Tudor king of England. Men of ability have occasionally sought to
create an intelligible Henry VIII., and to cause us to respect one
whose doings have so potently affected human affairs through ten
generations, and the force of whose labors, whether those labors were
blindly or rationally wrought, is apparently as unspent as it was on
that day on which, having provided for the butchery of the noblest of
his servants, he fell into his final sleep. At the head of these
philosophic writers, and so far ahead of them as to leave them all out
of sight, is Mr. James Anthony Froude, whose "History of England from
the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" has been brought down to
the death of Mary I., in six volumes,--another proof of the grand scale
on which history is now written, in order that it may be read on the
small scale; for it is not given to many men to have the time for study
which even a moderate modern course of history requires in these active
days. Mr. Froude is a very different writer from Dr. Nares, but the
suggestions made to the heavy Doctor by Macaulay might be borne in mind
by the lively historian. He should remember that "the life of man is
now threescore years and ten," and not "demand from us so large a
portion of so short an existence" as must necessarily be required for
the perusal of a history which gives an octavo volume for every five
years of the annals of a small, though influential monarchy.

Mr. Froude did not commence his work in a state of blind admiration of
his royal hero,--the tone of his first volume being quite calm, and on
the whole as impartial as could reasonably have been expected from an
Englishman writing of the great men of a great period in his country's
history; but so natural is it for a man who has assumed the part of an
advocate to identify himself with the cause of his client, that our
author rapidly passes from the character of a mere advocate to that of
a partisan, and by the time that he has brought his work down to the