sixty years; but when he
put out his hand with royal courtliness and grace and said, "Welcome,
well-beloved stranger, to my century and to the hospitalities of my
realm," my old prejudices vanished away and I forgave him. I think now
that Henry the Eighth has been over-abused, and that most of us, if we
had been situated as he was, domestically, would not have been able to
get along with as limited a graveyard as he forced himself to put up
with. I feel now that he was one of the nicest men in history. Personal
contact with a king is more effective in removing baleful prejudices
than is any amount of argument drawn from tales and histories. If I had
a child I would name it Henry the Eighth, regardless of sex.

Do you remember Charles the First?--and his broad slouch with the plume
in it? and his slender, tall figure? and his body clothed in velvet
doublet with lace sleeves, and his legs in leather, with long rapier at
his side and his spurs on his heels? I encountered him at the next
corner, and knew him in a moment--knew him as perfectly and as vividly
as I should know the Grand Chain in the Mississippi if I should see it
from the pilot-house after all these years. He bent his body and gave
his hat a sweep that fetched its plume within an inch of the ground, and
gave me a welcome that went to my heart. This king has been much
maligned; I shall understand him better hereafter, and shall regret him
more than I have been in the habit of doing these fifty or sixty years.
He did some things in his time, which might better have been left
undone, and which cast a shadow upon his name--we all know that, we all
concede it--but our error has been in regarding them as crimes and in
calling them by that name, whereas I perceive now that they were only
indiscretions. At every few steps I met persons of deathless name whom I
had never encountered before outside of pictures and statuary and
history, and these were most thrilling and charming encounters. I had
hand-shakes with Henry the Second, who had not been seen in the Oxford
streets for nearly eight hundred years; and with the Fair Rosamond, whom
I now believe to have been chaste and blameless, although I had thought
differently about it before; and with Shakespeare, one of the
pleasantest foreigners I have ever gotten acquainted with; and with
Roger Bacon; and with Queen Elizabeth, who talked five minutes and never
swore once--a fact which gave me a new and good opinion of her a