always been known to several persons about the late king.  When, with this conviction, we recur to the “Eikon,” and examine it in connection with Gauden’s acknowledged writings, the internal testimony against him no longer seems so absolutely conclusive.  Gauden’s style is by no means so bad as Hume represents it.  Many remarkable parallels between it and the diction of the “Eikon” have been pointed out by Todd, and the most searching modern investigator, Doble.  We may also discover one marked intellectual resemblance.  Nothing is more characteristic in the “Eikon” than its indirectness.  The writer is full of qualifications, limitations, allowances; he fences and guards himself, and seems always on the point of taking back what he has said, but never does; and veers and tacks, tacks and veers, until he has worked himself into port.  The like peculiarity is very observable in Gauden, especially in his once-popular “Companion to the Altar.”  There is also a strong internal argument against Charles’s authorship in the preponderance of the theological element.  That this should occupy an important place in the writings of a martyr for the Church of England was certainly to be expected, but the theology of the “Eikon” has an unmistakably professional flavour.  Let any man read it with an unbiassed mind, and then say whether he has been listening to a king or to a chaplain.  “One of us,” pithily comments Archbishop Herring.  “I write rather like a divine than a prince,” the assumed author acknowledges, or is made to acknowledge.  When to these considerations is added that any scrap of the “Eikon” in the King’s handwriting would have been treasured as an inestimable relic, and that no scrap was ever produced, there can be little question as to the verdict of criticism.  For all practical purposes, nevertheless, the “Eikon” in Milton’s time was the King’s book, for everybody thought it so.  Milton hints some vague suspicions, but refrains from impugning it seriously, and indeed the defenders of its authenticity will be quite justified in asserting that if Gauden had been dumb, Criticism would have been blind.

According to Selden’s biographer, Cromwell was at first anxious that the “Eikon” should be answered by that consummate jurist, and it was only on his declining the task that it came into Milton’s hands.  That he also would have declined it but for his official position may be inferred from his own words:  “I take it on me as a work assigned, rather than by me chosen or affected.”  His distaste may further be gauged by his tardiness; while “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” had been written in little more than a week, his “Eikonoklastes,” a reply to a book published in February, did not appear until October 6th.  His reluctance may be partly explained by his feeling that “to descant on the misfortunes of a person fallen from so high a dignity, who hath also paid his final debt both to nature and his faults, is neither of itself a thing