He falls into manifold mistakes, commits and omits in all ways; plods along contented, in an element of perennial dimness, purblindness; has occasionally a helpless broad innocence of platitude which is almost interesting. A man indeed of extreme imbecility; to whom nevertheless let due gratitude be borne.
His Book, in fact, is not properly a Book, but rather an Aggregate of bewildered jottings; a kind of Cromwellian Biographical Dictionary, wanting the alphabetical, or any other, arrangement or index: which latter want, much more remediable than the want of judgment, is itself a great sorrow to the reader. Such as it is, this same Dictionary without judgment and without arrangement, ‘bad Dictionary gone to pie,’ as we may call it, is the storehouse from which subsequent Biographies have all furnished themselves. The reader, with continual vigilance of suspicion, once knowing what man he has to do with, digs through it, and again through it; covers the margins of it with notes and contradictions, with references, deductions, rectifications, execrations,—in a sorrowful, but not entirely unprofitable manner. Another Book of Noble’s, called Lives of the Regicides, written some years afterwards, during the French Jacobin time, is of much more stupid character; nearly meaningless indeed; mere water bewitched; when no man need buy or read. And it is said he has a third Book, on some other subject, stupider still; which latter point, however, may be considered questionable.
For the rest, this poor Noble is of very impartial mind respecting Cromwell; open to receive good of him, and to receive evil, even inconsistent evil: the helpless, incoherent, but placid and favourable notion he has of Cromwell in 1787 contrasts notably with that which Carrion Heath had gathered of him in 1663. For, in spite of the stupor of Histories, it is beautiful, once more, to see how the Memory of Cromwell, in its huge inarticulate significance, not able to speak a wise word for itself to any one, has nevertheless been steadily growing clearer and clearer in the popular English mind;
