themselves. They recked nothing of that sound traditional frame of
government which it was the aim of Hyde religiously to conserve. Few
statesmen have had a task more hard, more thankless, and more hopeless
than that which fell to him during these troubled months.

Hyde was saved from despair only by the intense dramatic instinct of the
historian that was implanted in him. He could, or--what came to the same
thing--he believed that he could, discern the greater issues of the time,
and what interested him above all was the vast influence upon those issues
of personal forces. When he recalled the events of his time, in the
enforced leisure of later years, it was to the action of great
personalities that he gave his chief attention, and the passing incidents
grouped themselves in his memory as mere accessories to the play of
individual character. All through his history it is this which chiefly
attracts us, and nowhere is it more striking than when he records the
passing of the greatest personal force of the age in Cromwell. It did not
occur to Hyde--and, to their credit be it said, it did not occur to any
even of the more friendly spectators on the other side--to regard Cromwell
as the embodiment of a mighty purifying force in which defects were to be
ignored or even justified on account of the heaven-inspired dictates under
which he was presumed to have acted. Just as little could Hyde conceive of
Cromwell as the great precursor of modern ideas, demanding the obedient
homage of every ardent partisan of popular rights. These were
eccentricities reserved for later historians under impulses of later
origin. Hyde was compelled by all his strongest traditions and most
cherished principles to regard Cromwell's work as utterly destructive, and
he never pretended to have anything but the bitterest prejudice against
him. To his mind, Cromwell was sent as a punishment from Heaven for
national defection, and he never concealed his hatred for Cromwell's
profound dissimulation or his abhorrence for the tyranny which the