to find that a popular king was not a mere monster of iniquity.  If Henry had been what Catholic historians represented him, the mob would have pulled his palace about his ears.  The public bought the book, and read it; for the style, though very unlike Macaulay’s, was quite as easy to read.  In 1860 appeared the two volumes dealing with Edward VI.  And Mary, which complete the former half of this great book.  After the brief and disturbed period of Edward’s minority and Somerset’s Protectorate, the country enjoyed a true Catholic reign.  Whatever may have been the religion of Henry, there could be no doubt about Mary’s.  Mary had only one use for Protestants, and that was to burn them.  Among her first victims were Latimer and Ridley, two bright ornaments of Christian faith and practice, who committed the deadly sin of believing that it was against the truth of Christ’s natural body to be in heaven and earth at the same time.  To them soon succeeded Cranmer, the father of the English liturgy, not a man of unblemished character, but incomparably superior to Gardiner, to Bonner, or to Pole.  For Cranmer Froude had a peculiar affection, and his account of the Archbishop’s martyrdom is unsurpassed by any other passage in the History.  I need make no apology for quoting the end of it; “So perished Cranmer.  He was brought out with the eyes of his soul blinded to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching while alive.  Pole was appointed next day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the Court had overreached themselves by their cruelty.  Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would have left the Archbishop to die broken-hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn, and the Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion.  They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the roll of martyrs.  The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a single and peculiar trial.  The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which He would build His Church.”

It used to be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste, and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences.  Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true.  The implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time, like the shirt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in persecution.  Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because according to that Church they are absolutely blameless.  Punctilious in the discharge of all religious duties, they were chaste, sober, frugal, and honest.  They made long prayers.  They tithed mint, and