judge me, whose labours, whose cares, whose fiery trials were, beside
yours, as the heaving volcano beside a boy's firework? You condemn
my weaknesses? Know that they were stronger than your strength! You
impute motives for my sins? Know that till you are as great as I
have been, for evil and for good, you will be as little able to
comprehend my sins as my righteousness! Poor marsh-croaker, who
wishest not merely to swell up to the bulk of the ox, but to embrace
it in thy little paws, know thine own size, and leave me to be judged
by Him who made me!' . . . How the poor soul would shrink back into
nothing before that lion eye which saw and guided the destinies of
the world, and all the flunkey-nature (if such a vice exist beyond
the grave) come out in utter abjectness, as if the ass in the fable,
on making his kick at the dead lion, had discovered to his horror
that the lion was alive and well--Spirit of Quevedo! finish for us
the picture which we cannot finish for ourselves.

In a very different spirit from such has Mr. Froude approached these
times. Great and good deeds were done in them; and it has therefore
seemed probable to him that there were great and good men there to do
them. Thoroughly awake to the fact that the Reformation was the new
birth of the British nation, it has seemed to him a puzzling theory
which attributes its success to the lust of a tyrant and the cupidity
of his courtiers. It has evidently seemed to him paradoxical that a
king who was reputed to have been a satyr, instead of keeping as many
concubines as seemed good to him, should have chosen to gratify his
passions by entering six times into the strict bonds of matrimony,
religiously observing those bonds. It has seemed to him even more
paradoxical that one reputed to have been the most sanguinary tyrant
who ever disgraced the English throne should have been not only
endured, but loved and regretted by a fierce and free-spoken people;