sort of man; a view which was not only not shared by Anselm,
but was probably not shared by Rufus. In this connection, or rather in
connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take
another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and
better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the
environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good
moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right
where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination could not re-picture
an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than being born: but
Henry VIII. lived in a time of expanding knowledge and unrest; a time
therefore somewhat like the Victorian. And Dickens in his childish but
robust way does perceive the main point about him: that he was a wicked
man. He misses all the fine shades, of course; he makes him every kind
of wicked man at once. He leaves out the serious interests of the man:
his strange but real concern for theology; his love of certain legal and
moral forms; his half-unconscious patriotism. But he sees the solid bulk
of definite badness simply because it was there; and Froude cannot see
it at all; because Froude followed Carlyle and played tricks with the
eternal conscience. Henry VIII. _was_ "a blot of blood and grease upon
the history of England." For he was the embodiment of the Devil in the
Renascence, that wild worship of mere pleasure and scorn, which with its
pictures and its palaces has enriched and ruined the world.

The time will soon come when the mere common-sense of Dickens, like the
mere common-sense of Macaulay (though his was poisoned by learning and
Whig politics), will appear to give a plainer and therefore truer
picture of the mass of history than the mystical perversity of a man of
genius writing only out of his own temperament, like Carlyle or Taine.
If a man has a new theory of ethics there is one thing he must not be
allowed to do. Let him give laws on Sinai, let him dictate a Bible, let
him fill the world with cathedrals if he can. But he must not be allowed
to write a history of England; or a history of any country. All history
was conducted on ordinary morality: with his extraordinary morality he
is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlyle tries to write of the
Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy; that is, with a bias
against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result i