The Sun.
London, England, 1861-08-09 00:00:00

the occurrences related in " The Constable" are
supposed to take place. As we took occasion to
remark some few months back, while the story was
in the midst of its periodical appearance in the pages
of Bentley's Miscellany, the titie of the narrative
appears to us to be somewhat of a misnomer. For,
interesting though the character of bluff Sir John
Gage (the Constable of the Tower) is undoubtedly
in itself—it is altogether subordinate to many
other characters introduced upon the scene:
the hero of the Romance being, beyond all ques-
tion, that most alluring and admirable study for a
Romancist—the handsome, gifted, daring, ambi-
tious Sir Thomas Seymour ! Afterwards Baron
Seymour of Sudeley, Lord High Admiral of Eng-
land, husband of Henry the Eighth's widow,
Catherine (Parr) the Queen Dowager, the favou-
rite uncle of King Edward VI,, the aspirant to
the Protectorship, the affianced lover of the fair
young Princess—afterwards our great Queen—
Elizabeth ! The marvel is that until now Sey-
mour has never been chosen as the hero of an
English Historical Romance. Chosen as such,
however, he has been at length in these
enthralling Five Books of The Constable of the
Tower, a work that might more literally have
been designated The Lord High Admiral of Eng•
land. Designate it how we may, however, the his-
toric romance of" The Constable'' with its veritable
hero " The Admiral," are here before us—invested,
each of them, with a not very easily resistible
fascination. Although Mr.Ainsworth has evidenced
by the mere selection of that personage a certain
partiality for all that is noble or better in the ex-
traordinary character of Lord Seymour, he has de-
lineated the character and described the career of
that adventurer's intrigue with a candour strangely
dispassionate. Here, in these pages, of which Sey-
mour is the glory and the boast, it is impossible to
recognise anything whatever of that unconscious
infatuation growing up almost unawares in the mind
of almost every historian or biographer who dilates
upon one favourite character selected from the
throng of our bygone fellow-men—that unconscious,
or at any rate only half conscious infatuation ad-
mirably well defined by Lord Macaulay (who un-
wittingly, by the way, evidenced exactly the same
"disease of admiration" in the instance of his own
chosen demi-god King William III.), as the lees Bos-
tvelliana. Nothing whatever of this same disease of
admiration is displayed anywherethrough these three
volumes of his historical romance of "The Constable"
by Mr. Ainsworth, when treating of the ambition
and the enterprise, the rise and the downfall, the
daring loves and the lamentable death of Seymour
the Admiral. " Arrogant, assuming, and implac-
able—a man of insatiable ambition ;" those are the
expressions of Hume. To Seymour might be applied
many of those marvellous words in whieh the
master hand of Sallust has touched off to the very
life the nature, the genius, the character of Lucius
Cataline. Might we not remark, in truth, of Sey-
mour, as Sallust observes in the immortal words, in
regard to Cataline :—" Nobili genere natus, fuit
magna vi et animi et corporis, sed ingenio malo
pravoque. . . . . Animus audax, subdolus,