For thy new mercy-seat of purest goldFor daily floral sacrifice for sin, Where SELF, man's great high-priest, the Holiest, enters in."

These are hard things; but after Mr. Osborne's letters, we fear they must be pronounced to be "proven.' Meanwhile, we cannot but deem the great political organ of the day essentially wrong in its almost dishonest system of Compromise. This compromise is its paradise of truth. But compromise has never yet produced great poets, great statesmen, nor great Christians. We cannot laud that slavish servitude that waits on the chariot-wheels of success-that represses earnestness earnestness, which is the very life-blood of British enterprise. Nor can we admire that singular idiosyncracy which expects all mankind, Mr. Spurgeon not excepted, to be borne in the arms of its dry nurse, Mrs. Punch, to the baptism of its own leaden font. The impartial monkey who nibbled off the cheese of the litigant cats was certainly not a very respectable judgein-equity; nor can we attach much greater judicial dignity to those astute simiæ of the Press, whose simulated gravity now passes sentence on the Protestant, now on the Catholic; anon jauntily takes its judicial seat on the Bible, and anon holds out its friendly paw to Christians. England does not want an overgrown Chimpanzee for its mentor, but an honest man. Somewhat more than versatility, time-serving, and simulation, is in requisition. A higher tone of morality is also demanded for our public men; nor will capacity be tolerated instead of steadfast integrity. It is impossible not to be struck with the frequent collisions increasingly occurring between what is called the Executive and the Commons. It has become increasingly difficult to carry on the government. What does this show but that we have entered upon another phase of the so-called "constitution." That constitution may not fully answer the requirements of

this great country. No nation is less inclined to change for the sake of We are not natuchange than ours. rally fickle-minded, but rather apathetic, phlegmatic, and contented. The nation will tolerate much from its professional statesmen, but it will not tolerate national degradation. Increased publicity in diplomatic affairs will be insisted on.

If the isolation of England has been complained of by foreign writers, let it be remembered that it is the isolation of the Freeman from the bondage of the Slave. Nay, more, it requires no great forecast to perceive that that isolation will be increased by the increase of national morality and a more simple Christianity. Publicity cannot be made to chime in with Secrecy-a closed press with an open one-light with darkness-communities of religious harlequins with a people of rational piety. Whatever may be done by the rulers of France and England, we may rest assured that the bulk of either population will never harmonize until the first great principle be harmonized from which the legislation of each has sprung up. Congresses have been fashionable of late years; materialities and "material pledges" have been dealt with pretty liberally; but we have as yet had no notice of a Congress for securing the freedom of conscience for the entirety of Europe. We respectfully invite the Pope to the presidency of this conference. Before statesmen take one step in any direction, statistic or political, it behoves them publicly to lay down this great principle; and we beg of France, "the first of civilized nations," to see it carried out. There is no half-way house to TRUTH. That is the only promontory which has ever commanded one unbroken prospect over the tide of time. From anything short of this, there is no prospect at all. The lightnings of the political heaven may play around its summit-the popular billows may thunder at its base; but the PILGRIM of TRUTH, and the mighty pedestal upon which he stands, remain alike unscathed by the elemental war and the red artillery of the skies.

WE must confess that we find considerable difficulty in doing justice to a work like the present. As regards his critic, Mr. Froude might justly say with an illustrious writer, that to judge his book is a task which can, with perfect propriety, be undertaken only by the man who is able to execute a similar performance. We are sensible of an apparent want of modesty in attempting to look down upon Mr. Froude from a vantage ground which he himself has supplied, with only such additional points of view or correctives of the sight as are afforded by very obvious sources of information. As regards the work itself, one of its principal merits cannot be adequately represented in a brief review. A meagre and sketchy analysis of the twelve years, from 1535 to 1547, covered by these two volumes, could convey little conception of that proportionality (to borrow a word of the elder Scaliger's) which adapts all the parts to the analogy of the whole, which, in modern times, has been termed historical perspective, and which, in poetry, the older critics would have attributed to judgment. A skilful painter, in representing a house, will introduce a window through which we can gaze on a noble park or a lofty mountain. The history of the reign of Henry VIII. requires such windows, that through England we may see Ireland and Scotland, Spain and Germany, France and Italy. In these respects we can be stow almost unqualified approbation on Mr. Froude. The numerous threads which he has to interweave never become entangled. Enormous as are the masses of the composition, they are so finely balanced that the mind can move them with perfect facility. In this work we have another proof that the historical student should eschew little books. Compendiums, catechisms, and abridgments only add to labour in the long run. After reading a great history, details, no

doubt, evaporate; but the memory can afford to lose some of the grosser particles, while the substance remains. Some of the colours may fade, but the great outlines are indelibly engraved. Let us cite an instance from one passage in the reign of Henry VIII., as handled by Hume and Mr. Froude. The great insurrection, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, is despatched by Hume in five hurried pages. We will venture to say that most readers of Hume remember little of this transaction beyond its name-the fact that

one Aske, a gentlemen," headed the rising; that it was suppressed; and that, of course, certain executions followed. Mr. Froude, who justly lays much stress upon the new materials which he has contributed to this chapter in English history, and bids us distrust Hall and Holinshed, devotes not less than a hundred pages to the Pilgrimage of Grace. Here, by the way, is a picture of the lighting of the beacons in Yorkshire, October 13, 1536, very much in the style of Clytemnestra's description, in the Agamemnon, of the beacon fire, which, fed by heath, and flickering on the long, rolling back of the sea ridges, sped from Ida to the palace of the sons of Atreus the news of the taking of Troy.

"As Aske rode down at midnight to the bank of the Humber-the clash of the alarm-bells came pealing far over the water. From hill to hill, from church-tower to church-tower, the warning lights were shooting. The fisherman on the German Ocean watched them flickering in the darkness from Spurnhead to Scarborough, from Scarborough to Berwick-uponTweed. They streamed westwardover the long marches across Spalding Moor; up the Ouse and the Wharf to the watershed, where the rivers flow into the Irish Sea. The mountains of Westmoreland sent on the message to Kendal, to Cockermouth, to Penrith, to Carlisle ; and for days

and nights there was one loud storm of bells and blaze of beacons from the Trent to the Cheviot Hills."-Vol. iii., p. 123.

We can only say that the hundred pages of the one writer are more easily remembered than the five pages of the other.

We shall not, then, attempt an analysis, which must necessarily be bare and uninteresting, of the events recorded in these volumes. But we shall indicate Mr. Froude's view of some of the leading characters of the time; we shall glance at a few pictures of the age in its social, moral, and religious developments; and we shall examine some main characteristics of Mr. Froude's style and mode of thought.

I. The characters of the great Churchmen of the era of the English Reformation are especial favourites with Mr. Froude. Abject in their prostration to the Papal See, and foreigners rather than Englishmen in their political tendencies: sometimes infinitely subtle, sometimes passionate and vehement-veiling personal ambition under the guise of devotion to "the Bishop"-not seldom exhibiting a sensuality whose human coarseness is almost a relief to their deep-eyed scheming and white-lipped hatred they give ample scope to the caustic and relentless humour, to the compressed sentences worthy of Tacitus, which Mr. Froude delights to utter. No reader of his second volume will have forgotten Pope Clement VII. twisting his handkerchief, weeping, flattering, or wildly waving his arms in angry impatience-honest only in the excess of his dishonesty-endowed with one solitary virtue-that of not pretending to be virtuous.

In the present volumes the two great contemporary cardinals, Reginald Pole and David Beton, Archbishop of St. Andrew's, are executed at full length and in extraordinary

contrast.

The points of contact between Pole's life and the present segment of the history are easily traced. In 1535, France, the Papacy, and the Empire, were in close alliance. But the withdrawal of the offer of Milan

to his son stung Francis to fury. He suddenly declared war against Charles. D'Annebault, who afterwards commanded the force destined for the invasion of England, swept like a torrent over Piedmont : Charles invaded France. Then followed that terrible summer campaign, which cost him De Leyva and thirty thousand veterans, and literally tainted the languid breezes with an intolerable stench from the unburied bodies of the soldiers whom the Emperor left behind him.* "Wild beasts," De Leyva had said, "must be fought in their dens." The brave, but covetous and bloody commander had not calculated the strength of the hug.t Under these circumstances it was that the Pope began to bid again for Henry. The news of the execution of Ann Boleyn was, of course, received with exultation at Rome. The sorceress who had bewitched the English monarch was dead, and the spells that she had woven were rendered impotent by her guilt. Just at this point, Reginald Pole, of whom we have previously heard as a young kinsman and favourite of Henry, and as one who was consulted on the question of his divorce, began to come prominently forward. It may have been, as Mr. Froude says, that "the white rose was twining pure before his imagination, with no red blossoms intermixed, round the pillars of a regenerated Church." But henceforth his career is darkened by treason. The winter of 1536 was glorious summer at the Vatican with the news of the rising of the English commons in the north. A sword, and cap embroidered with a dove, were blessed in the midnight mass on Christmaseve at St. Peter's, to be sent to James V. of Scotland, with many a prayer that his hand might be strengthened by the sword, and his head protected by the cap, through the might of the Holy Spirit, figured by the dove. Pole was made cardinal, and received legatine commission. But the able policy of Henry had stamped out the northern rebellion, and only a few smouldering embers remained under ashes too thin to be deceitful. Pole was utterly disappointed. At Paris,

where Francis was naturally gravitating towards England, he was not received; at Cambray and Liege his retreat was hardly secure from the long arm of Henry's vengeance. The arrest of the heroes of the "Pilgrimage of Grace"-the brave and able Aske, the astute and venerable Darcy-is obscurely connected with his correspondence. At Liege, he endeavours to unravel the tangled skein of his intrigues, but grows confused, and in August, 1537, is recalled. So things passed, until in January, 1539, Paul III. launches his bull against Henry, and at the same time Pole flings forth his famous book, De Unitate Ecclesiæ, on the troubled waters of Catholic Europe. This work had been written so far back as 1536, but had been receiving the finishing strokes of ingenious and vigilant hatred ever since; in particular, it was enriched by the story of Henry's intrigue with Mary Boleyn, sister of Ann. By a careful examination of the original copy of the MS. book, apparently in Pole's own handwriting, Mr. Froude has established the important fact that in the original the Mary Boleyn story is neither mentioned nor alluded to, and opens the way for the inference that the cardinal had heard the calumny in the interval between composing and publishing the work. He also, with much sagacity, traces the story through friar Peto, Sir George Throgmorton, and his brother Michael, to Pole. From this book of Pole's is derived that view of Henry's character which has passed through Lingard to Roman Catholic writers. It is a contrast of almost incredible virtues with almost incredible vices; the former exclusively Catholic, the latter exclusively Protestant, and the evil love of Boleyn the bridge from the land of light to the land of the shadow of death. Look on this picture, and then on that. In youth, the fairest cedar in all the garden of God; possessed of a heart in which was clustered a galaxy of moral virtues, justice, clemency, liberality, prudence beyond his years, piety, the foundation of all happiness: in maturer years, an incestuous profligate, a rebel against Christ and his vicar of a wickedness that dwarfed all human comparison by its diabolical grandeur, leaving him only the form

of man-a deeper dyed offender than Uriah, than Saul, than Dathan and Abiram-aspiring, like Lucifer, to the stars of God-a thief and a robber. Then, his voice rising in volume, a wild shriek of delirious rage rings across the British Channel, the blue waves of the Mediterranean, and the rolling billows of the Bay of Biscay. He calls upon the King of France to be up and doing. He invites the Emperor to compose his differences with Francis. Let Barbarossa ride the waters with his seawarp corsairs. Henry is worse than the Great Turk, let him be the object of a new crusade. The faithful in England will rally round the banner embroidered with the five wounds of the Redeemer, and avenge the desolated monasteries. The wrongs of Catherine of Arragon will ring like a trumpet-blast in the ears of the haughty and chivalrous Spaniards. Such was this renowned book, in which, as Cromwell says to Throgmorton, one lie leapeth in every line on another's back."

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All this has a disastrous sequel. We hear of the Exeter or Plantaganet conspiracy, and of a projected Cornish rising. From the stock that had produced some of the fairest ladies and bravest gentlemen in England, there rises a coward, traitor, and liar, in the person of Sir Geoffrey Pole, the cardinal's brother. On the 9th of December, 1538, Exeter, Montague, and Sir Edward Neville, are brought to the scaffold. There is a still more tragic result. After a delay of some weary months, the Countess of Salisbury, Reginald's mother, is brought out through the Traitor's Gate, and lays her head, white with seventy years, upon the block. It was the saying of Henry himself that Lady Salisbury was the most saintly woman in England; and Pole might boast with pardonable pride that he was the child of a martyr. We can excuse Lingard for the reverence with which he dwells on the execution, in spite of Mr. Froude's somewhat contemptuous note. The Catholic England of that day presents few sublime spectacles.

Pole's subsequent endeavours to mitigate the ferocity of the Marian persecution might lead one to wish that we could think better of him. Such, however, is he in Mr. Froude's