reputation of any ordinary man. He was among the best physicians of
his age. He was his own engineer, inventing improvements in
artillery and new constructions in shipbuilding; and this not with
the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough
workmanlike understanding. His reading was vast, especially in
theology. He was 'attentive,' as it is called, 'to his religious
duties,' being present at the services in chapel two or three times a
day with unfailing regularity, and showing, to outward appearance, a
real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his
life. In private he was good-humoured and good-natured. His letters
to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and
unrestrained, and the letters written by them to him are similarly
plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that the person whom
they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as
a man. He seems to have been always kind, always considerate;
inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and
winning, as a consequence, their sincere and unaffected attachment.
As a ruler he had been eminently popular. All his wars had been
successful. He had the splendid tastes in which the English people
most delighted; . . . he had more than once been tried with
insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, and
extinguished in forgiveness . . . And it is certain that if he had
died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like the Roman
emperor said by Tacitus to have been censensu omnium dignus imperii
nisi imperasset, would have been considered by posterity as formed by
Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would
have been deplored as a perpetual calamity.'


Mr. Froude has, of course, not written these words without having