the crimes of their public men is so remarkable as to utterly destroy the value of their works as authorities among people of other nations. The beastly vices of the eighth Henry were, of course, so glaring that they could neither be denied nor extenuated; but who would expect to find that his worthy daughter Elizabeth, the “virgin queen” and _Gloriana_, before whose benign altar even Shakespeare offered the incense of his flattery, should at this remote period be discovered to be: as a woman ugly, ill‐ tempered, and unchaste, and as a ruler fickle, cruel, cold‐blooded, and thoroughly despotic. James I., the head of a long line of gallant princes, to whom his pliant prelates attributed “divine illumination,” and subsequent historians praised for his learning and wit, we at length know to have been a miser and a charlatan, as deformed in mind as he was uncouth in person. “His cowardice,” says his compatriot and co‐religionist Macaulay, “his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person and manners, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision” to his English subjects. The unscrupulous Northampton and the subtle Cecil, the trusted ministers of both sovereigns, who had long been regarded as the unswerving champions of English independence and the bulwark of Protestant ascendency, are now proved to have been all along the paid tools of Catholic Spain, with whose ill‐gotten gold their lofty palaces were built and their luxurious wants regularly supplied.(104) The chivalrous and romantic Raleigh of other days, examined by the inexorable scrutiny of the XIXth century, turns out a spy in the pay of a foreign and by no means friendly power; the philosophic Bacon, a common peculator; and Coke, the father of English common law, a falsifier of sworn evidence and a concocter of legal conspiracies against the liberties of his countrymen. Yet these were the leading personages, who, with many others equally corrupt, in their day and generation swayed the destinies of England, desolated the church of God, originated or abetted plots and schemes, at home and abroad, for the spoliation and extermination of the professors of the ancient faith.