vices of both. From the Lancastrian Henry he inherited in a great degree the shrewdness, the intellectual ability, the love of learning, and the tenacity of purpose, which had made the latter one of the ablest monarchs that ever sat upon the English throne, and also the hard selfishness and grasping acquisitiveness which had made him one of the most unpopular. From the Yorkist Edward he derived his fine person, his frank soldier-like bearing, his popular manners, but also his sensuality, his want of self-restraint, his profusion, and his caprice. Personal courage on the one hand, and a tendency to cruelty on the other, seem to have come to him almost equally from both. The contrary tendencies of some of the above characteristics and the prominent development of them all seem to account in a great degree for that element of versatility and uncertainty to which we have already drawn attention. If we allow due weight to all of these, and consider, further, the peculiar circumstances in which they found their sphere of action—the early age at which he came to the throne, the sudden change from a somewhat strict subjection to his father to the enjo3anent of almost unlimited power in his own hands, the constantly increasing development of the autocratic element in government during his reign, and the difficulties in which his own tyranny and caprice were constantly involving him—we may perhaps be able to reach a fairly accurate conception of Henry's character, and one almost as far removed from the mere brutal, sensual, and capricious tyrant which some historians would have us believe him, as it must be from the politic, patriotic, self-restrained hero which Mr. Froude has persuaded himself to present to us. It is also entirely consistent with such a character, and with his early attainment of
