dare to detail the undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and to comment
on them dramatically enough to make his readers feel about them what
men who witnessed them felt, he would be accused of a 'morbid love of
horrors.' If any one, in order to show how the French Revolution of
1793 was really God's judgment on the profligacy of the ancien
regirne, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the ancien
regime unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would have
a right to demand, 'How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts
from their merited oblivion?' Those, again, who are really
acquainted with the history of Henry the Eighth's marriages, are well
aware of facts which prove him to have been, not a man of violent and
lawless passions, but of a cold temperament and a scrupulous
conscience; but which cannot be stated in print, save in the most
delicate and passing hints, to be taken only by those who at once
understand such matters, and really wish to know the truth; while
young ladies in general will still look on Henry as a monster in
human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, to undeceive them
by anything beyond bare assertion without proof.

'But what does it matter,' some one may say, 'what young ladies think
about history?' This it matters; that these young ladies will some
day be mothers, and as such will teach their children their own
notions of modern history; and that, as long as men confine
themselves to the teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the
history of their own country to be handled exclusively by their
unmarried sisters, so long will slanders, superstitions, and false
political principles be perpetuated in the minds of our boys and
girls.

But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the historian's case