among the kings of the age;" though it be true that Henry was the least odious of the three royal sages.

"It is due in the strictest justice to Lord Bacon not to omit, that the history was written to gratify James I., to whom he was then suing for bitter bread, who revised it, and whom he addressed in the following words:-"I have therefore chosen to write the reign of Henry VII., who was in a sort your forerunner; and whose spirit as well as his blood is doubled upon your majesty." Bacon had just been delivered from prison: he had passed his sixtieth year, and was galled by unhonoured poverty. What wonder if in these circumstances even his genius sunk under such a patron and such a theme!" 1

Now setting aside for the present the general question as to the spirit in which history ought to be written, and the particular question as to the spirit in which this history is written, upon both which points I shall have a word to say presently, let us first consider the more positive and definite imputations contained in the foregoing passage. That Bacon wrote the book to gratify James; that in order to gratify James he represented Henry as a model of king-craft; and that the systematic purpose of so representing Henry as a model of king-craft" distorted character and events;"-this is what the charge amounts to. And it is important to know how far it is true. For if it were so, to set about detecting and rectifying historical inaccuracies would be a mere waste of time and a mistaking of the proper duty of an editor. In that case the book as a history would be merely worthless. It would be curious only as a record of Bacon's idea - or rather of what he supposed to be James's idea of a model king, and should be treated accordingly.

It seems to me however that the hypothesis is not only uncalled for, but utterly untenable.

That he "wrote the book to gratify James I." is indeed in one sense true enough. He wanted to do some service which James would appreciate, and he knew that a good history of so important a reign was one of the best services he could perform, and one the most certain to be appreciated. But it is plain that Sir J. Mackintosh meant something more than this; and if he meant, as I presume he did, that Bacon chose the subject because it gave him an opportunity for flattering James,

Lardner's Cyclopædia, Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 362.

- I would first ask, why any body should think so? Is it not the very same subject which at least fifteen years before he had wished some one else to undertake for the simple purpose of supplying a main defect in our national literature? 1 Did not the defect still remain? And was he not now at leisure to undertake the subject himself? Why then seek any further for his motive in choosing it?

But suppose he did choose the subject for the purpose of flattering James, how did he propose to treat it, so as to produce that effect? By setting up Henry the Seventh (we are told) as the model of a king! Now Henry was in his entire character and in all his ways, both as a man and as a king, the very contrast and opposite to James himself. Both indeed professed to love peace; and both were constant, without being uxorious, to their wives. But there the resemblance ends. In all other respects, to set up either as the model of what a king should be is little less than to point out the other as the model of what a king should not be. Neither was this a difficulty inherent in the subject. For however obvious and ineffaceable those features of Henry's character may appear to us, which mark him as so peculiarly the opposite of James, we are to remember that we read it by the light which Bacon himself threw upon it; that it was Bacon himself who brought them to light, brought them to light in this very history for the first time. Henry's character as drawn by preceding historians might have been used for purposes of flattery well enough. "He was a Prince," says Stowe, reporting the substance, without the flourishes, of what he found in Hall and Polydore, " of marvellous wisdom, policy, justice, temperance, and gravity, and notwithstanding many and great occasions of trouble and war he kept his realm in right good order, for the which he was greatly reverenced of foreign princes." Such a passage would have been a very fair foundation in fact for a fancy-portrait of a great and wise king. A man combining in himself all the cardinal virtues and reigning in a continued succession of victorious achievements in peace and war (so history reported him) might easily

See his "Letter to the Lord Chancellor touching a History of Britain; " the original of which, preserved at Bridgwater House, is dated 2 April, 1605.— Collier's Descriptive Catalogue, p. 17. See also Advancement of Learning, vol. iii. p. 336. of

by a less skilful hand than Bacon's, using a very little of the novelist's or rhetorician's licence, have been turned into a handsome likeness of James - or of anybody else. And who can believe that if Bacon had been really studying, not to draw the man as he was, but to produce such a representation of him as should seem to reflect honour upon his descendant, he would have introduced into the portrait those traits of coldness, reserve, suspicion, avarice, parsimony, partyspirit, partiality in the administration of justice when he was himself interested, finesse which was not policy, strength of will which blinded judgment, closeness and darkness which bred danger; traits which are now inextricably interwoven with our idea of the man; but for traces of which the pages of Fabyan, of Polydore Vergil, of Hall, of Holinshed, and of Stowe, will be searched in vain? If it were necessary to believe that in introducing such features into the portrait he was thinking to gratify James at all, we must suppose that it was not by raising Henry to an ideal eminence which did not belong to him, but by degrading him from that ideal eminence which he enjoyed; and thereby relieving the reigning Solomon from his great rival for that title. But the thing seems to me altogether incredible.

If it be urged on the other hand that the character of Henry as interpreted by Bacon, however unlike it may be to James, is not so unlike Bacon himself; and that he was therein delineating his own ideal; it is enough to say that many of the peculiarities which he detects and points out in Henry's mind and ways, are noticed as weaknesses and errors, derogatory to his judgment and injurious to his fortunes. Many of his difficulties, for instance, are attributed to the shortness of his foresight, which prevented him from seeing distant dangers in time to prevent them. Who can suppose that that entered into Bacon's idea of a politic king? His "settled determination to depress all eminent persons of the house of York," might perhaps, upon Machiavel's principle that in order to secure a conquest it is necessary to extirpate the reigning family, have been reconciled with the proposed ideal. But Bacon expressly notices it as an error in his policy arising from a weakness in his mind; and the cause in fact of almost all his troubles. The severity of his exactions again is excused by Polydore Vergil as a politic art to keep turbulent subjects in obedience.

Bacon imputes it to a vice of his nature in coveting to accumulate treasure, and represents it as procuring him the hatred of his people to such a degree that his state was insecure even in the height of his felicity. In the matter of Brittany, Bacon represents him as outwitted by the French king: and how? not (as Polydore would have it) from reposing too much trust in the promises of his confederates; but simply because the French king understood the case, and he did not. His system of secret espionage is indeed justified, as necessary to protect him against secret machinations; but the darkness and closeness with which he conducted all his affairs is censured, as creating general diffidence and alarm which bred danger. His discountenancing of the nobility, which has been regarded by some historians as a stroke of profound policy to which the subsequent settlement of the kingdom was chiefly owing, is considered by Bacon "as one of the causes of his troublesome reign." And generally the many difficulties with which. he had to contend are expressly mentioned as not inherent in the case, but as the consequence of "some grand defects and main errors in his nature, customs, or proceedings." Nay, the sum total of his achievements is evidently regarded by Bacon as hardly worthy of him; and the short-coming is ascribed not to any want of opportunity or untowardness of fortune, but to a deficiency in himself,—a deficiency fatal to all heroic pretensions,—a want of worthier aims. "If the king (he says) did no greater matters, it was long of himself; for what he minded he compassed." Who can suppose that in such a representation he meant "to convey a theory of kingcraft and the likeness of its ideal model"?

But we are told that he almost owns as much himself— "almost avows an intention of embodying in the person of his hero too much of the ideal conception" &c. &c. Where such an avowal is to be found we are not informed; and I cannot myself discover any passage in which he speaks of what he intends to do. When he speaks of what he has done, he certainly makes an avowal of a very different kind. "I have not flattered him " (he says in his dedicatory letter), "but took him to the life, as well as I could, sitting so far off and having no better light." And certainly this is the short and true account of the whole matter. Whoever will take the trouble

convinced that the portrait of Henry is a true study from nature, and one of the most careful, curious, and ingenious studies of the kind ever produced. It is important too that this should be understood; because upon this it is that the main interest of the work depends. For it must be confessed that Henry's reign, though entertaining from the bustle and variety of incidents, and important for some of its results, includes but few matters which for themselves are much worth remembering. The subjects of all those negotiations and treaties retain no interest for us. The wars and the warriors

have alike passed and left no trace. The story of Perkin Warbeck has the interest only of a great romance. The laws did indeed print their footsteps deeper; but the progress of knowledge and the changes of time have gone over them too, and they remain only as curiosities of the past. But as the memory runs back along the surface of English history from the last of the Georges to the first of the Plantagenets, the reign of Henry the Seventh still presents one conspicuous object;an example of a king who was also prime minister; a king, not indeed of ideal wisdom or virtue, but yet of rare sagacity industry and courage, who for twenty-three years really governed the country by his own wit and his own will. Bacon has accordingly treated the history of his reign as a history of the administration of affairs in England from 1485 to 1509, and represented Henry as what he really was during all that time, the sole and real minister, conducting in person the affairs of each several department.

In what spirit he has executed the work, what kind of moral impression the narrative is made to suggest, is a question difficult to answer, because different readers will be differently affected by it. I would only say that those readers who, like Sir James Mackintosh, rise from the perusal of the narrative full of passionate pity for the oppressed, and resentment against the oppressor so vehement that it overflows even upon the innocent historian whose faithful report has excited it, are the last persons who ought to complain of the writer for telling his story in such a way as not to produce such impressions. If strong disapprobation and dislike of Henry be the feeling which his history properly written ought to excite, there is scarcely a writer that has touched the subject since who may not be called as an unconscious witness that Bacon's history has