INDEX.

IF it be a misfortune to be overpraised, neither the men nor the women who played prominent parts in English history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, will have reason to complain of the manner in which their reputations have been dealt with by their countrymen. To have accomplished any thing remarkable, throughout this period, appears to be a ground rather for suspicion than for admiration; and a certain uniformity of failure, like that which marks the career of Mary Queen of Scots, alone commands a general interest. It is not enough to have died tragically; the wise and the unwise came too often to a common end at the stake or on the scaffold: we have but to run over in our own minds the most conspicuous names of those centuries, and to consider the position which they occupy in the popular estimation, to be at once aware, that only those among them who have effected nothing, who have been sufferers merely, are regarded with

Life of Cardinal Wolsey. By John Galt Third Edition, with additional Illustrations from Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, and other sources. London: David Bogue. 1846.

VOL. XXXIII. NO. I.

tenderness; the actors are held to have been sufficiently rewarded with success, and at our hands deserve only to be restored to their proper place by a judicious scrutiny of their faults. We are not lenient to Henry the Eighth, or to Mary Tudor, or to Elizabeth. Oliver Cromwell's reputation has the taint still of the Tyburn gallows upon it. Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Gardiner, the Seymours, the Dudleys, the Cecils, Sir Francis Walsingham, or Francis Bacon-these names, once illustrious, are now tarnished over with every most unworthy imputation; and Sir Thomas More is, perhaps, the only really remarkable man who still remains a favorite with us; rather, probably, because he was the greatest of the victims of a falling side, than because we essentially value either his character or his actions.

This unprosperous condition of public 'opinion, however, is not maintained without partial remonstrance; people who have cared to examine the authentic accounts of the

times, having perceived very clearly on how slight a foundation the popular judgments of them are based, and raising their voices with more effect or less, in behalf of this person

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