t) to proceed in person to the Holy Land, and rescue the city of
God from the pollutions and abominations of the infidels. In recording
this declaration of the expiring monarch, Hume adds a comment as full
of bitter sarcasm as it is tinctured with his characteristic (p. 310)
spirit of scepticism. "So ingenious are men in deceiving themselves,
that Henry forgot in these moments all the blood spilt by his
ambition, and received comfort from this late and feeble resolve;
which, as the mode of those enterprises was now past, he certainly
would never have carried into execution." Had Hume been as faithful
and painstaking in the search of truth, as he was ready to adopt the
account of any transaction which was nearest at hand, and unscrupulous
in substituting his own hasty remarks in the place of well-weighed
reflections on ascertained facts, he never would have suffered so
ignorant and ill-founded a comment to disgrace his pages. Hume[238]
charges Henry with having left the world, forgetful of the
bloodguiltiness by which his soul was stained, and with a sentence of
hypocrisy and falsehood on his lips. To the first charge,--that Henry,
at the awful moment of his dissolution, deceived himself into a
forgetfulness "of all the blood spilt by his ambition,"--needs only to
be replied, that so far from his having forgotten the loss of human
life attendant upon his wars, the very page on which the historian is
so severely commenting, records that Henry spoke of that subject
openly and unreservedly to those who stood around his bed, expressing
his sure trust that the guilt of that blood did not stain his soul,
who sought only his just inheritance; but rested on the heads of (p. 311)
those who, by their obstinate perseverance in injustice, compelled
him to appeal to the God of battle in vindication of his own rights.

[Footnote 238: Hume's Hist. vol. iii. ch. xix.]

Again, Henry declares, on the faith of a dying Christian Prince, that
it had verily been his fixed resolution, as soon as his wars in France
had been brought to a favourable issue, to proceed to the Holy Land.
Hume says that this was a late and feeble resolve; and the ground on
which he rests this charge of falsehood is, that the mode of those
enterprises was then past. Hume ought to have known, as an ordinary
historian, that the mode of those enterprises was not then past; and
Hume might have known that Henry's was not a death-bed resolve, to