subjects, with which his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the reputation of any ordinary man. He was among the best physicians of his age; he was his own engineer, inventing improvements in artillery, and new constructions in shipbuilding; and this, not with the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough workmanlike understanding. His reading was vast, especially in theology, which has been ridiculously ascribed by Lord Herbert to his father's intention of educating him for the Archbishopric of Canterbury; as if the scientific mastery of such a subject could have been acquired by a boy of twelve years of age, for he was no more when he became Prince of Wales. He must have studied theology with the full maturity of his understanding; and he had a fixed and perhaps unfortunate interest in the subject itself.

In all directions of human activity Henry displayed natural powers of the highest order, at the highest stretch of industrious culture. He was attentive, as it is called, to his religious duties, being present at the services in chapel two or three times a-day with unfailing regularity, and showing, to outward appearance, a real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his life. In private, he was good-humoured and good-natured. His letters to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and unrestrained; and the letters written by them to him are similarly plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that the person whom they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as a man. Again, from their correspondence with one another, when they describe interviews with him, we gather the same pleasant impression. He seems to have been always kind, always considerate, inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and winning, as a consequence, their warm and unaffected attachment. As a ruler, he had been eminently popular. All his wars had been successful. He had the splendid tastes in which the English people most delighted, and he had substantially acted out his

own theory of his duty, which was expressed in the following words:-"Scripture taketh princes to be, as it were, fathers and nurses to their subjects; and by Scripture it appeareth that it appertaineth to the office of princes to see that right religion and true doctrine be maintained and taught, and that their subjects may be well ruled and governed by good and just laws, and to provide and care for them, that all things necessary may be plenteous, and that the people and commonweal may increase, and to defend them from oppression and invasion, as well within the realm as without, and to see that justice be administered unto them indifferently; and to hear benignly all their complaints, and to show towards them, although they offend, fatherly pity; and, finally, so to correct them that be evil, that they had yet rather save them than lose them, if it were not for respect of justice and maintenance of peace and good order in the commonweal.” These principles do really appear to have determined Henry's conduct in his earlier years. It is certain that if, as I said, he had died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like that Roman emperor said by Tacitus to have been, "by universal consent, capable of reigning had he not reigned," would have been considered by posterity as formed by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would have been deplored as a perpetual calamity. We must allow him, therefore, the benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it when interpreting his later actions. Not many men would have borne themselves through the same trials with the same integrity; but the circumstances of those trials had not tested the true defects in his moral constitution. Like all princes of the Plantagenet blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will. His impulses, in general nobly directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life, when his character was formed, he was forced into collision with difficulties with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to contend. Education had done much for him; but his nature required more correction than his position

had permitted; whilst unbroken prosperity and early independence of control had been his most serious misfortune. He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greatest of men. With all his faults about him, he was still, perhaps, the greatest of his contemporaries, and the man best able of all living Englishmen to govern England, had he not been set to do it by the condition of his birth.

Froude.

THE STARLING.

"Beshrew the sombre pencil," said I vauntingly, "for I envy not its powers, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a coloring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has herself magnified, and blackened; reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them. 'Tis true," said I, correcting the proposition-"the Bastile is not an evil to be despised; but strip it of its towers, fill up the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose it is some tyrant of a distemper, and not of a man who holds you in it, the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint."

I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy with a voice which I took to be that of a child, which complained, "It could not get out." I looked up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, nor child, I went out without further attention. In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling, hung in a little cage. "I can't get out," said the starling.

I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. "I can't get out," said the starling. "God help thee," said I, "but I will let thee out, cost what it will;" so I turned about the cage to get at the door; it was twisted, and double

twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both hands to it.

The bird flew to the place where was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient. "I fear, poor creature," said I, "I cannot set thee at liberty." "No," said the starling, "I can't get out; I can't get out," said the starling.

reason

I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits, to which my had been a bubble, were so suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile, and I heavily walked up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.

Sterne.

ON HUMAN GRANDEUR.

An alehouse-keeper, near Islington, who had long lived at the sign of the "French King," upon the commencement of the last war with France, pulled down his old sign, and put up that of the Queen of Hungary. Under the influence of her red face and golden sceptre, he continued to sell ale till she was no longer the favourite of his customers; he changed her, therefore, some time ago for the King of Prussia, who may probably be changed, in turn, for the next great man that shall be set up for vulgar admiration.

Our publican in this imitates the great exactly, who deal out their figures, one after the other, to the gazing crowd. When we have sufficiently wondered at one, that is taken in, and another exhibited in its room, which, seldom holds its station long, for the mob are ever pleased with variety.

I must own I have such an indifferent opinion of the vulgar, that I am ever led to suspect that merit which

raises their shout; at least I am certain to find those great, and sometimes good men, who find satisfaction in such acclamations, made worse by it; and history has too frequently taught me, that the head which has grown this day giddy with the roar of the million, has the very next been fixed upon a pole.

There is scarce a village in Europe, and not one university, that is not thus furnished with its little great men. The head of a petty corporation who opposes the designs of a prince who would tyrannically force his subjects to save their best clothes for Sunday; the puny pedant who finds one undiscovered property in the polype, or describes an unheeded process in the skeleton of a mole, and whose mind, like his microscope, perceives nature only in detail; the rhymer who makes smooth verses, and paints to our admiration when he should only speak to our hearts, all equally fancy themselves walking forward to immortality, and desire the crowd behind them to look on. The crowd takes them at their word. Patriot, philosopher, and poet are shouted in their train. "Where was there ever' so much merit seen? No times so important as our own. Ages yet unborn shall gaze with wonder and applause!" To such music the important pigmy moves forward, bustling and swelling, and aptly compared to a puddle in a storm.

I have lived to see generals who once had crowds hallooing after them wherever they went; who were bepraised by newspapers and magazines, those echoes of the voice of the vulgar, and yet they have long sunk into merited obscurity, with scarce even an epitaph left to flatter. A few years ago the herring-fishery employed all Grub Street; it was the topic in every coffee-house, and the burthen of every ballad. We were to drag up oceans of gold from the bottom of the sea; we were to supply all Europe with herrings upon our own terms. At present we hear no more of all this. We have fished up very little gold that I can learn; nor do we furnish the world with herrings, as was expected. Let us wait but a few years longer,