FROM HENRY VII. TO GEORGE II.

It is admitted that he was a man of abilities,
for them with the purpose of comparison. What use others have made of their more
extensive knowledge we shall soon see.
and a copious writer; though with bad taste, and too florid and redundant a style. Is
not this the character of the Icon? Scarce any book is more full of metaphors, and
We have some acknowledged
these generally frigid and common-place. The sun, the sea, the wind, are in perpetual
a page is free from these ornaments.
requisition. Not
writings of the king's; his style, like that of his son James, is plain, short, English,
without pedantry or affectation. If there is much in the Icon which Charles could not
have written, I mean as to recondite allusion, command of language, and regular struc-
ture of periods, there is much that he would have disdained to write. I would not
impute to the patron of Jones and Vandyke, to the admirer of Hooker and Shakspeare,
"God knows as I can
such puerilities as the following: "I will rather choose to wear a crown of thorns with
my Saviour, than to exchange that of gold (which is due to me) for one of lead, whose
embased flexibleness shall be found to bend," &c. Chap. VI.

with truth wash my hands in innocency as to any guilt in that [the Irish] rebellion; so
I might wash them in my tears, as to the sad apprehensions I had to see it spread so far
and make such waste." Chap. XI. "I had the charity to interpret that most part of
my subjects fought against my supposed errors, not my person, and intended to mend
me, not to end me." Chap. XV. And, above all, this happy stroke on his being delivered
up by the Scots: "If I am sold by them, I am only sorry they should do it; and that
my price should be so much above my Saviour's." Chap. XXIII.-Could the sound
taste and rational piety of Charles have stooped to this senseless cant?

This part of the argument, however, has lately been managed by Mr. Todd, (Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 1826), in the most decisive manner; and presumptions carrying, in my judgment, conviction with them, have been adduced by him in a series of parallelisms between the language of the Icon and that of Gauden's known writings. There are thirty-seven in number, but a few will perhaps suffice to convince the reader; indeed I do not see how any man can resist the first I shall mention.

Gauden, in a sermon printed 1641, describes the magistrate "setting up the just terror of those laws, which may chase away those owls, and bats, and feral birds that love darkness."

The following are from other writings Dressing the church as swine would dress a garden."

"I had rather you should see and prevent your sins in such glasses of free and fair remonstrances, than hear of them too late in the just wrath of God upon you and the kingdom."

"Let all my iniquities be cast into the sea, even the red sea of my Saviour's blood."

"My reputation shall, like the sun, after owls and bats have had their freedom cover itself to such a degree of splendour, in the night and darker times, rise and reas those feral birds shall be grieved to behold." Icon, c. 15.

of Gauden:

"As swine are to gardens and orderly plantations, so are tumults to parliaments." Icon, C. 4.

"I believe the just avenger of all disthat city see their sin in the glass of their orders will, in time, make those men and punishment." Ibid.

"In the sea of our Saviour's blood of our own blood bring us at last to a state drown our sins; and through this red sea of piety, peace, and plenty." C. 12.

I conjecture that Gauden altered the Mr. Todd says that Milton, in commenting on this passage, changed feral into fatal, considering the other as an unauthorised word. But he would not have spared the writer on this account; and, in my edition, which is of 1649, though not one of the best, as it wants the odd Greek motto, I find fatal. word to escape that juxta-position with his own sermon, which would lead to so irresistible a consequence as Mr. Todd has drawn,

"After a most savage and cyclopick manner death doth at once triumph over

us."

"Poor mortals forget how soon the wheel may come about, and the same measure be meted to them which they mete to others. Adonizibek may live to see his own thumbs and great toes cut off."

"The soft dews and the liberal but gentle showers of the divine goodness."

"Reverence those who bear the name and office of fathers to church and state; love and honour them, if worthy; pray for them and bear with them, if bad and froward; cover and palliate, as Noah's more piteous and blessed sons did, a father's nakedness and infirmity; as Constantine the Great professed he was willing to do the failing of any bishop or churchman."

"Like some cyclopick monster whom nothing will serve to eat and drink.” Ibid.

"They cannot but see the proportions of their evil dealings against me in the measure of God's retaliation upon them, who cannot hope long to enjoy their own thumbs and toes," &c. Id.. Meditation on Death.

"The sweet and liberal dews of heaven." C. 17.

"The errors of the fathers of the church I would rather with Constantine cover with silence, and reform with meekness, than expose their persons and sacred function to vulgar contempt." C. 17.

It is inconceivable that two persons, so different in character and circumstances as Charles I. and Dr. Gauden, should so remarkably and so frequently coincide in allusion and expression; and, in a common question of literary imitation, almost any one of the above parallelisms would be reckoned conclusive. Mr. Todd has enlarged this list by help of a curious manuscript book of prayers, composed by Gauden, which has been brought to light by the discussion, and which, in a number of striking coincidences of language, identifies its author with the pseudo-Charles of the Icon.

It will be agreed, perhaps on all sides, that the Icon Basilike is superior, taken as a whole, to the acknowledged writings of Gauden, though the one has been absurdly extolled, and the other unjustly depreciated. But what inference does this furnish? Do men never write above themselves? Do they not frequently support a simulated character better than their own? What were Chatterton and Macpherson with their vizors off? Is it probable that the author of Junius ever again displayed equal skill in composition? I am no ardent admirer of those celebrated letters; but among five thousand guesses, they have never been ascribed to any man (except Mr. Burke) to whom the objection of inferiority, as to powers of style, has not been made. Literary history would supply many other instances; but we are really not driven to this ar gument; for in point of mere talent, and especially of language, there seems no great superiority in the Icon over the known writings of Gauden. Where it excels, is in the air of personated majesty. Gauden had more facility than imagination, more imagination than judgment, more judgment than taste, more of every thing than dignity and disinterestedness of soul. The real man, as we find him in his political tracts, or in his letters to lord Clarendon and lord Bristol-vulgar, scurrilous, low-minded, vain, insolent, querulous, craving, importunate-is different indeed from the feigned sovereign, the mild resigned royal sufferer of his invention. But is not this, again, conformable to our experience of mankind? Do all, who can form virtuous and noble conceptions, act by their standard in the current practice of their lives? The preacher, the poet, the novelist, the dramatist, afford unfortunately too many proofs to the contrary. Gauden had genius and learning to direct him how to counterfeit magnanimity; but a restless, unquiet temper, and too strong desire of advancement, were much in the way of his exhibiting it in his own life. In the Icon, he was the king on the stage; out of the Icon, he was the player in his garret.

It seems not clear that any writer but Gauden has used the word cyclopick. Todd, p. 62.

This controversy must long since have ceased, if it had not been kept alive by a doting partiality for the name of Charles the First. In the eyes of some men, he is They cannot bear to lose his own testithe model of spotless virtue on a throne. mony for those excellent dispositions, which the peevish inquirers into history have been apt to question. Hence they preposterously represent his consent to the publication of the Icon Basilike in his name as a heinous crime, of which he could not be supposed guilty; and a prince, whose life was full of assertions which he knew to be untrue, and of promises he never meant to perform, is held up as incapable of this most pardonable, I will say, most innocent deception. The book was sent to him, it was approved by him, it was revised by him (though circumstances did not permit the revised copy to be published, as he, of course, designed), what turpitude could there be in his suffering it to bear his name? He doubtless wished the nation to believe that he thought as the Icon made him think; and as to the literary honour which he thus assumed, it was not worth a moment's consideration.

I here conclude a note rather too prolix for this work. Those who are acquainted with the argument will know that I have omitted a great deal for the sake of brevity, and because it has been well treated by others, especially in the 44th volume of the Edinburgh Review. I cannot admit that any doubt remains as to this controversy. That a few advocates of the king's claim will still be found, is probable enough; but to me it appears like believing in the authenticity of Rowley's Poems, or in the text of the three witnesses, or that the duke of Monmouth was the Man in the Iron Mask, or that Horne Tooke wrote Junius, or like placing, any time these dozen years, the laurel of Waverley on a wrong head, or whatever else most stultifies in criticism. Let me presume to hope that Dr. Wordsworth, who possesses, and I doubt not most sincerely, an anxious desire that the truth may be fairly brought to light, will yield his assent to the a reconsideration of the evidence, and especially on weighing the public voice on surprising additions to it which Mr. Todd has adduced; and will remember that men have a right to expect a sound and discriminating logic from the successor of Barrow and Bentley in presiding over that great school of the severer discipline of the mind, Trinity College, Cambridge.

VOL. II.

INDEX.