As to Friedrich, it is not a book at all, but an encyclopaedia of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century.  Who reads every word of these ten volumes?  Who cares to know how big was the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some unendurable Frau?  What a welter of dull garbage!  In what dust-heaps dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdroeckh!  O, Thomas, Thomas, what Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble shoulders?  Compare Friedrich with Cromwell.  In the Life of the Puritan hero we have a great purpose, a prolonged homily, a magnificent appeal against an unjust sentence passed two hundred years before by ignorance, bigotry, and passion.  The literary interest never overpowers the social and political, the moral and the religious purpose.  Twenty years later, when he takes up the German Friedrich, the literary interest overpowers the historical.  Half of the ten volumes of Friedrich are taken up with tiresome anecdotes about the ordinary appendages of a German court.  Even the true greatness of Frederick—­his organisation of a model civil administration—­is completely obscured in the deluge of court gossip and Potsdamiana. Friedrich is a wonderful work, highly valuable to the student, a memorable result of Teufelsdroeckhian industry and humour—­but it is not a masterpiece:  judged by the standard of Carlyle’s own masterpieces, it is really a failure. Cromwell is the life of a hero and a statesman; Friedrich consists of miscellaneous memoirs of the court and camp of the greatest of modern rulers.

On the whole, we may count the Cromwell as the greatest of Carlyle’s effective products.  With his own right hand, alone and by a single stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about their greatest man.  The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy, fashion, literature, and wit had for two centuries combined to falsify history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen.  And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and for ever reversed this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero of the Protestant movement.  There are few examples in the history of literature of so great and so sudden a triumph of truth and justice.  At the same time, it is well to remember that the Cromwell is not a literary masterpiece, in the sense of being an organic work of high art.  It is not the “Life” of Cromwell:  it was not so designed, and was never so worked out.  It is his “Letters and Speeches,” illustrated by notes.  A work so planned cannot possibly be a work of art, or a perfect piece of biography.  The constant passage from text to commentary, from small print to large, from Oliver’s Puritan sermonising to Carlyle’s Sartorian eccentricities, destroys the artistic harmony of the book as an organic work of art.  The “Life” of Cromwell was in fact never written by Carlyle; and has yet to be written.  Never yet was such splendid material for a “Life” prepared by a great historian.