rescue Henry's memory from having vowed that he had resolved to do what he knew he never could have done. "The mode of those (p. 315) enterprises was" not "past." [Footnote 242: Raynaldus, Annales Ecclesiastici, vol. viii. p. 556.] [Footnote 243: It is not to be forgotten that Henry of Monmouth had from his very childhood been interested by accounts of the state of Palestine. His father, as we have seen, went himself to the Holy Sepulchre; and, even during Henry's wars in France, his uncle, the Bishop of Winchester, visited Constance as he was proceeding in the guise of a pilgrim to the Holy Land.] But Hume would have it believed that this was a late and feeble resolve of Henry, formed on his death-bed, when he was acting the part of a self-deceiver, forgetful of the lamentable effects of his ambition, and seeking comfort from his self-deception in the last moments of his life. There is strong and clear evidence that he not only had contemplated such a measure, but had actually taken important preliminary steps to facilitate the execution of his design, whenever he might be happily released from his present engagements. "This vindicatory evidence" (to use the words of Mr. Granville Penn)[244] "of the veracity and sincerity of Henry, is a manuscript discovered at Lille, in Flanders, in the autumn of 1819, which proves to positive demonstration, that at the moment when Henry was suddenly arrested in his victorious progress by the hand of death, his mind was actually, though secretly, engaged in projecting an attack on the infidel power in Egypt and Syria, as soon as he should have pacified the internal agitations of France; and that a confidential military agent of high character and distinguished rank had been despatched by him to survey the maritime frontier of those two countries, and to procure, upon the spot, the information necessary towards embarking in so vast an (p. 316) enterprise. [Footnote 244: Mr. Granville Penn's interesting paper was read before the Royal Society of Literature at their first meeting in the year 1825, and is recorded in the first volume of their Transactions.]