when he pounced upon newswriters and ferreted unlicensed pamphlets for sedition.  True, there was nothing in this occupation formally inconsistent with anything he had written in the “Areopagitica”; yet one wishes that the Council of State had provided otherwise for this particular department of the public service.  Nothing but a sense of duty can have reconciled him to a task so invidious; and there is some evidence of what might well have been believed without evidence—­that he mitigated the severity of the censorship as far as in him lay.  He was not to want for better occupation, for the Council of State was about to devolve upon him the charge of answering the great Royalist manifesto, “Eikon Basilike.”

The controversy respecting the authorship of the “Eikon Basilike” is a remarkable instance of the degree in which literary judgment may be biassed by political prepossession.  In the absence of other testimony one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according as his verdict inclined to Charles I. or Bishop Gauden.  In fact, it is no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely different kinds of testimony.  The external evidence of Charles’s authorship is worth nothing.  It is almost confined to the assertions, forty years after the publication, of a few aged Cavaliers, who were all morally certain that Charles wrote the book, and to whom a fiction supplying the accidental lack of external testimony would have seemed laudable and pious.  The only wonder is that such legends are not far more numerous.  On the other hand, the internal evidence seems at first sight to make for the king.  The style is not dissimilar to that of the reputed royal author; the sentiments are such as would have well become him; the assumed character is supported throughout with consistency; and there are none of the slips which a fabricator might have been thought hardly able to avoid.  The supposed personator of the King was unquestionably an unprincipled time-server.  Is it not an axiom that a worthy book can only proceed from a worthy mind?

                       “If this fail,
    The pillared firmament is rottenness,
    And earth’s base built on stubble!”

Against such considerations we have to set the stubborn facts that Bishop Gauden did actually claim the authorship that he preferred his claim to the very persons who had the strongest interest in exploding it; that he invoked the testimony of those who must have known the truth, and could most easily have crushed the lie; that he convinced not only Clarendon, but Charles’s own children, and received a substantial reward.  In the face of these undeniable facts, the numerous circumstances used with skill and ingenuity by Dr. Wordsworth to invalidate his claim, are of little weight.  The stronger the apparent objections, the more certain that the proofs in Gauden’s hands must have been overwhelming, and the greater the presumption that he was merely urging what had