THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY

OF

FAMOUS LITERATURE.

ENGLAND IN HENRY VIII.'S TIME.

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, the English historian, was born at Dartington, Devon, April 23, 1818, the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes. He was educated at Westminster and Oriel College, Oxford, where he came under the influence of the Tractarian movement. He was elected a Fellow of Exeter and received deacon's orders, but his views underwent a change, as revealed in "The Nemesis of Faith" (1848), in consequence of which he lost his fellowship. He then turned to literature and for many years was a contributor to Fraser's Magazine and the Westminster Review. He became rector of St. Andrews (1869); visited America, South Africa, and the Australasian colonies; and in 1892 succeeded E. A. Freeman as professor of modern history at Oxford. He died at Salcombe, Devon, October 20, 1894. His monumental work is a "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada" (12 vols., 1856-1870). Also noteworthy are: "Short Studies on Great Subjects," ," "The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Cæsar," "The English in the West Indies." As literary executor of Carlyle he edited a "Life of Carlyle," "Carlyle's Reminiscences," and Mrs. Carlyle's "Letters."]

IN periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the influence of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves back into a time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a single type, in which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms of the son's, and the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of his distant ancestors. So absolutely has change become the law of our present condition, that it is identified with energy and moral health; to cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass away from off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it is to have missed the best object for which we now seem to exist.

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