The Press.
London, England, 1858-03-20 00:00:00

flitraturt.

History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to
the Death of Elizabeth. By J. A. Froude,
M.A. Vols. 111., and IV. London : J. W.
Parker and Son.
ALL mankind are suspicious of great dis-
coverers. They have found out by experience
how easily people are duped by their own
hobbies, and what disproportionate magni-
tude any new system or new fact is almost
certain to assume in the mind of its promul-
gator. To take an instance from a subject
recently noticed in these columns. The late
Rev. Mr. Bowles happened to come into pos-
session of certain unpublished letters from
Pope to Miss Martha and Teresa Blount.
He could not sit still under so great a dis-
covery. As he read and re-read his treasures,
they gradually began to respond to the cra-
vings of his own mind. New lights began to
dawn upon him. He must construct an
hypothesis. And so forth comes a life of the
poet, in which the world is informed that they
have hitherto entirely misjudged him ; that
he was a rake and a seducer, and that his in-
timacy with the aforesaid young ladies involved
a criminal intrigue. Mr. Bowles's assertions,
of course, made some impression at the time,
though an able champion of the poet ap-
peared in the person of Lord Byron ; but we
believe they are now universally rejected, and
that the world has returned to its previous
opinion on the subject.
Mr. Froude is a more careful, perhaps a
more conscientious, inquirer the.) Mr. Bowles.
So that although he 1)1 )fosses t,) give us an
entirely new character of llcliry V I IT., he can-
not emancipate himself from facts sufficiently
to make his performance answer to his pro-
mises. Fired by the idea that he had dis-
covered an entirely new mode of writing his-
tory, he seems to have greatly overrated the
results to be obtained by it. His character of
Henry VIII. does not, after all, materially
differ from that which most moderate men
had agreed to accept. Nor, in comparing the
tenor of his two new volumes with the lan-
guage of Hallam and Hume, do we find any
novelty of view at all in proportion to the
noise with which they have been heralded.
The two volumes now before us come down
to the death of Henry VIII., the first of
them terminating with the downfall of Crom-
well in MO. This volume (III.) embraces a
period of five years. The principal events
which it contains are the Northern Rebellion
of the Romanists, usually known as " The
Pilgrimage of Grace," followed by the con-
spiracy in which the Marquis of Exeter lost
his head, the attempt to settle the doctrine
of the Church of England by the promulgation
of " The Six Articles," the King's marriage
with Anne of Cleves, and the disgrace of his
chief Minister.
Mr. Froude shines in narrative, and his
account of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in-
surrections is remarkably spirited and graphic.
He, too, follows the example first set by Lord
Macaulay, of ascertaining with some care the
personal character and social condition of the
principal dramatis persona ; thereby helping
us to a much more accurate conception of
political movements than we should otherwise
be able to arrive at. For instance, our view of
this popular rising, and of the light in which
it appeared to Henry himself, is much altered
by knowing that Aske, the principal leader,
was a person of distinction, and related to the
Earls of Cumberland, instead of being, as
Sir J. Mackintosh represents him, " a man of
"Yorkshire, whose station entitled him to be
" called a gentleman." Mr. Froude's story of
the rebellion is on the whole, we should think,
tolerably impartial. lie implies, though ho
does not sufficiently mark, the distinction to
be drawn between the different classes of mal-
contents. The yeomanry and peasantry had,
he thinks, real grounds of complaint in the
enclosures and Statute of Uses, quite in-
dependent of their religious principles. The
clergy wero actuated, in his opinion, by little
else than a desire to regain their property and
- while the gentry were led rather
- and romantic attachment to

privileges ; while the
by an imaginative and