Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/54

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ing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.'

Now this portrait of Macaulay's is executed with far more respect for the Puritan character than Jonson exhibited in his portrait of Zeal-of-the-land Busy. But it is just as clearly a caricature. It violently exaggerates certain harsh traits of individual Puritans under persecution and at war; it suppresses all the mild and attractive traits; and Carlyle, with his hero-worship and his eye on Cromwell, continues the exaggeration in the same direction. It gives an historically false impression, because it conveys the idea that the Puritans were exceptionally harsh and intolerant as compared with other men in thetr own times.

For example, the supposedly harsh Puritan Cromwell stood for a wide latitude of religious opinion and toleration of sects at a time when the Catholic Inquisition had established a rigid censorship and was persecuting Huguenots and Mohammedans and Jews, and torturing and burning heretics wherever its power extended. It is customary now to point to the Salem witchcraft and the hanging of three Quakers in Bos-