Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/27

 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

present, like an earlier, volume of the series has a history of some, though of a slighter, interest connected with the name of Mr. John Stuart Mill. In the year 1840, Carlyle had, at the suggestion of Mill, then editor of the Westminster Review, undertaken to contribute to that periodical an article on Oliver Cromwell. While this article was being written, ill-health compelled the editor to go abroad, and his temporary successor, who, probably through some misunderstanding or oversight on Mill’s part, had been left uninformed of the engagement, decided to deal with the subject himself, and wrote in that sense to Carlyle. It was undoubtedly a somewhat provoking incident, and Carlyle was not unnaturally annoyed by it; but he was, fortunately, too much attracted by his subject to abandon it, and, instead of throwing aside his uncompleted essay, resolved to expand it into a history of the Civil War.

As, however, was not unusual with him, and, as became still more his habit in later life, the hot fit of enthusiasm for a newly conceived project was succeeded by the cold fit of regret for his decision, and of disenchantment with his task. Even after he had determined, warned by the discovery of its true dimensions, to reduce the scope of the work, and to make it mainly a biography of Cromwell, embodying a narrative of the principal events of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, we still find him lamenting, always with his customary touch of exaggeration, the difficulties and labours of the undertaking. ‘My progress with Cromwell, he writes, ‘is frightful.‘ A thousand times I regretted that this task was ever taken up.‘ Again, he describes it as ‘the most