What two works are those for which at this moment our national intellect (or, more rigorously speaking, our _popular_ intellect) is beginning clamorously to call? They are these: first, a _Conversations-Lexicon_, obeying (as regards plan and purpose) the general outline of the German work bearing that title; ministering to the same elementary necessities; implying, therefore, a somewhat corresponding stage of progress in our own populace and that of Germany; but otherwise (as regards the executive details in adapting such a work to the special service of an English public) moving under moral restraints sterner by much, and more faithfully upheld, than could rationally be looked for in any great literary enterprise resigned to purely German impulses. For over the atmosphere of thought and feeling in Germany there broods no _public_ conscience. Such a _Conversations-Lexicon_ is one of the two great works for which the popular mind of England is waiting and watching in silence. The other (and not less important) work is--a faithful _History of England_. We will offer, at some future time, a few words upon the first; but upon the second--here brought before us so advantageously in the earnest, thoughtful, and oftentimes eloquent volumes of Mr. Froude--we will venture to offer three or four pages of critical comment. [Footnote 53: _History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth._ By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Vols. I. and II. London: Parker & Son, West Strand. 1856.] Could the England of the sixteenth century have escaped that great convulsion which accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries? It is barely possible that a gentle system of periodic decimations, distributing this inevitable ruin over an entire century, might have blunted the edge of the fierce ploughshare: but there were difficulties in the way of such arrangements, that would too probably have thwarted the benign purpose.