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.

_Sartor Resartus_ (1831), the earliest of his greater works, is
unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest
and most lyrical of his productions. Here is the Sage of
Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his
most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the