of qualifications, limitations, allowances; he fences and guards
himself, and seems always on the point of taking back what he has said,
but never does; and veers and tacks, tacks and veers, until he has
worked himself into port. The like peculiarity is very observable in
Gauden, especially in his once-popular "Companion to the Altar." There
is also a strong internal argument against Charles's authorship in the
preponderance of the theological element. That this should occupy an
important place in the writings of a martyr for the Church of England
was certainly to be expected, but the theology of the "Eikon" has an
unmistakably professional flavour. Let any man read it with an unbiassed
mind, and then say whether he has been listening to a king or to a
chaplain. "One of _us_," pithily comments Archbishop Herring. "I write
rather like a divine than a prince," the assumed author acknowledges, or
is made to acknowledge. When to these considerations is added that any
scrap of the "Eikon" in the King's handwriting would have been
treasured as an inestimable relic, and that no scrap was ever produced,
there can be little question as to the verdict of criticism. For all
practical purposes, nevertheless, the "Eikon" in Milton's time was the
King's book, for everybody thought it so. Milton hints some vague
suspicions, but refrains from impugning it seriously, and indeed the
defenders of its authenticity will be quite justified in asserting that
if Gauden had been dumb, Criticism would have been blind.

According to Selden's biographer, Cromwell was at first anxious that the
"Eikon" should be answered by that consummate jurist, and it was only on
his declining the task that it came into Milton's hands. That he also
would have declined it but for his official position may be inferred
from his own words: "I take it on me as a work assigned, rather than by
me chosen or affected." His distaste may further be gauged by his
tardiness; while "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" had been written