The execution of the Earl of Suffolk, in the early part of Henry's reign, does not occur to the historian as throwing any light on this Turk-like clearing off of possible pretenders at the end. When the entries in the register of death' come rather thick, they call forth the pious and philosophic observation that, on the whole, Providence gives little good in this world for 'which suffering, in large measure or small, is not exacted as payment, and the king and the country (?) alike, on the whole, had reason to be well satisfied.' The eagerness of the Crown to depress and decimate the old aristocracy, bore no analogy to the political tendencies of Louis XI. and Henry VII., but was the result of a high principle of social morality which 'made responsibility the especial privilege of rank.' At the fifth wife, it is felt that the philosophic curiosity of the reader will be naturally excited, and require some account of these successive catastrophes; and the account is, that there was a business-like habit of proceeding' about the king which led to connubial infelicity. We rise from the laborious perusal (of the many thousand documents' relating to the reign) 'with the conviction, rather, that the king's disposition was natu' rally cold;' and that if he kept at least one mistress and had six wives, it was from a self-denying submission to the dictates of public duty. In slandering the honour of Anne of Cleves, and getting rid of her, to marry some one else, he was also, we presume, influenced by natural coldness.' The alternating divorces and uxoricides of Catholic and Protestant wives appear to have been arranged by a tasteful Destiny preserving the symmetry of misfortune.' The king's apparent vacillations in religion, and the alternating persecutions by which they were accompanied, were really, it seems, a steady policy of moderation. The king wished to ensure the triumph of the Reformation by keeping it within bounds, and cutting off the heads of men of genius,' like Cromwell, who attempted to go too fast. It was in pursuance of this moderating policy that he first required his subjects, on pain of death, to believe in three Sacraments, and afterwards in seven, and that he first abolished all the monasteries, and then enforced the observance of monastic vows. The triumph of moderate Protestantism was complete when the Six Bloody Articles reimposed on England all the leading doctrines of the Roman Catholic Faith. Liberty of conscience seems rather an essential part of Protestantism, but, after all, a little violation of it is a good thing in its way. Not variety of opinion, but unity not the equal license of the wise and foolish to choose their belief- but an ' ordered harmony, where wisdom (the wisdom of Henry VIII) - prescribes a law to ignorance (the ignorance of More and Latimer), is the rule which reasonable men should most desire for themselves and for mankind.' Besides, if Henry erred' in so slight a matter as imposing false doctrines and persecuting the true, 'his errors might find excuse in the multitude of business which was 'crowded upon him.' The various inroads upon the constitution made in the course of the reign were really so many instances of revolutionary enthusiasm exalting a popular chief. The Act empowering the 'king for the time being,' to make laws by royal proclamation without the consent of Parliament, was analogous to the Roman practice of appointing a temporary Dictator to carry the state through a crisis. The Acts enabling the king to repudiate his loans were graduated retrospective property taxes. Benevolences were a spontaneous act of the gentlemen' who preferred the honour of England to their personal convenience.' Alderman Reed and Alderman Roch, who were so insolent as to think benevolences unconstitutional, were the one justly imprisoned, the other pressed for the northern wars, amidst general amusement and approbation,' which the chroniclers to whom Mr. Froude refers have omitted to record. The debasing of the coin, as we have mentioned before, was a loan from the mint,' similar in principle to the suspension of cash payments. The monastery lands, which might have obviated the necessity of benevolences, had been melted down into cannon,' some pieces of which, of large calibre, now form the inheritance of the houses of Seymour, Fitzwilliam, and Russell. The miscarriages in Ireland were not caused by sending out incompetent men and starving the service. The fact is, the country has exerted a magical power of transformation upon every one 'connected with it. The hardest English understanding has 'given way before a few years of residence there; the most 'solid good sense has melted under the influence of its atmosphere-as was the case, for example, with Lord Chesterfield and Lord Wellesley. The wrongs done to the Irish people, who were forbidden to intermarry with the conquering race, or to hold office in their own land, disappear, and nothing remains but their faults, calling for exemplary coercion. Henry's foreign policy was all straightforward and sound, and that of his opponents was all the reverse. The plot for kidnapping the King of Scotland, and carrying him off to London in time of peace, was a plan for employing some gentle constraint,' since 'a free visit could not be arranged.' The plot for assassinating Cardinal Beton, was looking at things as they were, and not through conventional forms.' The diplomatic lying which Paget reports to his master, was honest service.' The alliance with the Emperor against the German Protestants, which led to the sack of Cleves, was all in favour of moderate Protestantism. In short, such a 'palimpsest' never was found before. We began by paying a just tribute to the merits of those portions of Mr. Froude's work which his paradox does not affect. The greater portion of our limited space has necessarily been taken up in examining the grounds of the extraordinary revolution which he has undertaken to effect in this period of English history. Our opinion upon his reasonings and their result is not doubtful: and we would once more urge him to reconsider his Henry VIII. if he wishes his history to live. But we must end with the renewed expression of the pleasure we have derived from many parts of the work, especially those which delineate the religious parties of the time. The interest of the new matter is extreme, and it is given for the most part in the most interesting manner. Even on the character of Henry VIII. himself as a theologian and statesman, some new light has probably been thrown. Mr. Carlyle has a good deal to answer for in having been the means, by his splendid but dangerous example, of spoiling what might have been so good a book, and compelling its honest critics to say, that it may stand very high in the estimation of those who look in a history only for interest and excitement, but that it cannot stand high in the estimation of those who look in a history above all things for the truth. ART. X. Sakoontalá, or the Lost Ring; an Indian Drama. Translated into English Prosé and Verse from the Sanskrit of Kálidása. By MONIER WILLIAMS, M. A. Professor of Sanskrit at Haileybury. Hertford: 1855. EPIC and lyric poetry have found a home wherever the human soul has emerged from barbarism; they belong alike to all the cultured tribes of mankind. Wherever the past has lured with its world of mythic splendours, or the present and future, by their yet nearer impress, have woke the poet's inner life of thought, there the epos and ode have ever risen as the instinctive voice of these deep emotions of the soul. But dramatic poetry is no such cosmopolite. It comes to us indissolubly linked with the history of that great family of nations, already associated with so much that is great and glorious in the fasti of our world, whose languages bear the treasures of all Gentile thought, and have ever been the medium of European civilization. drama, in a word, is the peculiar glory of the Indo-Teutonic race. The Not that we would claim for every member of that family a right to this splendid heirloom: there are many nations of high intellectual name, who have no part in the inheritance. Thus ancient Rome and modern Persia have no indigenous drama, no national form which has struck its roots down deep in the national character, and draws direct a living energy from its secret elements of vigour and strength. We feel, when we read the Roman comedies, that these have no vital union with the nation's 'heart of hearts;' they are borrowed from another soil, and here languish in an uncongenial clime. A national drama can only exist by expressing the national character, by gathering into itself all that is great and heroic in its past history and present development. Every great dramatic literature is a world in itself, which reproduces on a smaller scale all those strong lines of influence, which have been working on the people from generation to generation, and have made its inner and outer life what they are. Who cannot read in the dramas of Greece, Spain, or England, the long succession of busy years of action, whose annals, at the very sound of their names, rise at once to fill the mind with images-years which have left their stamp on the nation's very type of countenance, how much deeper still on what is yet more plastic, its inner character and soul? Ancient India, like ancient Greece, has a drama of her own, which, untouched by foreign influence, and fostered only by native culture, has flourished and declined with an original history; exemplifying under that distant sky, in its lonely cycle of development, the same laws of growth and decay, which have been so unceasingly at work in our busier western world. Contemporary with Lucretius and Catullus, it reached its greatest splendour at the court of Vikramaditya, King of Oujein; and Kálidása, whose chef d'œuvre has been so lately translated into English, was one of the nine gems' which attest the munificence of that renowned patron of Hindú literature. In these poems we find faithfully portrayed the Indian mind as it was in those old days. The nation of dreaming mystics, on whom Alexander's contemporaries gazed with such bewildered awe, between whom and the impulsive Greeks there lay a gulf which no man living could pass, have reproduced themselves in their dramas, and thrown on the canvass of mythic distance the outlines of their own present and its world. Their dramas, as opposed to the classical, may belong to the romantic school; but in truth they might be almost said to constitute a class by themselves,-cut off, like the Indian mind, from all those mighty influences, which for some 3000 years have been moulding Europe into what she is. It is indeed a strange problem to contemplate the Indian mind pacing its lonely round; no 'spot ' of dull stagnation' like China, but full of energy, and life, and hope: 'A still salt pool locked in with bars of sand, The plunging waves draw backward from the land save that India, locked in by the Indus and Himalaya, lay far away and apart, where even the faintest echoes of Greece or Europe could never reach her. The great masters of human thought and language have to the Indian mind lived in vain; it has run through its solitary cycle and worked out its own weary problem alone; yet India has a literature of poetry and philosophy which reaches back to the earliest times, older than Troy and the Iliad, perhaps as old as the Pentateuch itself. There were Indian poets before Homer had Hisped his first song; there were Indian thinkers and philosophers, before Thales called water the apyn of all things; and though this succession of writers has now dwindled down to idle poetasters and pedantic gram |