shown before. His sketch of the Christian Brothers, and his little
true romance of Anthony Dalaber, the Oxford student, are gems of
writing; while his conception of Latimer, on whom he looks as the
hero of the movement, and all but an English Luther, is as worthy of
Latimer as it is of himself. It is written as history should be,
discriminatingly, patiently, and yet lovingly and genially; rejoicing
not in evil, but in the truth; and rejoicing still more in goodness,
where goodness can honestly be found.

To the ecclesiastical and political elements in the English
Reformation Mr. Froude devotes a large portion of his book. We shall
not enter into the questions which he discusses therein. That aspect
of the movement is a foreign and a delicate subject, from discussing
which a Scotch periodical may be excused. {2} North Britain had a
somewhat different problem to solve from her southern sister, and
solved it in an altogether different way: but this we must say, that
the facts and, still more, the State Papers (especially the petition
of the Commons, as contrasted with the utterly benighted answer of
the Bishops) which Mr. Froude gives are such as to raise our opinion
of the method on which the English part of the Reformation was
conducted, and make us believe that in this, as in other matters,
both Henry and his Parliament, though still doctrinal Romanists, were
sound-headed practical Englishmen.

This result is of the same kind as most of those at which Mr. Froude
arrives. They form altogether a general justification of our
ancestors in Henry the Eighth's time, if not of Henry the Eighth
himself, which frees Mr. Froude from that charge of irreverence to
the past generations against which we protested in the beginning of
the article. We hope honestly that he may be as successful in his