icon_, obeying (as regards plan and purpose) the
general outline of the German work bearing that title; ministering to
the same elementary necessities; implying, therefore, a somewhat
corresponding stage of progress in our own populace and that of
Germany; but otherwise (as regards the executive details in adapting
such a work to the special service of an English public) moving under
moral restraints sterner by much, and more faithfully upheld, than
could rationally be looked for in any great literary enterprise
resigned to purely German impulses. For over the atmosphere of thought
and feeling in Germany there broods no _public_ conscience. Such a
_Conversations-Lexicon_ is one of the two great works for which the
popular mind of England is waiting and watching in silence. The other
(and not less important) work is--a faithful _History of England_. We
will offer, at some future time, a few words upon the first; but upon
the second--here brought before us so advantageously in the earnest,
thoughtful, and oftentimes eloquent volumes of Mr. Froude--we will
venture to offer three or four pages of critical comment.

[Footnote 53: _History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death
of Elizabeth._ By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter
College, Oxford. Vols. I. and II. London: Parker & Son, West Strand.
1856.]

Could the England of the sixteenth century have escaped that great
convulsion which accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries? It is
barely possible that a gentle system of periodic decimations,
distributing this inevitable ruin over an entire century, might have
blunted the edge of the fierce ploughshare: but there were
difficulties in the way of such arrangements, that would too probably
have thwarted the benign purpose.

Meantime, what was it that had stolen like a canker-worm into the
machinery of these monastic bodies, and insensibly had corroded a
principle originally of admitted purity? The malice of Protestantism
has too readily assumed that Popery was answerable for this corrosion.
But it would be hard to show that Popery in any one of its features,
good or bad, manifested itself conspicuously and operatively: nay, to
say the simple truth, it was through the very opposite agency that the
monastic institutions came to ruin: it was because Popery, that
supreme control to which these monasteries had been confided, shrank
from its responsibilities--weakly, lazily, or even perfidiously,
a