300 ROBERTSON. 



the one and the tyranny and perfidy of the other ? 

 Henry VI II., indeed, by his cruelty to his wives, has 

 been deprived of much palliation which otherwise his 

 abilities and his accomplishments would have obtained 

 for his despotic life, his numerous judicial murders 

 actually perpetrated, as well as his plot for an ordinary 

 assassination, that of Cardinal Beaton, only prevented 

 by his own decease. But his daughter, who was as 

 tyrannical to the full, and only restrained by the reli- 

 gious difficulties of her position, who was a model of 

 falsehood in all its more hateful and despicable 

 forms, who had all the guilt of murder on her head, 

 and was only saved from its actual perpetration by hav- 

 ing a Paulett for her agent, whom she would fain 

 have suborned to commit it, instead of a Tyrrel, is 

 loaded with the praise due to the most pure and vir- 

 tuous of sovereigns, because she had talents and firm- 

 ness and ruled successfully in difficult times. 



It is not, however, merely by abstaining from 

 indiscriminate praise, or by dwelling with dispro- 

 portioned earnestness upon the great qualities, and 

 passing lightly over the bad ones, of eminent men, 

 and thus leaving a false general impression of their 

 conduct, that historians err, and pervert the opinions 

 and feelings of mankind. Even if they were to give a 

 careful estimate of each character, and pronounce just 

 judgment upon the whole, they would still leave by 

 far the most important part of their duty unperformed, 

 unless they also framed their narrative so as to excite 

 our interest in the worthy of past times ; to make us 

 dwell with delight on the scenes of human improve- 

 ment ; to lessen the pleasure too naturally felt in con- 



