merely, but moral, and depends on the moral health, the wideness and
heartiness of his moral sympathies, by which he can put himself--as
Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think successfully--into
the place of each and every character, and not merely feel for them,
but feel with them. He does not merely describe their actions from
the outside, attributing them arbitrarily to motives which are pretty
sure to be the lowest possible, because it is easier to conceive a
low motive than a lofty one, and to call a man a villain than to
unravel patiently the tangled web of good and evil of which his
thoughts are composed. He has attempted to conceive of his
characters as he would if they had been his own contemporaries and
equals, acting, speaking in his company; and he has therefore thought
himself bound to act toward them by those rules of charity and
courtesy, common alike to Christian morals, English law, and decent
society; namely, to hold every man innocent till he is proved guilty;
where a doubt exists, to give the prisoner at the bar the benefit of
it; not to excite the minds of the public against him by those
insinuative or vituperative epithets, which are but adders and
scorpions; and, on the whole, to believe that a man's death and
burial is not the least reason for ceasing to behave to him like a
gentleman and a Christian. We are not inclined to play with solemn
things, or to copy Lucian and Quevedo in writing dialogues of the
dead; but what dialogues might some bold pen dash off between the old
sons of Anak, at whose coming Hades has long ago been moved, and to
receive whom all the kings of the nation have risen up, and the
little scribblers who have fancied themselves able to fathom and
describe characters to whom they were but pigmies! Conceive a half-
hour's interview between Queen Elizabeth and some popular lady-
scribbler, who has been deluding herself into the fancy that
gossiping inventories of millinery are history . . . 'You pretend to