6 one quarter of our English population was the only part that did not earnestly desire to see the old creed restored in its fulness,' what had become of the people who had pressed forward Reformation principles ever since the time of Wycliffe, soon after whose death we know they were estimated at one-half the population? Had they left no successors? Where were the people who rose as one man on Mary's death and supported Elizabeth and her Ministers in sweeping away the illegal results of that short reactionary episode in the career of the Reformation? Why, the Puritans themselves must have formed a large portion of that quarter of the population. Where were the people who supported the framers of our Liturgy, the martyrs for the Church of England? Could they have forced our formularies on the country without the majority being on their side? We know there were, occasional insurrections through all these reigns, but we have reason to believe that the insurgents were opposed to the large numerical majority of the people, the people of the towns and large villages, the great middle class rising every day in numbers and importance, the men who sent representatives to Parliament, and we know what these Parliaments were, -the bones and sinews of England. Elizabeth plainly saw that the future of this country was in the hands of the more intelligent, cultivated, and moderate of this great party, not in those of Catholics' or Puritans; she entirely sympathised with them from her heart, as we have already said, and not only with her intellect from education, learning, experience, conviction; but we require much more proof than Mr. Froude gives us that she was able in her turn to base her policy, which was substantially theirs, on the support of only a fraction of one quarter of the population. If so, she would at least deserve far more credit than he gives her for 'political sagacity.' Again we come into the region of miracles,' and begin to suspect that there is something at the bottom of these paradoxes. Whatever it may be, it is certainly not an affection for the Church of England. We have mentioned incidentally one cause of the errors into which Mr. Froude has been led-the reliance on the despatches of foreign ambassadors,-to which must be added the too great reference to the despatches of English spies and agents. To write an entirely fresh and independent history of such a period as this from such sources, neglecting the works of his predecessors, even though all but contemporary, as he does-for he scarcely ever refers to the standard authorities-is in itself a perilous undertaking. No doubt we gain a vast amount of hitherto unused material; Mr. Froude deserves the thanks of all Vol. 128. No. 256. 2 N future future historians for his extraordinary industry in searching the Simancas archives and our own for their long-buried treasures; but we cannot congratulate him on his caution in using them, nor give him credit for having done more than supply materials for history. The remark of M. Gauthier on this point is just: 'Qui voudrait accepter sans contrôle les nouvelles envoyées d'Ecosse par les agents Anglais et leurs espions? Et qui ne sait que beaucoup de pièces sont raturées et interlignées de la main même de Cecil?'(Avant Propos,' p. vi.) No people are so frequently deceived as ambassadors, agents, and spies in such an age. Their pictures of what is going on around them are often graphic and interesting to the greatest degree, but they require to be checked on all points touching politics, religion, and even as to mere fact. They too often see what they wish to see, and report what they are expected to report. But this is not to deny that they can be made most useful to the historian, and they are often so in Mr. Froude's hands. Perhaps the greatest service he has done us is the exposure of the machinery by which Philip II. was guiding the policy of Europe -a service for which we have equally, or even more, to thank Mr. Motley. Nothing is so interesting as to note the allgoverning monarch's cursory remarks scratched on the margin of his ambassadors' despatches, as, for example, where we have a letter of James VI., then quite a youth, to Philip, in which he says: 'M. de Mainville, you tell me, has been pleased to speak of the virtues and rare qualities which God has bestowed upon me;' and on the margin of which passage the experienced King has written, a modest young man.' In many a crisis we 'attend the very heart'-to use the expression of the spy Phillipps-of the actors. In no instance has Mr. Froude made better use of foreign documents than in his original account of the Armada. The journals of the Spanish officers employed on that hopeless expedition put the whole drama in a new light, and enable us to see the fight with our own eyes, and hear with our own ears the thunders of Drake and the wails of his miserable victims. Why, by-the-by, does our author not notice Sir Walter Ralegh in this struggle and elsewhere? He is scarcely mentioned in the whole work, and yet Mr. Edwards' valuable Life of Ralegh shows that he was already taking a leading part.* Another excellent service has been done by Mr. Froude through *The Life of Ralegh,' by Edward Edwards, 1868. Vol. i., ch. iii. We would particularly recommend this work to our readers, to which we regret that we have not been able to give a separate notice. these these Spanish papers. He has proved, with almost absolute conclusiveness, that the Jesuit stories concerning Elizabeth's immoral conduct with Leicester, Simier, Hatton, and others are false. These have been accepted by Lingard and many other writers, and incorporated into their histories, and have given a colour to their view of disputed questions. It is now ascertained that in the whole of the correspondence of Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, 'an enormous mass' (xi. 2), there is not a word of personal charge against her, not a single imputation on her personal character. His predecessor, De Silva, had also studiously enquired into the scandals which were afloat, and satisfied himself that they were without foundation. This, for reasons we need not enlarge upon, disposes of the question. While thanking Mr. Froude for this, we must, however, remark that it was quite unnecessary that he should give us the whole of Mary Stuart's indecent letter to Elizabeth, detailing many of these very charges which we are told not to believe; and we think he exceeds the limits usually and properly set in these matters elsewhere (xi. 413; xii. 5). When, however, it is an Archbishop of York against whom a disgusting scandal is to be told, even though the propagators of the scandal were punished upon investigation for subornation, we cannot be surprised that we have it in extenso. Nor can we congratulate our author on any great improvement of his tone upon other moral questions, such as the guilt of cruelty, since the days when he made a magnificent hero of the monster Henry VIII., defended his guilty instrument, Cromwell, justified the murders of Fisher and More (ii. 369)-(a passage in xi. 359 suggests that he has not recanted), admired the divorce and beheading of Henry's wives, excused his marriage with Jane Seymour the day after Anne Boleyn was beheaded as a dry act of duty' (ii. 503), laughed at the hard fate of the clergy who were caught by him in the trap of the præmunire (i. chap. iv.) (by the bye we observe he has entirely altered his opinion on the congé d'élire since he began his history *), scornfully disparaged the courageous young Masters of Arts of Oxford for holding out against Henry when their seniors gave in (i. chap. iii.), doubted whether wickedness was more than misfortune, approved of hanging abbots, because they might have been hoarding a fund to subsidise insurrection' (ii. 431), and avowed various other sentiments of a similar kind which surprised the public. In these volumes we are less violently affronted; but we trace the same spirit in the elaborate palliation (on the ground of necessity) of the use of torture (x. 293; xi. 327), and in the opinion that Alva's * Cf. ii., 196, note, with xii., 552. 2 N 2 horrible horrible massacres are only blamed because they failed in their intended effect. We deny that the difference in the estimate we make of the guilt of such deeds' may after all be only in the intellectual appreciation of the circumstances' (xi. 17). And, though we will not undertake, at the end of an article, to enter into the question of the justice of treating the invading Jesuits as traitors, we must take objection to the cold-blooded exulting language in which their frightful punishment is described in more places than one. It is sufficiently reprehensible even where the culprits are caught in the act (xii. 270). All this is too much of a piece with the passages we have noted when speaking of the Queen of Scots. We had meant to say something on Mr. Froude's treatment of Irish matters, but our space forbids. Amidst much graphic and interesting narrative of English dealings with that island there is to be found the same misapprehension of the conditions of the problem, the same studied depreciation of the Established Church, and, as Mr. Brewer has lately proved in a crucial instance, the same hasty assumption, unfounded generalisation, and culpable carelessness in the use of documents as we have pointed out in other cases, and which obliges us to refuse to consider these volumes as a history in the highest sense of the term. A history of England in the Tudor reigns should surely also give us a very much greater insight into the Parliamentary and Constitutional history of the times. We look in vain for any indications of a study of D'Ewes, or any other authority, on the numerous important questions raised in this period. A mere narrative or biography, without legal, literary, constitutional, or ecclesiastical history, and there is nothing worth mention of any of them in these volumes,-may be a book of the season for circulating libraries, but it can take no rank as a History.' We are truly sorry that we can give no higher praise to this work. It seems to us a grand opportunity misused; grand, because few authors have ever attained so brilliant a style as Mr. Froude, or shown more enterprise in searching for new information; while no period of English history can compare in romantic interest with that of Elizabeth. The work will necessarily have many readers and shallow admirers: it might have left its mark for good. We have given reasons for believing that this cannot be expected. The one primary qualification in a historian is that he should inspire confidence in the minds of educated readers, and a fair belief in his guidance. Mr. Froude utterly fails to do this. ART. ART. VIII.-Annals of an Eventful Life. By George Webbe Dasent, D.C.L. 3 Vols. London, 1870. AMIDST the glut of novels which now issues from the press, the number of those which exhibit marks of originality. may be two or three per cent. A public too busy or two frivolous to read much other literature contents itself with a general demand, and if the supply is constant, abstains from severe criticism of the material. The purveyors, indeed, are alive to the exigencies of competition, and either trade upon a name by way of throwing a warranty of genius around thinly printed octavos with 'nothing new' in them, or else insist on at least one sensation to a book, to carry off the tedium of tameness and sameness. In the latest novels it has been our fate to peruse this sort of relief is administered, in one instance, by the introduction of a nervous child driven into brain fever by a worthless nurse, who tried to keep her quiet in bed by telling her that the dresses hanging side by side on pegs in an open clothes-press were Blue-beard's headless wives: in another, by shearing away all the heroine's belongings in the last chapter, and leaving her a stately and solitary monument of patience through killing off patron, husband, and children, by the half-dozen. To say nothing of Niobe, this sort of dénouement smacks of Hamlet: nor is it respectful to the reader, although it may be convenient enough for the author, to pile up disasters towards the conclusion, with the double purpose of compensation for an otherwise uneventful story, and of abridgment of the novelist's duty of disposing of his dramatis persona' before he makes his final bow. Many novels, indeed, disavow resort to the sensational; and in the exercise of such self-denial deny us the luxury of a single excitement, and travelling over the beaten track of love requited' and 'love unrequited,' 'happy-ever-afters,' and 'blighted beings' are, to speak plainly, of the groove groovy. So that between one and the other, there is little novelty, little seeming recognition of a class of readers which can appreciate constructiveness, tact, interfusion of sentiment and humour, wit and wisdom in just proportion, or the bone and muscle of thought and reflection, in nine out of ten of our would-be popular novelists. We venture to think we have hit upon a tenth man. 6 In his Annals of an Eventful Life,' the author flings to the winds the venerable prescriptions of novelists from time out of mind, and having settled within himself the most direct mode of securing the ear of his readers, throws himself upon their favour with an air of trustfulness and old friend-ish-ness, which cannot fail to secure |