54 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 



King Solomon, few would have cared to study his 

 character. Not long before the Pope had given an 

 Irish King leave to have six wives all at once, and 

 that King lived and died in the odour of sanctity. 



It is a salutary exercise in the analysis of a char- 

 acter to draw up a tabular view of its good and evil 

 and neutral features. As a rule this method, if dis- 

 passionately carried out, would probably show that the 

 bad are a little less bad and the good a little less good 

 than is commonly supposed. Out of this columnar 

 method Henry would certainly emerge a sadly be- 

 smirched figure. The items in the good column are 

 few : he was surely a capable man, holding his own in 

 the European crowd of capable men ; he was sincerely 

 pious ; he was a friend of all the arts the art of ship- 

 building practically began with him ; he was beyond 

 all doubt popular with his people who believed them- 

 selves to be better governed and more prosperous 

 than any other people; strangers, scholars, travellers, 

 reported well of him ; he was frank, sincere, accessible. 

 In public and in private character he was superior to 

 any other European monarch. It is a short list and 

 the black column is long. He was fitful, capricious, 

 bustling, petulant, disapproving ; his love of conspicu- 

 ousness and admiration, his ostentation and his extrava- 

 gance exceeded all reasonable limits ; his vanity was 

 colossal and swallowed up all dignity and pride ; his 

 self-importance and self-will were little short of insani- 

 ties ; the popular voice of recent time (not, curiously, 

 of his own time) declares that he was also " a monster 

 of lust." If a fickle and easily impressionable man 

 (facile impressionability is not deep passion) who, 

 guided by self-will only in sexual matters, takes and 

 dismisses one wife after another is a monster of lust, 



