Loe raamatut: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862», lehekülg 2

But there were two famous soldier's songs, of unknown origin, the pets of every camp, which piqued all the poets into writing war-verses as soon as the genius of Frederic kindled such enthusiasm among Prussians. The first was an old one about Prince Eugene, who was another hero, loved in camps, and besung with ardor around every watchfire. It is a genuine soldier's song.

 
Prince Eugene, the noble captain,
For the Kaiser would recover
Town and fortress of Belgrade;
So he put a bridge together
To transport his army thither,
And before the town parade.
 
 
When the floating bridge was ready,
So that guns and wagons steady
Could pass o'er the Danube stream,
By Semlin a camp collected.
That the Turks might be ejected,
To their great chagrin and shame.
 
 
Twenty-first of August was it,
When a spy in stormy weather
Came, and told the Prince and swore
That the Turks they all amounted,
Near, at least, as could be counted,
To three hundred thousand men, or more.
 
 
Prince Eugenius never trembled
At the news, but straight assembled
All his generals to know:
Them he carefully instructed
How the troops should be conducted
Smartly to attack the foe.
 
 
With the watchword he commanded
They should wait till twelve was sounded
At the middle of the night;
Mounting then upon their horses,
For a skirmish with the forces,
Go in earnest at the fight.
 
 
Straightway all to horseback getting,
Weapons handy, forth were setting
Silently from the redoubt:
Musketeers, dragooners also,
Bravely fought and made them fall so,—
Led them such a dance about.
 
 
And our cannoneers advancing
Furnished music for the dancing,
With their pieces great and small;
Great and small upon them playing,
Heathen were averse to staying,
Ran, and did not stay at all.
 
 
Prince Eugenius on the right wing
Like a lion did his fighting,
So he did field-marshal's part:
Prince Ludwig rode from one to th' other,
Cried, "Keep firm, each German brother,
Hurt the foe with all your heart!"
 
 
Prince Ludwig, struck by bullet leaden,
With his youthful life did redden,
And his soul did then resign:
Badly Prince Eugene wept o'er him,
For the love he always bore him,—
Had him brought to Peterwardein.
 

The music is peculiar,—one flat, 3/4 time,—a very rare measure, and giving plenty of opportunity for a quaint camp-style of singing.

The other song appeared during Frederic's Silesian War. It contains some choice reminiscences of his favorite rhetoric.

 
Fridericus Rex, our master and king,
His soldiers altogether to the field would bring,
Battalions two hundred, and a thousand squadrons clear,
And cartridges sixty to every grenadier.
 
 
"Cursed fellows, ye!"—his Majesty began,—
"For me stand in battle, each man to man;
Silesia and County Glatz to me they will not grant,
Nor the hundred millions either which I want.
 
 
"The Empress and the French have gone to be allied,
And the Roman kingdom has revolted from my side,
And the Russians are bringing into Prussia war;—
Up, let us show them that we Prussians are!
 
 
"My General Schwerin, and Field-Marshal Von Keith,
And Von Ziethen, Major-General, are ready for a fight;
Turban-spitting Element! Cross and Lightning get
Who has not found Fritz and his soldiers out yet!
 
 
"Now adieu, Louisa!¹³—Louisa, dry your eyes!
There's not a soldier's life for every ball that flies;
For if all the bullets singly hit their men,
Where could our Majesties get soldiers then?
 
 
"Now the hole a musket-bullet makes is small,—
'T is a larger hole made by a cannon-ball;
But the bullets all are of iron and of lead,
And many a bullet goes for many overhead.
 
 
"'T is a right heavy calibre to our artillery,
And never goes a Prussian over to the enemy,
For 't is cursed bad money that the Swedes have to pay;
Is there any better coin of the Austrian?—who can say?
 
 
"The French are paid off in pomade by their king,
But each week in pennies we get our reckoning;
Sacrament of Cross and Lightning! Turbans, spit away!
Who draws so promptly as the Prussian his pay?"
 
 
With a laurel-wreath adorned, Fridericus my King,
If you had only oftener permitted plundering,
Fredericus Rex, king and hero of the fight,
We would drive the Devil for thee out of sight!
 

Among the songs which the military ardor of this period stimulated, the best are those by Gleim, (1719-1803) called "Songs of a Prussian Grenadier." All the literary men, Lessing not excepted, were seized with the Prussian enthusiasm; the pen ravaged the domain of sentiment to collect trophies for Father Friedrich. The desolation it produced in the attempt to write the word Glory could be matched only by the sword. But Gleim was a man of spirit and considerable power. The shock of Frederic's military successes made him suddenly drop the pen with which he had been inditing Anacreontics, and weak, rhymeless Horatian moods. His grenadier-songs, though often meagre and inflated, and marked with the literary vices of the time, do still account for the great fame which they acquired, as they went marching with the finest army that Europe ever saw. Here is a specimen:—

VICTORY-SONG AFTER THE BATTLE NEAR PRAGUE

 
Victoria! with us is God;
There lies the haughty foe!
He falls, for righteous is our God;
Victoria! he lies low.
 
 
'T is true our father¹⁴ is no more,
Yet hero-like be went,
And now the conquering host looks o'er
From high and starry tent.
 
 
The noble man, he led the way
For God and Fatherland,
And scarce was his old head so gray
As valiant his hand.
 
 
With fire of youth and hero-craft
A banner snatching, he
Held it aloft upon its shaft
For all of us to see;
 
 
And said,—"My children, now attack,—
Take each redoubt and gun!"
And swifter than the lightning track
We followed, every one.
 
 
Alas, the flag that led the strife
Falls with him ere we win!
It was a glorious end of life:
O fortunate Schwerin!
 
 
And when thy Frederic saw thee low,
From out his sobbing breath
His orders hurled us on the foe
In vengeance for thy death.
 
 
Thou, Henry,¹⁵ wert a soldier true,
Thou foughtest royally!
From deed to deed our glances flew,
Thou lion-youth, with thee!
 
 
A Prussian heart with valor quick,
Right Christian was his mood:
Red grew his sword, and flowing thick
His steps with Pandourt¹⁶-blood.
 
 
Full seven earth-works did we clear,
The bear-skins broke and fled;
Then, Frederic, went thy grenadier
High over heaps of dead:
 
 
Remembered, in the murderous fight,
God, Fatherland, and thee,—
Turned, from the deep and smoky night,
His Frederic to see,
 
 
And trembled,—with a flush of fear
His visage mounted high;
He trembled, not that death was near,
But lest thou, too, shouldst die:
 
 
Despised the balls like scattered seed,
The cannon's thunder-tone,
Fought fiercely, did a hero's deed,
Till all thy foes had flown.
 
 
Now thanks he God for all His might,
And sings, Victoria!
And all the blood from out this fight
Flows to Theresia.
 
 
And if she will not stay the plague,
Nor peace to thee concede,
Storm with us, Frederic, first her Prague,
Then, to Vienna lead!
 

The love which the soldiers had for Frederic survived in the army after all the veterans of his wars had passed away. It is well preserved in this camp-song:—

THE INVALIDES AT FATHER FREDERIC'S GRAVE

Here stump we round upon our crutches, round our Father's grave we go, And from our eyelids down our grizzled beards the bitter tears will flow.

 
'T was long ago, with Frederic living, that we
got our lawful gains:
A meagre ration now they serve us,—life's no
longer worth the pains.
 
 
Here stump we round, deserted orphans, and
with tears each other see,—
Are waiting for our marching orders hence,
to be again with thee.
 
 
Yes, Father, only could we buy thee, with our
blood, by Heaven, yes,—
We Invalides, forlorn detachment, straight
through death would storming press!
 

When the German princes issued to their subjects unlimited orders for Constitutions, to be filled up and presented after the domination of Napoleon was destroyed, all classes hastened, fervid with hope and anti-Gallic feeling, to offer their best men for the War of Liberation. Then the poets took again their rhythm from an air vibrating with the cannon's pulse. There was Germanic unity for a while, fed upon expectation and the smoke of successful fields. Most of the songs of this period have been already translated. Ruckert, in a series of verses which he called "Sonnets in Armor," gave a fine scholarly expression to the popular desires. Here is his exultation over the Battle of Leipsic:—

 
Can there no song
Roar with a might
Loud as the fight
Leipsic's region along?
 
 
Three days and three nights,
No moment of rest,
And not for a jest,
Went thundering the fights.
 
 
Three days and three nights
Leipsic Fair kept: Frenchmen who pleasured
There with an iron yardstick were measured,
Bringing the reckoning with them to rights.
 
 
Three days and all night
A battue of larks the Leipsicker make;
Every haul a hundred he takes,
A thousand each flight.
 
 
Ha! it is good,
Now that the Russian can boast no longer
He alone of us is stronger
To slake his steppes with hostile blood.
 
 
Not in the frosty North alone,
But here in Meissen,
Here at Leipsic on the Pleissen,
Can the French be overthrown.
 
 
Shallow Pleissen deep is flowing;
Plains upheaving,
The dead receiving,
Seem to mountains for us growing.
 
 
They will be our mountains never,
But this fame
Shall be our claim
On the rolls of earth forever.
 

What all this amounted to, when the German people began to send in their constitutional cartes-blanches, is nicely taken off by Hoffman von Fallersleben, in this mock war-song, published in 1842:—

All sing.

 
Hark to the beating drum!
See how the people come!
Flag in the van!
We follow, man for man.
Rouse, rouse
From earth and house!
Ye women and children, good night!
Forth we hasten, we hasten to the fight,
With God for our King and Fatherland.
 

A night-patrol of 1813 sings.

 
O God! and why, and why,
For princes' whim, renown, and might,
To the fight?
For court-flies and other crows,
To blows?
For the nonage of our folk,
Into smoke?
For must-war-meal and class-tax,
To thwacks?
For privilege and censordom—
Hum—
Into battle without winking?
But—I was thinking—
 

All sing.

 
Hark to the heating drum!
See how the people come!
Flag in the van!
We follow, man for man:
In battle's roar
The time is o'er
To ask for reasons,—hear, the drum
Again is calling,—tum—tum—tum,—
With God for King and Fatherland.
 

Or to put it in two stanzas of his, written on a visit to the Valhalla, or Hall of German Worthies, at Regensburg:—

 
I salute thee, sacred Hall,
Chronicle of German glory!
I salute ye, heroes all
Of the new time and the hoary!
 
 
Patriot heroes, from your sleep
Into being could ye pass!
No, a king would rather keep
Patriots in stone and brass.
 

The Danish sea-songs, like those of the English, are far better than the land-songs of the soldiers: but here is one with a true and temperate sentiment, which the present war will readily help us to appreciate. It is found in a book of Danish popular songs.¹⁷

(Herlig er Krigerens Faerd.)

 
Good is the soldier's trade,
For envy well made:
The lightning-blade
Over force-men he swingeth;
A loved one shall prize
The honor he bringeth;
Is there a duty?
That's soldier's booty,—
To have it he dies.
 
 
True for his king and land
The Northman will stand;
An oath is a band,—
He never can rend it;
The dear coast, 't is right
A son should defend it;
For battle he burneth,
Death's smile he returneth,
And bleeds with delight.
 
 
Scars well set off his face,—
Each one is a grace;
His profit they trace,—
No labor shines brighter:
A wreath is the scar
On the brow of a fighter;
His maid thinks him fairer,
His ornament rarer
Than coat with a star.
 
 
Reaches the king his hand,
That makes his soul grand,
And fast loyal band
Round his heart it is slinging;
From Fatherland's good
The motion was springing:
His deeds so requited,
Is gratefully lighted
A man's highest mood.
 
 
Bravery's holy fire,
Beam nobler and higher,
And light our desire
A path out of madness!
By courage and deed
We conquer peace-gladness:
We suffer for that thing,
We strike but for that thing,
And gladly we bleed.
 

But our material threatens the space we have at command. Four more specimens must suffice for the present. They are all favorite soldier-songs. The first is by Chamisso, known popularly as the author of "Peter Schlemihl's Shadow," and depicts the mood of a soldier who has been detailed to assist in a military execution:—

 
The muffled drums to our marching play.
How distant the spot, and how long the way!
Oh, were I at rest, and the bitterness through!
Methinks it will break my heart in two!
 
 
Him only I loved of all below,—
Him only who yet to death must go;
At the rolling music we parade,
And of me too, me, the choice is made!
 
 
Once more, and the last, he looks upon
The cheering light of heaven's sun;
But now his eyes they are binding tight:
God grant to him rest and other light!
 
 
Nine muskets are lifted to the eye,
Eight bullets have gone whistling by;
They trembled all with comrades' smart,—
But I—I hit him in his heart!
 

The next is by Von Holtei:—

THE VETERAN TO HIS CLOAK

 
Full thirty years art thou of age, hast many a
storm lived through,
Brother-like hast round me tightened,
And whenever cannons lightened,
Both of us no terror knew.
 
 
Wet soaking to the skin we lay for many a
blessed night,
Thou alone hast warmth imparted,
And if I was heavy-hearted,
Telling thee would make me light.
 
 
My secrets thou hast never spoke, wert ever still and true;
Every tatter did befriend me,
Therefore I'll no longer mend thee,
Lest, old chap, 't would make thee new.
 
 
And dearer still art thou to ma when jests about thee roll;
For where the rags below are dropping,
There went through the bullets popping,—
Every bullet makes a hole.
 
 
And when the final bullet comes to stop a German heart,
Then, old cloak, a grave provide me,
Weather-beaten friend, still hide me,
As I sleep in thee apart.
 
 
There lie we till the roll-call together in the grave:
For the roll I shall be heedful,
Therefore it will then be needful
For me an old cloak to have.
 

The next one is taken from a student-song book, and was probably written in 1814:—

THE CANTEEN

 
Just help me, Lottie, as I spring;
My arm is feeble, see,—
I still must have it in a sling;
Be softly now with me!
But do not let the canteen slip,—
Here, take it first, I pray,—
For when that's broken from my lip,
All joys will flow away.
 
 
"And why for that so anxious?—pshaw!
It is not worth a pin:
The common glass, the bit of straw,
And not a drop within!"
No matter, Lottie, take it out,—
'T is past your reckoning:
Yes, look it round and round about,—
There drank from it—my King!
 
 
By Leipsic near, if you must know,—
'T was just no children's play,—
A ball hit me a grievous blow,
And in the crowd I lay;
Nigh death, they bore me from the scene,
My garments off they fling,
Yet held I fast by my canteen,—
There drank from it—my King!
 
 
For once our ranks in passing through
He paused,—we saw his face;
Around us keen the volleys flew,
He calmly kept his place.
He thirsted,—I could see it plain,
And courage took to bring
My old canteen for him to drain,—
He drank from it—my King!
 
 
He touched me on the shoulder here,
And said, "I thank thee, friend,
Thy liquor gives me timely cheer,—
Thou didst right well intend."
O'erjoyed at this, I cried aloud,
"O comrades, who can bring
Canteen like this to make him proud?—
There drank from it—my King!"
 
 
That old canteen shall no one have,
The best of treasures mine;
Put it at last upon my grave,
And under it this line:
"He fought at Leipsic, whom this green
Is softly covering;
Best household good was his canteen,—
There drank from it—his King!"
 

And finally, a song for all the campaigns of life:—

 
Morning-red! morning-red!
Lightest me towards the dead!
Soon the trumpets will be blowing,
Then from life must I be going,
I, and comrades many a one.
 
 
Soon as thought, soon as thought,
Pleasure to an end is brought;
Yesterday upon proud horses,—
Shot to-day, our quiet corses
Are to-morrow in the grave.
 
 
And how soon, and how soon,
Vanish shape and beauty's noon!
Of thy cheeks a moment vaunting,
Like the milk and purple haunting,—
Ah, the roses fade away!
 
 
And what, then, and what, then,
Is the joy and lust of men?
Ever caring, ever getting,
From the early morn-light fretting
Till the day is past and gone.
 
 
Therefore still, therefore still
I content me, as God will:
Fighting stoutly, nought shall shake me:
For should death itself o'ertake me,
Then a gallant soldier dies.
 

FROUDE'S HENRY THE EIGHTH

The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries, have been set aside, and others of a widely different character pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper, and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of the very highest and best class,—as the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central government, so far as that work was possible,—thus proceeding in the spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars. This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834 concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its chiefs, and the man who should now bring forward the conqueror of Gaul as a vulgar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that man who should insist that General Jackson destroyed American liberty when he removed the deposits from the national bank. The facts and fears of one generation often furnish material for nothing but jests and jeers to that generation's successors; and we who behold a million of men in arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all calling themselves Americans, are astonished when we read or remember that our immediate predecessors in the political world went to the verge of madness on the Currency question. Perhaps the men of 1889 may be equally astonished, when they shall turn to files of newspapers that were published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thousands of families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the misjudging of the present, and the failure to comprehend the future.

Men of a very different stamp from the first of the Romans have been allowed the benefits that come from a rehearing of their causes. Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have tried the soundest of heads, even had that head been united with the purest of hearts. But the apologists of "the sea-green incorruptible," it must be admitted, have not been very successful, as the sence of mankind revolts at indiscriminate murder, even when the murderer's hands have no other stain than that which comes from blood,—for that is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. Mr. Paget has all but whitewashed Marlborough, and has shaken many men's faith in the justice of Lord Macauley's judgement and in the accuracy of his assertions. Richard III., by all who can look through the clouds raised by Shakespeare over English history of the fifteenth century, is admitted to have been a much better man and ruler than were the average of British monarchs from the Conquest to the Revolution, thanks to the labors of Horace Walpole and Caroline Halsted, who, however, have only followed in the path struck out by Sir George Buck at a much earlier period. The case of Mary Stuart still remains unsettled, and bids fair to be the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case of history; but this is owing to the circumstance that that unfortunate queen is so closely associated with the origin of our modern parties that justice where her reputation is concerned is scarcely to be looked for. Little has been said for King John; and Mr. Woolryche's kind attempt to reconcile men to the name of Jeffreys has proved a total failure. Strafford has about as many admirers as enemies among those who know his history, but this is due more to the manner of his death than to any love of his life: of so much more importance is it that men should die well than live well, so far as the judgement of posterity is concerned with their actions.

Strafford's master, who so scandalously abandoned him to the headsman, owes the existence of the party that still upholds his conduct to the dignified manner in which he faced death, a death at which the whole world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions, have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian gens. It must be confessed that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet. They would have been mighty interesting reading,—as full of lies, probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.

Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates. Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Albèri, Catharine was not the harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French coup d'état, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in 1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,—a sort of argument the force of which we always have been unable to appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted. The incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose reign they were perpetrated.

The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed. A legitimate king, though the heir of a successful usurpation, and holding the royal prerogative as high as any man who ever grasped the sceptre, he was the tool of the mightiest of revolutionists, and poured out more royal and noble blood than ever flowed at the command of all the Jacobins and Democrats that have warred against thrones and dynasties and aristocracies. He is abhorred of Catholics, and Protestants do not love him; for he pulled down the old religious fabric of his kingdom, and furnished to the Reformers a permanent standing-place from which to move the world, while at the same time he slaughtered Protestants as ruthlessly as ever they were disposed of by any ruler of the Houses of Austria and Valois. Reeking with blood, and apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general estimate of his character than would a whole volume of professed personal panegyric, or of elaborate defence of his policy and his deeds. But this is not sufficient for those persons who would have reasons for their historical belief, and who seek to have a solid foundation for the faith they feel in the real greatness of the second 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 execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint, with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history, unless we are desirous of seeing that become a mere party-record. The practice of publishing books in an incomplete state is one that by no means tends to render them impartial, when they relate to matters that are in dispute. Mr. Froude's first and second volumes, which bring the work down to the murder of Anne Boleyn, afforded the most desirable material for the critics, many of whom most pointedly dissented from his views, and some of whom severely attacked his positions, and not always unsuccessfully. They were, naturally, not disposed to think that an act bad in itself changed its character when it became the act of Henry VIII. It was contrary to all human experience to suppose that Henry was in all cases in the right, while his opponents and his victims were as invariably in the wrong. If there ever had lived and reigned a man who could not do wrong, it was preposterous to look for him in one who had been a wife-killer, a persecutor, the slayer of the nobility of his kingdom, the exterminator of the last remnants of an old royal race, the patron of fagots and ropes and axes, and a hard-hearted and selfish voluptuary, who seems never to have been open to one kind or generous feeling. Most of those tyrants that have been hung up on high, by way of warning to despots, have had their "uncorrupted hours," in which they vindicated their claim to humanity by the performance of some good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's critics failed to accept his estimate of Henry, or that they arrayed anew the long list of his shocking misdeeds, and dwelt with unction on his total want of sympathy with ordinary humanity. As little surprising is it that Mr. Froude's attachment to the kingly queen-killer should be increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly, had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere, enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of men. A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and quilting-parties.