utterances had, if reading mean understanding, never read them. They stand in their old spelling; mispunctuated, misprinted, unelucidated, unintelligible,—defaced with the dark incrustations too well known to students of that Period. The Speeches above all, as hitherto set forth in The Somers Tracts, in The Milton State-Papers, in Burton’s Diary, and other such Books, excel human belief: certainly no such agglomerate of opaque confusions, printed and reprinted; of darkness on the back of darkness, thick and threefold; is known to me elsewhere in the history of things spoken or printed by human creatures. Of these Speeches, all except one, which was published by authority at the time, I have to believe myself, not very exultingly, to be the first actual reader for nearly two Centuries past.
Nevertheless these Documents do exist, authentic though defaced; and invite everyone who would know that Period, to study them till they become intelligible again. The words of Oliver Cromwell,—the meaning they had, must be worth recovering, in that point of view. To collect these Letters and authentic Utterances, as one’s reading yielded them, was a comparatively grateful labour; to correct them, elucidate and make them legible again, was a good historical study. Surely ‘a wise memory’ would wish to preserve among men the written and spoken words of such a man;—and as for the ‘wise oblivion,’ that is already, by Time and Accident, done to our hand. Enough is already lost and destroyed; we need not, in this particular case, omit farther.
Accordingly, whatever words authentically proceeding from Oliver himself I could anywhere find yet surviving, I have here gathered; and will now, with such minimum of annotation as may suit that object, offer them to the reader. That is the purport of this Book. I have ventured to believe that, to certain patient earnest readers, these old dim Letters of a noble English Man might, as they had done to myself, become dimly legible again; might dimly present, better than all other evidence, the noble figure of the Man himself again.
