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2)

I had not suspected, from my desultory reading of the Civil War, that
such a man then existed. The style of his last words on the gallows!
and those profound memoranda on political science. I've tried to
think back for other military commanders who could write like that, and
I'm bothered if I can think of one: Xenophon was only a Walter-Long
kind of a sportsman, beside him, & J. Caesar too abstract. Your
man stands out, head and shoulders.

He has been unlucky in waiting three hundred years for a real biographer:
but he must be warmly happy, now, if anything of his personality can still
feel. You unwrap him so skilfully, without ever getting, yourself,
in our way. The long careful setting of the scene - first-rate
history, incidentally, and tingling with life, as if you'd seen it - &
on top of that the swift and beautifully-balanced course of action. Oh,
it's a very fine thing.

I'm glad you allow common-sense to interpret the documents. A fetish
of the last-school-but-one was to believe every document. As one who
has had the making of original historical records I know how weak &
partial and fallible they are. Fortunately you have been a man of
affairs, and so are not to be taken in, like a scholar pure.

There is great labour behind the book, which yet reads easily, for your
digestion has been able to cope with all the stony facts. Your small
characters (often only a word long) brighten the whole thing. Incidentally,
you have been honest to see the fineness of Cromwell, under the home-
spun. Argyll is unforgettable: Huntly, too: and Hurry. Alasdair less
so. He didn't Colkitto enough to live in my reading. I wonder why?
Didn't you want him to clash with Montrose, in prowess? Also you left
out Rupert - I mean, you mention him, well enough, but you do not make him
walk & talk, whereas you bring to life Elizabeth & the Palatine circle.
I suppose you were concentrating your high lights. Charles, the king, is finely
drawn, as a shadow on the wall of his contemporaries. I suppose you know
the fineness of your writing? The way you line in the execution of
the King is marvellous. Montrose would have envied you those two or
three sentences, & the full-stop and paragraph, after them.

I noticed two or three tiny points only, to distress me. On page 61