ART. I.-History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. Reign of Elizabeth. Vols. V. and VI. London: 1870.
HE longer we travel in the company of Mr. Froude, the more unwilling we are to part from him, and we learn with regret from the concluding pages of these volumes that he has relinquished his original intention of carrying on the narrative to the death of Elizabeth. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the destruction of the Spanish Armada are the two great events which terminated the struggle for the independence of the crown of England against its internal and its external enemies; and Mr. Froude regards this catastrophe as the appropriate termination of his work. Much indeed remains to be told of heroic interest and of imperial splendour. A history of the reign of Elizabeth, in which the great names of Coke and Bacon, Essex and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare, find no place, is necessarily but a fragment. But Mr. Froude's view of history is tragic rather than epic. He traces the course of an idea, rather than the course of events. He took up the tale of England's greatness at that period of the reign of Henry VIII. when the king, moved by passion, by the ardent desire of an heir, and by the spirit of the Reformation, broke with Rome, divorced his queen, and flew to new and most unhappy nuptials. From that moment the cause of the Reformation and of the crown in England became one. The independence of the nation was at stake; and a struggle commenced which severed this country from the politics of continental Europe, and at length, by its success, established the power and greatness of the English monarchy. That term of fifty years' duration is, therefore, the most momentous period of our annals.