and Froude alone, could have written them. There are many passages, on the other hand, especially in his earlier works, which reveal the disciple. "The spectacle of a living human being boiled to death was really witnessed three hundred years ago by the London citizens: an example terrible indeed, the significance whereof is not easily exhausted" (History, vol. i.). "The two last sharing between them the higher qualities of nobleness, enthusiasm, self-devotion; but in their faith being without discretion, and in their piety without understanding" (ibid.). The former sentence is an echo of Carlyle, the latter of Ruskin. "At first there was a universal panic. Seven ships were at Carrigafoyle. The Mayor of Limerick, in sending word of their appearance to the Council, converted them into seven score. Twentyfour men were said to have landed at Tralee. Sir William Fitzwilliam, who had returned to be Deputy, and was more inferior and incapable than ever, described them as twenty-four galleons. Rumour gradually took more authentic form " (History, vol. xii.). Here the influence of Macaulay is equally visible; and that influence, indeed, predominates over the narrative style of the later volumes of Froude's History, though no two writers are more dissimilar in tone than Froude and Macaulay. Froude's sentences, however, are much looser in their texture than Macaulay's; and there is a noble music in his style, when it is at its best, which takes us back far beyond the eighteenth century (to which Macaulay properly belongs) to those "spacious times of Great Elizabeth" which Froude and Kingsley, beyond all others, have opened to our view. In what he himself calls the "representative power," no modern historian, unless it be Michelet, has excelled him. His vivid imagination enabled him to bring not only scenes, but characters and motives, before the reader, in the most effective, sometimes in the most dramatic form; and it may be noted that more than any other recent English writer he affects that familiar, but dangerous, companion of our youth, the oratio obliqua. JAMES MILLER DODDS. END OF THE MEDIEVAL AGE FOR, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone-like an unsubstantial pageant faded ; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of our cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world. (From History.) ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES: DEATH OF JOHN DAVIS As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference it was the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action-a melancholy end for such a man-like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men. They were cut off in the flower of their days, and few of them laid their bones in the sepulchres of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured. Life with them was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and-strange that it should be so this is the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth-whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves-one and all, their fate has been the same-the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men; and it was enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired, and an honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was the old Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the Theban poet lived again in them: θανεῖν δ ̓ οἷσιν ἀνάγκα, τί κέ τις ἀνώνυμον γῆρας ἐν σκότῳ καθήμενος ἕψοι μάταν, "Seeing," in Gibert's own brave words, "that death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf mutare vel timere sperno." VOL. V (From Short Studies.) 2 T RESULTS OF THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA ALWAYS and everywhere, even among the bravest people, the majority are spiritual cowards, and had England in the sixteenth century been governed by universal suffrage, the Roman Catholic system, considered as a rule of opinion, could not have been overthrown without violence. The allegiance to the Papacy might have been renounced, the Church courts might have been forced to conform themselves to the ordinary rules of justice, but transubstantiation and its kindred doctrines would have undoubtedly remained in the creed, with rope and faggot for its sanctions. Government by suffrage, however, is possible only in periods when the convictions of men have ceased to be vital to them. As long as there is a minority which would rather die than continue in a lie, there is a further court of appeal from which there is no reference. When ten men are so earnest on one side that they will sooner be killed than give way, and twenty are earnest enough on the other to cast their votes for it, but will not risk their skins, the ten will give the law to the twenty in virtue of a robuster faith and of the strength which goes along with it. Left alone, therefore, and without interference from abroad, the English nation, had there been no Elizabeth, would probably sooner or later have taken the Reforming side. Had the Spanish invasion succeeded, however, had it succeeded even partially in crushing Holland and giving France to the League and the Duke of Guise, England might not have recovered from the blow, and it might have fared with Teutonic Europe as it fared with France on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Either Protestantism would have been trampled out altogether, or expelled from Europe to find a home in a new continent; and the Church, insolent with another century or two of power, would have been left to encounter the inevitable ultimate revolution which is now its terror, with no reformed Christianity surviving to hold the balance between atheism and superstition. The starved and ragged English seamen, so ill furnished by their sovereign that they were obliged to take from their enemies the means of fighting them, decided otherwise; they and the winds and the waves, which are said ever to be on the side of the brave. In their victory they conquered not the Spaniards only, but the weakness of their Queen. Either she had been incredulous before that Philip would indeed invade her; or she had underrated the power of her people; or she discerned that the destruction of the Spanish fleet had created at last an irreparable breach with the Catholic governments. At any rate there was no more unwholesome hankering after compromise, no more unqueenly avarice or reluctance to spend her treasure in the cause of freedom. The strength and resources of England were flung heartily into the war, and all the men and all the money it could spare was given freely to the United Provinces and the King of Navarre. The struggle lasted into the coming century. Elizabeth never saw peace with Spain again. But the nation throve with its gathering glory. The war on the part of England was aggressive thenceforward. One more great attempt was made by Philip in Ireland, but only to fail miserably, and the shores of England were never seriously threatened again. Portugal was invaded, and Cadiz burnt, Spanish commerce was made the prey of privateers, and the proud galleons chased from off the ocean. the Low Countries the tide of reconquest had reached its flood, and thenceforward ebbed slowly back, while in France the English and the Huguenots fought side by side against the League and Philip. (From History.) In HISTORY HISTORY is the account of the actions of men; and in "actions" are comprehended the thoughts, opinions, motives, impulses of the actors and of the circumstances in which their work was executed. The actions without the motives are nothing, for they may be interpreted in many ways, and can only be understood in their causes. If "Hamlet" or "Lear" was exact to outward fact were they and their fellow-actors on the stage exactly such as Shakespeare describes them, and if they did the acts which he assigns to them, that was perfect history; and what we call history is only valuable as it approaches to that pattern. To say that the characters of real men cannot be thus completely known, that their inner nature is beyond our reach, that the dramatic portraiture of things is only possible to poetry, is to say that |