conscience, will appear the most important of all sources of
information; the first to be consulted, the last to be contradicted;
the Canon which is not to be checked and corrected by private letters
and flying pamphlets, but which is to check and correct them. This
seems Mr. Froude's theory; and we are at no pains to confess that if
he be wrong we see no hope of arriving at truth. If these public
documents are not to be admitted in evidence before all others, we
see no hope for the faithful and earnest historian; he must give
himself up to swim as he may on the frothy stream of private letters,
anecdotes, and pamphlets, the puppet of the ignorance, credulity,
peevishness, spite, of any and every gossip and scribbler.

Beginning his history with the fall of Wolsey, Mr. Froude enters, of
course, at his first step into the vexed question of Henry's divorce:
an introductory chapter, on the general state of England, we shall
notice hereafter.

A very short inspection of the method in which he handles the divorce
question gives us at once confidence in his temper and judgment, and
hope that we may at last come to some clearer understanding of it
than the old law gives us, which we have already quoted, concerning
the dog who went mad to serve his private ends. In a few masterly
pages he sketches for us the rotting and dying Church, which had
recovered her power after the Wars of the Roses over an exhausted
nation; but in form only, not in life. Wolsey, with whom he has fair
and understanding sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister,
'loving England well, but loving Rome better,' who intends a reform
of the Church, but who, as the Pope's commissioner for that very
purpose, is liable to a praemunire, and therefore dare not appeal to
Parliament to carry out his designs, even if he could have counted on