And

virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one. thus it came to pass that by degrees the name "frank," which may have originally indicated merely a national, came to involve a moral, distinction as well; and a "frank” man was synonymous not merely with a man of the conquering German race, but was an epithet applied to a person possessed of certain high moral qualities, which for the most part appertained to, and were found only in, men of that stock; and thus in men's daily intercourse, when they speak of a person as being "frank," or when they use the words "franchise," "enfranchisement," to express civil liberties and immunities, their language here is the outgrowth, the record, and the result of great historic changes, and bears testimony to facts of history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have never heard. . . . .

Language is full of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advancedonly not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kindlier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things, have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever-making in that new word a new region of

THE EARLY CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII. 265

thought to be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all. Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing as the lightning. Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.

TRENCH, "Study of Words."

THE EARLY CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII.

If Henry VIII. had died previous to the first agitation of the divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest misfortunes which had ever befallen the country; and he would have left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side of that of the Black Prince, or of the conqueror of Agincourt. Left at the most trying age, with his character unformed, with the means at his disposal of gratifying every inclination, and married by his ministers when a boy to an unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an upright and virtuous king. Nature had been prodigal to him of her rarest gifts. In person he is said to have resembled his grandfather, Edward IV., who was the handsomest man in Europe. His form and bearing were princely; and amidst the easy freedom of his address, his manner

remained majestic. No knight in England could match him in the tournament, except the Duke of Suffolk ; he drew with ease as strong a bow as was borne by any yeoman of the guard; and these powers were sustained in unfailing vigour by a temperate habit and by constant exercise. Of his intellectual ability we are not left to judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries. His State papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing in the comparison. Though they are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the expression equally powerful, and they breathe throughout an irresistible vigour of purpose. In addition to this, he had a fine musical taste, carefully cultivated; he spoke and wrote in four languages; and his knowledge of a multitude of other subjects, with which his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the reputation of any ordinary man. He was among best physicians of his age; he was his own engineer, inventing improvements in artillery, and new constructions in ship-building; and this, not with the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough workmanlike understanding.

• ...

the

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.

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.

FROUDE, "History of England."

PERSEVERANCE.

Perseverance is a prime quality in every pursuit. Youth is, too, the time of life to acquire this inestimable habit. Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent and good disposition: as the race was not to the hare but to the tortoise, so

the meed of success in study is not to him who is in haste, but to him who proceeds with a steady and even step. It is not to a want of taste, or of desire, or of disposition to learn that we have to ascribe the rareness of good scholars, so much as to the want of patient per

severance.

WILLIAM COBBETT.

NATURE STILL AND STERN.

It was at one o'clock in the morning of the 6th of August, 1856, that, after having been eleven days at sea, we came to an anchor in the silent haven of English Bay, Spitzbergen.

And now, how shall I give you an idea of the wonderful panorama in the midst of which we found ourselves? I think, perhaps, its most striking feature was the stillness, and deadness, and impassibility of this new world: ice, and rock, and water surrounded us; not a sound of any kind interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no bird or any living thing was visible; the midnight sun, by this time muffled in a transparent mist, shed an awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain; no atom of vegetation gave a proof of the earth's vitality-an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose, in scarcely any other part of the world is this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in England there is always perceptible an undertone of life thrilling through the atmosphere; and though no breeze should stir a single leaf, yet, in default of motion, there is always a sense of growth; but here not so much as a blade of grass was to be