No literary performance has ever been the occasion of more discussion or dispute, as to its authenticity, than one which was published by the royalist party to excite the public pity for Charles I. On the day after that monarch’s execution appeared a volume called Icon Basilike, or the Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty, in his Solitude and Sufferings. It professed to be from the pen of Charles himself, and a faithful exposition of his own thoughts on the principal events of his reign, accompanied with such pious effusions as the recollection suggested to his mind. It was calculated to create a strong sensation in favour of the royal sufferer, and is said to have passed through fifty editions in the course of the first year. During the Commonwealth, Milton made an attempt to disprove the king’s claim to the composition of the book, but his arguments were by no means conclusive, as the subsequent publications on the same subject proved. After the restoration, Dr. Gauden, a clergyman of Bocking in Essex, came forward, and declared himself the real author; but he advanced his pretensions with secresy, and received as the price of his silence, first, the bishopric of Exeter, and subsequently, when he complained of the poverty of that see, the richer one of Worcester. After his death, these circumstances transpired, and became the subject of an interesting controversy between his friends and the admirers of Charles the First. The subsequent publication of the Clarendon papers, has, in the opinion of Dr. Lingard, firmly established Gauden’s claim; but Dr. Wordsworth, in the year 1824, adjudged it to the king, in his work called “Who wrote Eikon Basilike?” In this, he learnedly combats the opinions of all the late controversialists on that subject. This drew forth replies from the Reverend Henry Todd, and “additional reasons” from the Reverend Mr. Broughton, in favour of Gauden’s claim. Dr. Wordsworth, in a “postscript,” again answered his antagonists, and summed up the evidence by saying, that not any convincing arguments in favour of Gauden’s claim had been brought forward against his--Dr. Wordsworth’s--but which, by negative evidence, rather strengthened his side of the question.