reverence, but a few characters or facts eclectically picked out of
the past, and, for the most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring
all the features which will not suit their preconceived pseudo-ideal.
There is in these books a scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the
whole course of the British mind since the Reformation, and (though
they are not inclined to confess the fact) with its whole course
before the Reformation, because that course was one of steady
struggle against the Papacy and its anti-national pretensions. They
are the outcome of an utterly un-English tone of thought; and the so-
called 'ages of faith' are pleasant and useful to them, principally
because they are distant and unknown enough to enable them to conceal
from their readers that in the ages on which they look back as
ideally perfect a Bernard and a Francis of Assisi were crying all day
long--'O that my head were a fountain of tears, that I might weep for
the sins of my people!' Dante was cursing popes and prelates in the
name of the God of Righteousness; Boccaccio and Chaucer were lifting
the veil from priestly abominations of which we now are ashamed even
to read; and Wolsey, seeing the rottenness of the whole system, spent
his mighty talents, and at last poured out his soul unto death, in
one long useless effort to make the crooked straight, and number that
which had been weighed in the balances of God, and found for ever
wanting. To ignore wilfully facts like these, which were patent all
along to the British nation, facts on which the British laity acted,
till they finally conquered at the Reformation, and on which they are
acting still, and will, probably, act for ever, is not to have any
real reverence for the opinions or virtues of our forefathers; and we
are not astonished to find repeated, in such books, the old stock
calumnies against our lay and Protestant worthies, taken at second-
hand from the pages of Lingard. In copying from Lingard, however,
this party has done no more than those writers have who would