JAMES NAYLER.

"You will here read the true story of that much injured, ridiculed
man, James Nayler; what dreadful sufferings, with what patience he
endured, even to the boring of the tongue with hot irons, without a
murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had
fallen into, which they stigmatized as blasphemy, had given place to
clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error in a strain of the
beautifullest humility."--Essays of Elia.

"Would that Carlyle could now try his hand at the English Revolution!"
was our exclamation, on laying down the last volume of his remarkable
History of the French Revolution with its brilliant and startling word-
pictures still flashing before us. To some extent this wish has been
realized in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Yet we confess
that the perusal of these volumes has disappointed us. Instead of giving
himself free scope, as in his French Revolution, and transferring to his
canvas all the wild and ludicrous, the terrible and beautiful phases of
that moral phenomenon, he has here concentrated all his artistic skill
upon a single figure, whom he seems to have regarded as the embodiment
and hero of the great event. All else on his canvas is subordinated to
the grim image of the colossal Puritan. Intent upon presenting him as
the fitting object of that "hero-worship," which, in its blind admiration
and adoration of mere abstract Power, seems to us at times nothing less