I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the "humanitarianism" of Gladstone than in the purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies … - John Richard Green

Of course in calling Cromwell a "tyrant" I used the word in its strict sense; and in that sense I don't think he is fairly a "tyrant" till he dissolves the 1654 Parliament. My notion of his character is, I am afraid, a new one... Cromwell seems to me neither the ambitious hypocrite nor the "governing genius" which people on one side or the other try to make him out, but a very right-meaning and able man who got with quite honest intentions into a false position and had not political genius enough to clear out of it. Of administrative genius he had plenty of course. All his later story seems to me very pathetic and mournful in the revolt he shows at his position of tyrant, and yet his inability to free himself from it.

[I]n spite of all the Gairdners and "Rollsmen" I shall go on loving freedom and the men who won it for us to the end of the chapter. In an offshoot of the Times yesterday I saw some remarks of Bismarck on "despatches" and "State papers," which the Ranke school might weigh to their great profit. He looks on such materials as of very little value. "What," he asks, "would all the current despatches tell of my real policy or that of Gladstone or Thiers"? Surely they tell even less of national feeling, of those impulses which (and not the policy of statesmen) really—with my Lord Beaconsfield's and Ranke's good leave—make history.

As you see in my own Wee-Book, I think moral and intellectual facts as much facts for the historian as military or political facts.