such scholarship as that of Vincent of Beauvais, or Thomas Aquinas, or Gerson, or Torquemada, an impossibility. Still there would be giants like Scaliger and Casaubon,-men who culled the fair flower of all learning; critical as the new scholars, comprehensive as the old; reserved for the patronage of sovereigns and nations, and perishing when they were neglected, like the beautiful books of the early printers. But they are a minor feature in the new picture. The real change is that by which every man comes to be a reader and a thinker; the Bible comes to every family, and each man is priest in his own household. The light is not so brilliant, but it is everywhere; and it shines more and more unto the perfect day. It is a false sentiment that leads men in their admiration of the unquestionable glory of the old culture, to undervalue the abundant wealth and growing glory of the new. The parallel holds good in other matters besides books. He is a rash man who would, with one word of apology, compare the noble architecture of the Middle Ages with the mean and commonplace type of building into which, by a steady decline, our churches, palaces, and streets had sunk at the beginning of the present century. Here too the splendor of the few has been exchanged for the comfort of the many; and although perhaps in no description of culture has the break between the old and the new been more conspicuous than in this, it may be said that the many are now far more capable of appreciating the beauty which they will try to rival, than ever the few were to comprehend the value of that which they were losing. But it is needless to multiply illustrations of a truth which is exemplified by every new invention: the steam plow and the sewing-machine are less picturesque, and call for a less educated eye than that of the plowman and the seamstress: but they produce more work with less waste of energy; they give more leisure and greater comfort; they call out, in the production and improvement of their mechanism, a higher and more widely spread culture. And all these things are growing instead of decaying. To conclude with a few of the commonplaces which must be familiar to all who have approached the study of history with a real desire to understand it, but which are apt to strike the writer more forcibly at the end than the beginning of his work. However much we may be inclined to set aside the utilitarian plan of studying our subject, it cannot be denied that we must read the origin and development of our Constitutional History chiefly with the hope of educating ourselves into the true reading of its later fortunes, and so train ourselves for a judicial examination. of its evidences, a fair and equitable estimate of the rights and wrongs of policy, dynasty, and party. Whether we intend to take the position of a judge or the position of an advocate, it is most necessary that both the critical insight should be cultivated, and the true circumstances of the questions that arise at later stages. should be adequately explored. The man who would rightly learn the lesson that the seventeenth century has to teach, must not only know what Charles thought of Cromwell and what Cromwell thought of Charles, but must try to understand the real questions at issue, not by reference to an ideal standard only, but by tracing the historical growth of the circumstances in which those questions arose; he must try to look at them as it might be supposed that the great actors would have looked at them if Cromwell had succeeded to the burden which Charles inherited, or if Charles had taken up the part of the hero of reform. In such an attitude it is quite unnecessary to exclude party feeling or personal sympathy. Whichever way the sentiment may incline, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is what history would extract from her witnesses; the truth which leaves no pitfalls for unwary advocates, and which is in the end the fairest measure of equity to all. In the reading of that history we have to deal with high-minded men, with zealous enthusiastic parties, of whom it cannot be fairly said that one was less sincere in his belief in his own cause than was the other. They called each other hypocrites and deceivers, for each held his own views so strongly that he could not conceive of the other as sincere; but to us they are both of them true and sincere, whichever way our sympathies or our sentiments incline. We bring to the reading of their acts a judgment which has been trained. through the Reformation history to see rights and wrongs on both sides; sometimes see the balance of wrong on that side which we believe, which we know, to be the right. We come to the Reformation history from the reading of the gloomy period to which the present volume has been devoted; a worn-out helpless age, that calls for pity without sympathy, and yet balances weariness with something like regrets. Modern thought is a little prone to eclecticism in history: it can sympathize with Puritanism as an effort after freedom, and put out of sight the fact that Puritanism was itself a grinding social tyranny, that wrought out its ends by unscrupulous detraction, and by the profane handling of things which should have been sacred even to the fanatic, if he really believed in the cause for which he raged. There is little real sympathy with the great object, the peculiar creed that was oppressed: as a struggle for liberty, the Quarrel of Puritanism takes its stand beside the Quarrel on the Investitures. Yet like every other struggle for liberty, it ended in being a struggle. for supremacy. On the other hand, the system of Laud and of Charles seems to many minds to contain so much that is good and sacred, that the means by which it was maintained fall into the background. We would not judge between the two theories. which have been nursed by the prejudices of ten generations. To one side liberty, to the other law, will continue to outweigh all other considerations of disputed and detailed right or wrong: it is enough for each to look at them as the actors themselves looked at them, or as men look at party questions of their own. day, when much of private conviction and personal feeling must be sacrificed to save those broader principles for which only great parties can be made to strive. The historian looks with actual pain upon many of these things. Especially in quarrels where religion is concerned, the hollowness of the pretension to political honesty becomes a stumbling-block in the way of fair judgment. We know that no other causes have ever created so great and bitter struggles; have brought into the field, whether of war or controversy, greater and more united armies. Yet no truth is more certain than this, that the real motives of religious action do not work on men in masses; and that the enthusiasm which creates Crusaders, Inquisitors, Hussites, Puritans, is not the result of conviction, but of passion provoked by oppression or resistance, maintained by self-will, or stimulated by the mere desire of victory. And this is a lesson for all time; and for practical life as well as historical judgment. And on the other hand, it is impossible to regard this as an adequate solution of the problem: there must be something, even if it be not religion or liberty, for which men will make so great sacrifices. The best aspect of an age of controversy must be sought in the lives of the best men; whose honesty carries conviction to the understanding, whilst their zeal kindles the zeal, of the many. A study of the lives of such men will lead to the conclusion, that in spite of internecine hostility in act, the real and true leaders had far more in common than they knew of: they struggled, in the dark or in the twilight, against the evil which was there, and which they hated with equal sincerity; they fought for the good which was there, and which really was strengthened by the issue of the strife. Their blows fell at random: men perished in arms against one another whose hearts were set on the same end and aim; and that good end and aim which neither of them had seen clearly was the inheritance they left to their children, made possible and realized not so much by the victory of one as by the truth and self-sacrifice of both. At the close of so long a book, the author may be suffered to moralize. His end will have been gained if he has succeeded in helping to train the judgment of his readers to discern the balance of truth and reality; and whether they go on to further reading with the aspirations of the advocate or the calmness of the critic, to rest content with nothing less than the attainable maximum of truth, to base their arguments on nothing less sacred than that highest justice which is found in the deepest sympathy with erring and straying men. SIR JOHN SUCKLING (1608-1642) IR JOHN SUCKLING is an interesting product of an interesting age. His portrait by Vandyke-that of a fair-haired gal lant, his long curls hanging over his shoulders, his eyes a steely blue, firm red lips, and a stalwart yet graceful figure arrayed in the richest silks and velvets-tells much of his story. But there are other characteristics less easily discovered. With the nonchalant manner, half bravado, half indifference, of the cavalier, he took good care of himself on at least two occasions when the spirit of the age and his training would have led him to display less caution. The King himself (Charles I.) did not excel him in the gorgeousness of his entertainments, nor was there so prodigal a gamester in the kingdom; yet he was capable of giving the soundest and the most virtuous advice, and of expressing the most edifying and Christian sentiments. Had his brother-in-law Sir George Southcott but lived to read Sir John's remarkable epistle on Southcott's death by his own hand, he would have refrained from such a proceeding for very shame of becoming an object of ridicule. Yet when Suckling, an exile and in distress, came to a dangerous pass in his fortunes, he committed suicide, regardless of his own satire. His splendid, erratic, melancholy career left no trace either of sadness or sentiment in his poems. There is nothing of the troubadour, nothing of the minor strain of melancholy cheerfulness which touches the heart in Lovelace's gay lyrics. The poem beginning SIR JOHN SUCKLING "Why so pale and wan, fond lover? is completely Suckling, and shows that his wreaths were not twined from the cypress-tree. Debt and love were both troublesome, with perhaps a slight difference in favor of debt. He never, according to the scanty facts known of his life, had a serious love affair, and certainly he sported with the grande passion. Yet he treated it with a |