next volumes as he has been in these, in vindicating the worthies of
the sixteenth century. Whether he shall fail or not, and whether or
not he has altogether succeeded, in the volumes before us, his book
marks a new epoch, and, we trust, a healthier and loftier one, in
English history. We trust that they inaugurate a time in which the
deeds of our forefathers shall be looked on as sacred heirlooms;
their sins as our shame, their victories as bequests to us; when men
shall have sufficient confidence in those to whom they owe their
existence to scrutinise faithfully and patiently every fact
concerning them, with a proud trust that, search as they may, they
will not find much of which to be ashamed.

Lastly, Mr. Froude takes a view of Henry's character, not, indeed,
new (for it is the original one), but obsolete for now two hundred
years. Let it be well understood that he makes no attempt (he has
been accused thereof) to whitewash Henry: all that he does is to
remove as far as he can the modern layers of 'black-wash,' and to let
the man himself, fair or foul, be seen. For the result he is not
responsible: it depends on facts; and unless Mr. Froude has
knowingly concealed facts to an amount of which even a Lingard might
be ashamed, the result is that Henry the Eighth was actually very
much the man which he appeared to be to the English nation in his own
generation, and for two or three generations after his death--a
result which need not astonish us, if we will only give our ancestors
credit for having at least as much common sense as ourselves, and
believe (why should we not?) that, on the whole, they understood
their own business better than we are likely to do.

'The bloated tyrant,' it is confessed, contrived somehow or other to
be popular enough. Mr. Froude tells us the reasons. He was not born