Froude’s

16

Henry

the

[J uly,

Eighth.

FROUDE‘S HENRY THE EIGHTH. THE spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their advocates at the bar of

and the judgments long since passed upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries, have been set aside, and others of a widely history,

different character pronounced. Caesar, who was wont to stand

Julius as

the

usurper, and was regarded as hav ing wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of

model

and best class,-—-a.s the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven’s own instrument to rescue un numbered millions from the misrnle of the very highest

looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to de an oligarchy whose members

stroy the personal freedom of all the races

He identified the in by them subdued. terests of the conquered peoples with those of the central government, so far as that work was possible,—-thus proceeding in the spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the vic tims of their wars in the benefits which This view preceeded from those wars. of his career is a sounder one than that which so long prevailed, and which en abled orators to round periods with ref erences

It

to the Rubicon.

years since

one

of

the

is not thirty

first of American

told the national Senate that “Julius Caesar struck down Roman lib erty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in his audience who

statesmen

that he was uttering anything beyond a truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance between “the mighty Julius” and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman whom supposed

the orator was cutting up,

and who was

actually in the chair while Mr. Calhoun

seeking to kill him, in a political from Plutarch’s by quotations “To have learnt something since Lives. was

sense,

1834 concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its chiefs, and the man who should now bring for ward the conqueror of Gaul as a vul

gar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that man who should insist that General Jackson de stroyed American

liberty when he re from the national bank. The facts and fears of one gen eration often furnish material for nothing but jests and jeers to that generation's moved

the

deposits

successors ; and we who behold a million

of men in

arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all calling them when selves Americans, are astonished we read or remember that our immediate in the political world went predecessors

to the verge of madness on the Currency Perhaps the men of 1889 may question. when they shall be equally astonished, that were turn to files of newspapers published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thou of families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the misjudg ing of the present, and the failure to com prehend the future. sands

Men of a very different stamp

from

the first of the Romans have been allow— ed the benefits that come from a rehear ing of their causes. Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect

that greatest of conquests, the snbjugzr tion of their prejudices, that he was an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of hu manity, to be placed by the force of cir in a position which would cumstances have

tried the soundest

of

heads,

even

had that head been united with the purest