say that Henry cut off Anne Boleyn's head as that Queen Victoria
hanged Palmer. Death, and death of a far more horrible kind than
that which Anne Boleyn suffered, was the established penalty of the
offences of which she was convicted: and which had in her case this
fearful aggravation, that they were offences not against Henry
merely, but against the whole English nation. She had been married
in order that there might be an undisputed heir to the throne, and a
fearful war avoided. To throw into dispute, by any conduct of hers,
the legitimacy of her own offspring, argued a levity or a hard-
heartedness which of itself deserved the severest punishment.

We will pass from this disagreeable topic to Mr. Froude's lifelike
sketch of Pope Clement, and the endless tracasseries into which his
mingled weakness and cunning led him, and which, like most crooked
dealings, ended by defeating their own object. Pages 125 et sqq. of
Vol. I. contain sketches of him, his thoughts and ways, as amusing as
they are historically important; but we have no space to quote from
them. It will be well for those to whom the Reformation is still a
matter of astonishment to read those pages, and consider what manner
of man he was, in spite of all pretended divine authority, under
whose rule the Romish system received its irrecoverable wound.

But of all these figures, not excepting Henry's own, Wolsey stands
out as the most grand and tragical; and Mr. Froude has done good
service to history, if only in making us understand at last the
wondrous 'butcher's son.' Shakspeare seems to have felt (though he
could explain the reason neither to his auditors nor, perhaps, to
himself) that Wolsey was, on the whole, an heroical man. Mr. Froude
shows at once his strength and his weakness; his deep sense of the
rottenness of the Church; his purpose to purge her from those