I know that there be those acute historic inquirers who would persuade us to believe that the king’s much-marrying propensities were all in order, and legitimate, and agreeable to English constitutional sanction: but I know, too, that there is a strong British current of common-sense setting down all through the centuries which finds harbor in the old-fashioned belief--that the king who, with six successive wives of his own choice, divorced two, and cut off the heads of other two, must have had--vicious weaknesses. For my own part, I take a high moral delight--Froude to the contrary--in thinking of him as a clever, dishonest, good-natured, obstinate, selfish, ambitious, tempestuous, arrogant scoundrel. Yet, withal, he was a great favorite in his young days;--so tall, so trim, so stout, so rich, so free with his money. No wonder the stately and disconsolate Queen (of Aragon) said:-- “Would I had never trod this English earth, Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it; Ye’ve angels faces, but Heaven knows your hearts!” And this wilful King befriended learning and letters in his own wilful way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own in that direction, when he grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding--in which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports and exercises of the field. _Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More._ It was with the King’s capricious furtherance that Cardinal Wolsey became so august a friend of learning. The annalists delight in telling us how the great Cardinal went down to St. Paul’s School to attend upon an exhibition of the boys there, who set afoot a tragedy founded upon the story of Dido. And at the boys’ school was then established as head-master that famous William Lilly[70] who had learned Greek in his voyaging into Eastern seas, and was among the first to teach it in England: he was the author too of that _Lilly’s Latin Grammar_ which was in use for centuries, and of which later editions are hanging about now in old New England garrets, from whose mouldy pages our grandfathers learned to decline their _pennæ--pennarum_. Wolsey wrote a preface for one of the earlier issues of this Lilly’s Grammar; and the King gave it a capital advertisement by proclaiming it illegal to use any other. The Cardinal, moreover, in later years established a famous school at his native place of Ipswich (a rival in its day to that of Eton), and he issued an address to all the schoolmasters of England in favor of accomplishing the boys submitted to their charge in the most elegant literatures.