These parties had suffered much pain. Honest they all might be; but the man of power and authority had at least this superiority, that he was at once the arbiter and the host. He was in the position of friendship, cordiality, hospitality, generosity, and of judgment; and they, though his guests, were at the same time his prisoners. But who were they, and at what time were they there? Wolsey was about to be shorn of his fancied nobility, and to lose the eye of favor. He was too much of a politician not to know what he had to expect; and he was really and truly a man of too great a mind to murmur at the fickleness of the King's favor. Lift up a beggar from the dunghill, set him among princes, and if he is not gifted with that wisdom which knows who exalts and who puts down, he will neither know how to bear elevation or degradation. He is like an actor, who, having enjoyed years of successful flattery, is astonished at his own decline, and knows not how to bear the coolness of disappointment. Happy the man whom nothing but the world to come can exalt; who preserves humility under all circumstances, and doing his duty nobly, retires into nothingness, conscious that he is nobody. A great man this, indeed. He is like that great philosopher, who, after a life of calculations, such as laid bare to the world the right movements of the heavenly bodies, declared that to himself he appeared no more than a child playing with a cup and ball, or blowing soap-bubbles with a tobacco pipe. This is a species of intellectual innocency which very few men attain. Half the world, knowing little, are apt to grow proud of the knowledge of that little, and have such conceit thereof as to imagine the world must think them wonders; but the really wise man is wonderful only to himself in his knowledge of his own marvellous ignorance. Wolsey was a great man, as all the world proclaimed; but very few who saw him knew anything of the real greatness of his private character. Men in after-ages made him the theme of fallen pride, and descanted upon his origin as if he rose from the butcher's shambles by impudence. There are some impudent men who do succeed in thrusting themselves into places for which they have no pretensions in the shape of mental qualification whatsoever; and these men are generally the greatest boasters and vaunters of their own selves; but they usually die unnoticed, or are looked upon with contempt by men of their own calibre. What must men of superior intellect think of them? Wolsey was no such mortal. He gave that day convincing proof of his being not only bred a gentleman, but of his having preserved the spirit of one through all the plenitude of his power, even to the moment of its decay.