ruck dumb
with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their
information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the
past lay out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to say for
himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover
authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare
indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any
other modern writer, confirmed. The true motive has almost invariably
been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.

Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of
opinion on a controverted question. They will serve, however, to
indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be
hazarded. And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is
the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form.
The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate
honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial
sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is
arranged.

Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their
dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is
laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were
dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic,
and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an
unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines, seem
to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were
enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told, was a
predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the
letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government,
the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable
witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious--in fact, as a
suborned liar. Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and
if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it
would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No
evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without
evidence--and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to
accomplish? It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of
the surviving testimony from time