Oliver Cromwell

Everybody who now writes about Cromwell must, apart from old authorities, begin by grateful acknowledgment of his inevitable debt to the heroic labours of Mr. Gardiner, our great historian of the seventeenth century; and hardly less to the toil and discernment of Mr. Firth, whose contributions to the “Dictionary of National Biography” show him, besides much else, to know the actors and the incidents of the civil wars with a minute intimacy commonly reserved for the things of the time in which a man actually lives.