square at the base,” as they were described by Napoleon, himself their chief, in his mathematically exact and poetically figurative language.

He who writes these lines, in presence of this rare and impressive ensemble, felt that Bossuet’s impassioned sketch was no longer sufficient for him.  He began to walk about that lofty figure, and he was seized by a powerful temptation to depict the giant in all his aspects.  It was a rich soil.  Beside the man of war and the statesman, it remained to draw the theologian, the pedant, the wretched poet, the seer of visions, the buffoon, the father, the husband, the human Proteus—­in a word, the twofold Cromwell, homo et vir.

There is one period of his life, especially, in which this strange personality exhibits itself in all its forms.  It is not as one might think at first blush, the period of the trial of Charles I, instinct as that is with depressing and terrible interest; but it is the moment when the ambitious mortal boldly attempted to pluck the fruit of that monarch’s death; it is the moment when Cromwell, having attained what would have been to any other man the zenith of fortune—­master of England, whose innumerable factions knelt silently at his feet; master of Scotland, of which he had made a satrapy, and of Ireland, which he had turned into a prison; master of Europe through his diplomacy and his fleets—­seeks to fulfil the dream of his earliest childhood, the last ambition of his life; to make himself king.  History never had a more impressive lesson in a more impressive drama.  First of all, the Protector arranges to be urged to assume the crown:  the august farce begins by addresses from municipalities, from counties; then there comes an act of Parliament.  Cromwell,