126 CHARLES AND OLIVER. tv man should not say once for all, I like Charles I better than Oliver Cromwell : I like the cause for which Charles believed himself to be contending better than that for which Cromwell strove : Charles is attractive to me, Oliver is repulsive : Charles is my friend, Oliver is my foe : but, am I bound to maintain that my friend is always right and my enemy always wrong; am I bound to hold Charles for a saint, Oliver for a monster ; am I bound never to mention Charles without a sigh or Oliver without a sneer ; am I bound to conceal the faults of the one and to believe every calumny against the other? If you like, put it the other way, believe in the great Protestant statesman, treat Charles as the overrated fine gentleman, the narrow-minded advocate of a theory which he did not understand, the pig-headed maintainer of the cause you dislike. You may be a partisan, but can you not believe that, if you believe your' own side of the question, truth when it is explored will be found on your side ? misrepresentation, exaggeration, dishonesty of advocacy will only disparage the presentment which you desire to make of your own convictions and your own prepossessions. Nay, I would go further, and say I should like Charles better than Oliver even if his cause were less my own than I conceive it to be. I am ready to stick to my friends and vote against my unfriends : but why should I shut my eyes to the false and foolish things that my friends do, or to the noble aspirations, honesty, and good intentions of those whom I think wrong in their means and mistaken in their ends. Yet, as I began by saying, without some infusion of spite it seems as if history could not be written ; that no man's zeal is roused to write unless it is moved by the desire to write down. Of course I seem to be stating extreme cases, but it is extreme cases that make their own advertisements, and that do the great mischief. Here the study of ancient history has its great advantage over modern ; yet battles are