Gratitude for some such acts is
supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with
garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same
moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish
father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the
feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the
death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's critics
failed to accept his estimate of Henry, or that they arrayed anew the
long list of his shocking misdeeds, and dwelt with unction on his total
want of sympathy with ordinary humanity. As little surprising is it
that Mr. Froude's attachment to the kingly queen-killer should be
increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The
biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To
endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes
the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have
denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man
of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly,
had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere,
enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have
been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of
men.
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