Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/109

 general no paragraphs: if the Letter is short, it is usually found written on the first leaf of the sheet; often with the conclusion, or some postscript, subjoined crosswise on the margin,—indicating that there was no blotting-paper in those days; that the hasty writer was loth to turn the leaf. Oliver’s spelling and pointing are of the sort common to educated persons in his time; and readers that so wish, may have specimens of him in abundance, and of all due dimness, in many printed Books: but to us, intent here to have the Letters read and understood, it seemed very proper at once and altogether to get rid of that encumbrance. Would that the rest were all as easily got rid of! Here and there, to bring out the struggling sense, I have added or rectified a word,—but taken care to point out the same; what words in the Text of the Letters are mine, the reader will find marked off by double commas: it was of course my supreme duty to avoid altering, in any respect, not only the sense, but the smallest feature in the physiognomy, of the Original. And so, ‘a minimum of annotation’ having been added, what minimum would serve the purpose,—here are the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell; of which the reader, with my best wishes, but not with any very high immediate hope of mine in that particular, is to make what he can.

Surely it is far enough from probable that these Letters of Cromwell, written originally for quite other objects, and selected not by the Genius of History, but by blind Accident which has saved them hitherto and destroyed the rest,—can illuminate for a modern man this Period of our Annals, which for all moderns, we may say, has become a gulf of bottomless darkness! Not so easily will the modern man domesticate himself in a scene of things every way so foreign to him. Nor could any measurable exposition of mine, on this present occasion, do much to illuminate the dead dark world of the Seventeenth Century, into which the reader is about to enter. He will gradually get to understand, as I have said, that the Seventeenth Century did exist; that it was not a waste