[_The Life of Wolsey_, by Cavendish, (quoted in the preceding pages,) is one of the most interesting and valuable specimens of biography in the English language. Its first merit is originality in the strictest sense of the word. The writer, one of Wolsey's gentlemen, and much in his confidence, was not merely a spectator, but an agent, and in some degree, a sufferer in the scenes which he describes. In the next place, though he writes from the heart, there is an air of impartiality in some parts of the work, which gives them the clear stamp of veracity. Of the hauteur and insolence of the Cardinal during his elevation, he sometimes allows himself to speak with asperity. The tender compassion which rendered him the faithful companion of his fallen fortunes, gives an amiable and pleasing colour to the latter part of his narrative. Besides, the cumbrous magnificence of the reign of Henry VIII., under the great change of manners which two centuries and a half have produced, is become in its representation to us, extremely picturesque; and for this part of his undertaking Cavendish was eminently qualified. He was not one of those unobserving men, who seem never to apprehend that what is familiar to themselves will become curious to posterity. He saw with an exact and discriminating eye, and what he beheld he was able to describe. In no other work, perhaps, is to be found so minute and faithful a detail of what the palaces of kings and prelates, and the houses of the great nobility then were; their loads of plate, their hangings of arras, the ponderous plenty of their tables, and the useless accumulation, as we should conceive, of cloth, linen, &c., which were sometimes exhibited in their great galleries as in so many warehouses. Add to this, the innumerable links then subsisting in the great chain of dependence, the haughty distance of the superior to his immediate inferior, the obsequiousness of the immediate inferior in return; the young nobility serving in the houses of the greater prelates like menial servants, and these prelates themselves as often, perhaps, on the knee to their king as to their God. All these particulars, acquired from the life by the writer before us, form so many vivid pictures presented to the mind's eye, so that ideas become images, and we seem to behold what we only read of.--See Dr. Wordsworth's _Ecclesiastical Biography_.] FOOTNOTES: