An attempt must be made here to sketch Henry's character with as much impartiality as is possible. But no impartial sketch will please either his older friends or his newer enemies. Although Henry came to the throne a mere boy, he was a precocious boy. In the precocious the several stages of life succeed each other more quickly than in others, and probably they themselves do not wear so well. When Henry was twenty-five he was little less wise and capable than he was at thirty-five or forty-five. At forty he was probably wiser than he was at fifty. The young king's presence was striking; he had a fresh rosy complexion, and an auburn though scanty beard. His very limbs, exclaims one foreign admirer, "glowed with warm pink" through his delicately woven tennis costume. He was handsome in feature; large and imposing in figure; open and frank in manners; strong, active, and skilled in all bodily exercises. He was an admirer of all the arts, and himself an expert in many of them. Henry had indeed all the qualities, whatever their worth may be, which make a favourite with the multitude. Those qualities, no matter what change time brought to them, preserved his popularity to the last. Henry was neither a genius nor a hero; but they who deny that he was a singularly able man will probably misread his character; misread his ideals, his conduct, and his various attitudes. Henry's education was thorough and his learning extensive. His habit of mind tended perhaps rather to activity and versatility and obedience to old authority than to intensity or depth or independence. His father, who looked more favourably on churchmen and lawyers than on noblemen, destined his second son for the Church. At that time theology, scholastic theology--for Colet and Erasmus and More had not then done their work--was the acutest mental discipline known as well as the highest accomplishment. For when the "new learning" reached this country it found theology the leading study, and therefore it roused theology; in Italy on the other hand it found the arts the predominant study, and there it roused the arts. Henry would doubtless have made a successful bishop and escaped thereby much domestic turmoil; but, on the whole, he was probably better fitted to be a King; while his quiet, contemplative, and kindly father would at any rate have found life pleasanter in lawn sleeves than he found it on a throne. It would be well if men and women were to write down in two columns with all possible honesty the good and the evil items in the characters (not forgetting their own) which interest them. The exercise itself would probably call forth serviceable qualities, and would frequently bring to light unexpected results. Probably in this process good characters would lose something and the bad would gain. From such an ordeal Henry VIII. would come out a sad figure, though not quite so sad as is popularly considered.