And, as for licentiousness and indolence, he seems to prove that, as the king's life advanced, the whole energy of his intellect was pressed into the business of the Commonwealth; while he brings together a weight of authority, which seems to us a preponderating weight, to show that his temperament was cold, and perhaps calculating, rather than ardent and profligate.

We do not even enter into the very fascinating argument as to whether Mr. Froude is right or wrong in these conclusions. We have only to say, that no person has a right to enter into that argument till he has read his book. It is not one of those cases where an exhaustive, previous knowledge of the subject gives a man a dispensation from attending to some trifling novelty of the hour. Here is entirely new material, drawn out from unquestioned archives of the age; and, for the first time for three hundred years, we are able to take the view of affairs which Henry himself took, and hear the justification made for him in advance by the events themselves, in which he acted. If it happen that this brings us to a series of opinions regarding him, which are, on the whole, the same with which men regarded him in the first and second generations after his death, it will be for those who adopt another opinion to say how they are to set aside the documents and the arguments which Henry's good fortune has at last brought into the field. They must not pretend that these are too trivial for examination.

The new American reprint has now reached the fourth volume, which closes with Henry's death. Mr. Froude has published four volumes more in England, covering the reigns of Edward and of Mary, and entering upon the discussion of that of Elizabeth; but it will require several additional volumes to carry the history to her death. It will be readily seen, that a view so new as his, as to the tenor of Henry's reign, places in a new light all the events which follow it. According to him, Henry is the first English sovereign who consciously interposed in the regulation of the politics of the continent, and was, in some regards, a controlling power in the contests between Francis, Charles V., and the German elect

ors. According to him, the English nation, being determined not to fall back into the anarchy of the wars of the Roses, regarded the divorce of Queen Catherine, that the king might have male issue, as the most important pre-requisite of all after prosperity. According to him, freedom of inquiry in matters of religion was so completely established in England when Henry's reign began, that a complete religious change was as certain as that daylight will follow dawn. Accord

ing to him, and to proofs that cannot be escaped which he adduces, the Roman clergy in England, when that reign began, had, as a class, almost completely forfeited the respect by which alone can ministers of religion retain any power in a free land. According to him, England was, in those days, a free land, a commonwealth in which even the individual peasant had a larger share in the affairs of the State, a larger self-respect, and a larger share of intelligence available for the welfare of the whole, than has the rustic boor or the factory operative of England to-day. According to him, therefore, the advance which England made between the beginning and the end of the sixteenth century, - from being a hyperborean island hardly known to civilization, to holding a large share in the destinies of the world; from the England of Caxton to the England of Shakspeare and Spenser, from the England of York and Lancaster to the England of Burleigh and Bacon,- this advance he considers as due to the natural development of a free nation making its laws more enlightened and its religion always more free.

He believes that that nation was led, for forty years of that progress, by one of the greatest of sovereigns, whose name was Henry. He believes that it was by principles which he laid down, and as the result of experiments which he began, that greatness, victory, and glory culminated in the reign of Elizabeth.

9*

ART. VIII. -THE COUNTRY - ITS PERILS AND

PROSPECTS.

Annual Message of the President of the United States; with the Accompanying Documents.

IF it be an honest source of pride to be the object of the unconcealed wonder of the civilized world, for the unparalleled resources, energies, and successes which our country has exhibited during the four years of our civil war, we may taste that satisfaction in all its fulness now. The fearful echoes of our cannon have aroused the drowsy attention and opened the deaf ear of Europe: the flashes of our artillery have attracted eyes that were hitherto ignorantly averted from our existence and importance. The indifference has been transferred to the other side of the account! So long as we showed ourselves unweaned in our affections and deference, nervous in our solicitude to please, and fidgety in our sensibility to their criticism, England and France repaid our subserviency with apathy or ill-disguised contempt. Now that their wrongheaded sympathies with our late enemies, and their awkward neutrality, have driven us into an absolute independence of their opinions, and almost an indifference to their conduct, they begin to discover that we are their best customer, their most dangerous foe, and the most promising country in the world; that we have displayed prodigious resources and talents for war, extraordinary ability in the management of our finances, great readiness to subordinate military power in the very height of its pride and pomp to civil authority, and an unexpected moderation and magnanimity in dealing with our late stubborn, unscrupulous, and cruel foe. It is said by American travellers abroad this last summer and autumn, that in four months public opinion in England and France went through a somerset of ground and lofty tumbling,- taunts and sneers, all vinegar and aloes, turning to deference and cordiality, all milk and roses, - a

change of feeling towards our cause and our countrymen, which our travellers found it almost ludicrous to experience. And this with the English even more than with the French, who invented the saying, "Success is very successful!" It is plain enough that the effect of the war has been to make America respected and courted abroad, if no better loved than before; and, on the other hand, if Europe is never again to be regarded in this country with the same solicitous desire for its approbation, it is probably to be soon much better understood, more freely visited, more judiciously and intelligently criticized and appreciated, and more intimately connected with us by trade and commerce. Almost the same unmasking to each other, which North and South have experienced, which makes it impossible for the old ignorance and disrespect ever to return, - has, to a less degree taken place in the relations of the American and European peoples. We are more thoroughly weaned from their aristocratic and feudal systems than ever,- from their political ideas and customs; and the death of slavery has broken the last tie of sympathy with their prevailing feeling for caste. The Catholic Church, too, another old European lien upon this continent, has lost American prestige during the war. Its priests and its disciples, as a rule, with most honorable and even numerous exceptions, - betrayed, if not disloyal, certainly unpatriotic sympathies. We owed little to Irish generals or regiments; nothing to pontifical or hierarchical good-will. The death of Archbishops Hughes and Kenrick deprived the Church of its most politic and most influential leaders; and we hope, not without fears to the contrary, that we have seen the culmination of its political power in this country. Properly resisted in its social ignorance, political combinations, and ecclesiastical aims in the city of New York, where its charities and religious institutions find so generous and partial a support from the public purse, it would find its proper place in a Protestant country and under a free government, among the minor and not the major causes of anxiety and disturbance.

The wonderful flocking abroad since the war ceased is in

structive, whether induced by the costliness of living in the usual style here at home, or viewed as a rebound of the longrepressed disposition to visit countries where Americans were lately so coldly, and are now so cordially received. Some have gone to enjoy this re-action of European sentiment, some to repair the waste of feeling caused by the strain of our late anxious national life; some to re-establish commercial and trading relations, and many to display the sudden and ill-gotten wealth wrung out of our late misfortunes. Nor is the number of intelligent foreigners, especially English, recently attracted to our own country, a less interesting fact. Probably a larger number of thorough and candid observers -English and French and German- have traversed our country within the last four years, than during all its previous history. The visit of even a Tunisian embassy is not without its import.

It is equally desirable for Europe to know America, and for America to know Europe. They have both much to learn from each other, and much to profit by each other's better acquaintance. America has ripe political ideas and institutions - far the best in the world- toward which all nations gravitate, because they are theoretically just and equal. Education, science, progress, all mean the inevitable triumph of democratic ideas and institutions. The existence of Christianity, with its constant spread and unfolding, necessitates, sooner or later, political equality; necessitates American democracy, and predestines the peaceful ascendency of the American ensign over all other standards., For our flag stands for the Sermon on the Mount done into the Declaration of Independence, and become the constitution of an equal, and thoroughly representative political estate. It is this moral attraction, which makes it not irreverent to say of the American flag what was said of him who alone made such a standard possible, his stripes and scars changing into the stripes and stars of that glorious ensign,-" And lo, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me!" The flag that stands for equal justice, equal rights, political brotherhood, and universal self-government, has its staff hewed out of Christ's cross; and in its folds