tious, if unenlightened, inflexibility of Mary; and in the haughty, yet politic, firmness of Elizabeth. The first of these princes, whatever may have been his faults, was governed, in the main, by no baser passion than ambition, and his astute and indefatigable policy harmonized with the exigencies of the time. Elizabeth, with higher intellect and larger views, placed herself among the foremost champions of a cause on which the future of Christendom depended. The course pursued by Mary neither furthered the development of the nation, nor ran parallel with the tendencies of the age; but her motives, at least, were respectable; she acted in accordance with what she believed to be the strongest of all moral obligations. But Henry VIII. was neither guided by political principles nor by a mistaken sense of duty. In his character, the peculiarities of his race assume their most repulsive aspect; and we doubt if the record of a career, so utterly, so brutally, selfish as his can be found in the annals of history. There are names, "at which the world grows pale," of men who, impelled by demoniacal frenzy, have passed from crime to crime, until their natures seemed to lose all semblance of humanity. Nero, endowed, perhaps, by nature, with an excess of sensibility, was steeped, while yet a boy, in all the infamies of the accursed age in which he lived, and reached, at last, an abyss of insatiable desires, when the lust of pleasure and the lust of blood were one. The madness of uncontrollable appetites goaded that wretched heathen soul onward in its course of stupendous wickedness; and if the victim paused, if moments of reflection came, Remorse herself seized the scorpion whip, and drove him towards his fearful doom. Henry's character was of a different stamp. His was not a weak and susceptible nature, dragged by the impetuous current of an evil age into a vortex of insane desires. There was a method in his fury, very unlike the wildness of desperation. His intellect, though shallow, was clear; his will was inflexible; his heart was wholly callous. No affection, no loyalty, ever awakened a corresponding feeling in his breast, or even the faintest consciousness of what he ought to feel. Neither argument nor entreaty could move him from a selfish purpose. Wolsey sometimes knelt before him for 43

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hours, vainly endeavoring, by all the arts of persuasion, to shake his determination. An intense egotism pervaded his nature. He valued men only as they ministered to his gratification or his ease, not for any intrinsic qualities of their own. When he was weary of them, or no longer needed them, if they opposed his nefarious schemes, or if their rectitude but silently reproached him, he crushed them and forgot them. The trustworthiness of virtue and the subserviency of vice were of equal estimation in his eyes. The great services of Wolsey, the integrity of More, the base compliances of Cromwell, received a like reward from his impartial brutality.

But this is not the depth of his infamy. He was incapable of feeling in cases where the most inhuman feel. He knew no shame for actions of which depravity itself is ashamed. He forgot things which the most ungrateful remember,things which are remembered by most men when they have forgotten the weightiest benefits. He sent women from his bed to the scaffold, and no recollection of their embraces brought a blush to his unmanly cheeks. He cast off the incomparable wife, on whose faithful bosom he had reposed for fifteen years or more, and used all the arts of malice and of meanness to torture the miserable remnant of her days. He consigned to an ignominious death the accomplished woman, to gain possession of whom he had made a revolution in his kingdom and agitated all Christendom, and the ignorant girl who had been his wife for a month. He caused his daughters to be virtuously educated, and branded them as illegitimate. What a wretch must this have been, who never saw in his dreams the forms which he had caressed, and which the headsman had mangled! Who can look without disgust at that face which Hans Holbein's faithful pencil has transmitted to us?the small pig's-eyes, the drooping, flabby, greasy cheeks, these would have revealed the man, had history been mute, the man destitute alike of principles and of affections, who never experienced an emotion of love, of pity, of gratitude, or of remorse.

No person of ordinary, unsophisticated feelings ever read the history of this monarch without the strongest sensations of horror and contempt. Yet Henry VIII. has been very

leniently dealt with by nearly all Protestant writers, who have fancied, that, among this mass of vices, they could discern indications of a nature originally noble. The faults of his character have all been traced to the too early possession of arbitrary power, and to the sycophancy that stimulated every evil propensity. His easy manners, his frank and careless speech, have caused men to believe that " Bluff Harry had, after all, a naturally good heart. It is true that he was not a hypocrite. He had not the refinement of intellect or the regard for men's opinions necessary for hypocrisy. But this free and unceremonious address, these apparent marks of good humor and good fellowship, betokened only a nature satisfied with itself, and accustomed to give free play to every selfish impulse. Far from indicating any kindly feeling or personal regard, these nauseous familiarities were lavished upon persons to whom he behaved with inconceivable baseness. We know, from the best evidence, that the hardened nature of the man was visible to every observer not blinded by his own vanity. When Roper congratulated his fatherin-law upon the loving demeanor of the king, who had put his fat arm about the Chancellor's neck as they walked together in conversation, "Son Roper," replied the keensighted More, "if having my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go." Sharon Turner finds a proof of Henry's magnanimity in the fact, that when Reginald Pole expostulated with him on the violence of his measures, Henry, whose hand, while he was speaking, played with the dagger hanging at his girdle, preserved sufficient self-command not to thrust the weapon, as he felt strongly inclined to do, into his kinsman's breast!

Hallam, who applauds the affability of his manners and the generosity of his temper, observes that "after all, Henry was every whit as good a king and man as Francis I., whom there are still some on the other side of the Channel servile enough to extol; not the least more tyrannical and sanguinary, and of better faith towards his neighbors." Francis I. (whose character, as he has been dead these three hundred years, we cannot imagine any Frenchman of the present day extolling from servile motives) was, doubtless, an arbitrary

prince and a licentious man, whose example gave its tone to the most profligate of courts, and who oppressed his subjects by such exactions as were never tolerated by the English nation under the most despotic of its sovereigns. But we do not remember to have read that he punished loyalty and fidelity as crimes; that the men who were most devoted to his service were consigned, one after another, to ignominy and death. He was unfaithful to his wife; but he did not degrade her from her rank, or deny her the company of her children, or strip her of the comforts of life, and assign her a residence where the unwholesome air swiftly terminated her existence. The women who shared his sensual pleasures were not afterwards the victims of his brutal temper. Madame d'Estampes did not perish by the sword of the execu tioner, but is credibly reported to have survived her royal lover. The children of Francis were not made the objects of public stigma, or treated with insolence and harshness by his parasites. No one ever expressed a wish, in his presence, that the head of the king's daughter were "from her shoulders," in order that he might "toss it with his foot." The veneration which Francis showed for his mother, his regard and affection for his sister, the ardent love which he bore to his children, the delicacy of his behavior towards his daughter-inlaw, on an occasion when delicacy was something more than courtesy, are traits recorded not merely by his "servile" countrymen, but by the intelligent Venetian ministers, whose practice it was to furnish to their government secret and faithful reports of what came under their observation. If a prominent feature in the character of the French monarch was love of applause, the conduct by which he often endeavored to gain approbation was of that kind which most deserves it. "Take back

"Henry, the second son of Francis I., who was now dauphin, was married to Catharine de Medici, of Florence. For a long time they had no children, and, as she was by many not deemed his equal in birth, the idea of sending her back to Florence began to be spoken of. Catharine herself, wise and resolute as she was, came to the King, and offered to depart, whilst a flood of tears choked her language. My child,' replied the King, 'as God has willed that you should be my daughter-in-law, such shall you remain.' This act is worthy of high estimation, for Francis was anxiously fearful that none of his sons would have male issue, and that his race would, therefore, become extinct in the second generation." Ranke, Wars and Monarchy in France, i. 165.

your keys," he said to the citizens of Rochelle, after the suppression of an insurrection, which the bloody chastisement that followed the "Pilgrimage of Grace" leaves us no room to doubt how Henry would have punished; -"Ring all your bells; you are forgiven; I covet only the hearts of my subjects." No one will pretend that the policy of Francis was dictated by a pure desire for the welfare of his people. But at least, it did not fluctuate with the play of his sensual appetites; it was characterized by intelligence and activity; and instead of dreaming and chattering about impossible conquests, he enlarged the resources of his kingdom, and maintained its independence against a most sagacious and powerful antagonist. And even if these points of dissimilarity did not exist, the world would still see a great difference between the bloated voluptuary, who valued luxury more than he coveted glory, and whose highest personal exploit was killing a stag in Windsor Forest, and the gallant soldier of Marignano and Pavia, whose body was hardened against the effects of exposure and privation, who slept on the ground, without removing his armor, during the night that interrupted a battle, and whose feats of daring were the favorite themes of chronicle and song.

The three children of Henry VIII., though born of three different women, all exhibited the strongly-marked characteristics of their father's race. In intellect, they were all, perhaps, his superiors; but yet, in all, it was the same intellect, distinguished rather by clearness and vigor than by subtlety or depth. They were educated, however, under very dissimilar influences; for, in the long intervals that elapsed between their births, Henry had time to change his religion and his household, to decapitate his old advisers and surround himself with new. In their characters, or, at all events, in their principles, we observe a contrast which corresponds to this difference of education. Mary and Edward were both most carefully trained, not only as regarded their intellectual culture, but in respect of religious opinions and moral principles and conduct. The views and habits thus early induced could not fail to take the strongest hold of such tenacious minds. The teachings and example of her pious mother made Mary