To clear up such seeming paradoxes as these by carefully examining
the facts of the sixteenth century has been Mr. Froude's work; and we
have the results of his labour in two volumes, embracing only a
period of eleven years; but giving promise that the mysteries of the
succeeding time will be well cleared up for us in future volumes, and
that we shall find our forefathers to have been, if no better, at
least no worse men than ourselves. He has brought to the task known
talents and learning, a mastery over English prose almost unequalled
in this generation, a spirit of most patient and good-tempered
research, and that intimate knowledge of human motives and passions
which his former books have shown, and which we have a right to
expect from any scholar who has really profited by Aristotle's
unrivalled Ethics. He has fairly examined every contemporary
document within his reach, and, as he informs us in the preface, he
has been enabled, through the kindness of Sir Francis Palgrave, to
consult a great number of MSS. relating to the Reformation, hitherto
all but unknown to the public, and referred to in his work as MSS. in
the Rolls' House, where the originals are easily accessible. These,
he states, he intends to publish, with additions from his own
reading, as soon as he has brought his history down to the end of
Henry the Eighth's reign.

But Mr. Froude's chief text-book seems to have been State Papers and
Acts of Parliament. He has begun his work in the only temper in
which a man can write accurately and well; in a temper of trust
toward the generation whom he describes. The only temper; for if a
man has no affection for the characters of whom he reads, he will
never understand them; if he has no respect for his subject, he will
never take the trouble to exhaust it. To such an author the Statutes
at large, as the deliberate expression of the nation's will and