resistance against the King’s arbitrary decrees, without a struggle to reassert his former ascendancy over his royal master. But probably the ascendancy was irrecoverable; he had himself resigned it when he surrendered his palace of Hampton Court to Henry in an access of cowardly panic; and no ascendancy which is not moral or intellectual ever has any vitality in it, and that of Wolsey over the King had never been any other than that of the practised debauchee over the unpractised one. Wolsey was Henry’s senior by twenty years. When the pupil had become as depraved as his teacher, he required his assistance no longer, and in moments of reflection, which come to the most frivolous, he must have felt how debased such teaching had been, and the greater its iniquity the greater the pupil’s abhorrence of the instructor, whose constant presence must act as a perpetual reproach; when the orange is sucked dry, the shapeless husk becomes an offensive object to look at. Cardinal Wolsey is credited with a love of learning and schemes to promote it, as his foundation of a college at Oxford, now Christ Church, which, however, he only partly accomplished, and his school at Ipswich. But these were not so much establishments to advance learning as to support and glorify the Church, of which he was the chief pillar and personal representative, and which therefore it was his pride and interest to strengthen and exalt, even at some personal sacrifice. Such was the man who built the palace of Hampton Court, to the description and history of which we must now proceed. We stated above that immediately on having entered into possession of the estate, Wolsey pulled down the ancient manor-house; early in 1515 he began the new buildings. All researches have failed to bring to light the architect employed by the Cardinal. The name of James Bettes occurs as master of the works, as also that of Nicholas Townley as chief comptroller, and that of Laurence Stubbes, paymaster of the works, and that of Henry Williams, surveyor; but probably the design of Hampton Court must be attributed to Wolsey himself, who had the examples of other mediæval prelatic builders to guide him. In fact, we are inclined to think that the entrance to the first court was somewhat of an imitation of the centre of Esher Place, on the river Mole, a building erected by William of Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester, in 1447. Of this building nothing now remains but the two octagonal towers of the centre, just as the gateway of Wolsey’s college at Ipswich only remains, which also bears a striking resemblance to that of Esher Place.